Draghi, from “Whatever it takes” to the “national interest”: the alphabet of the former premier – Corriere.it

How many uses for the word when used in public. It can cajole, pitch, promise, swear, even threaten, or convince, spur, reassure. Sometimes, too often, to deceive, delude, confuse. A thousand more could be added. But there is also another task that the word can perform, and that is not only to precede the facts, but to favor them, accompany them, push them, make them inevitable. Perhaps this is one of the keys to reading the titled book Ten years of challenges
published by Treccani, which collects Mario Draghi’s writings and public speeches from 2011 to 2022with a foreword by Lionel Barber del «Financial Times».

Impossible, to argue, to escape from the discourse of «Whatever it takes» of July 2012, when he said the ECB was ready to do whatever it took to preserve the euro. It took only a few minutes for international speculation to understand that the game was over, that the abyss at the end of the rye field into which Greece had been ferociously driven now had an entire continent, Europe, on sentinel, ready to prevent it from happening again. How many times that phrase has been recalled. More than to celebrate the author, to steal a piece of it, to take possession of a success that everyone, even if with a bit of kleptomania, felt as their own. Draghi himself is probably the one who claimed it the least. There is elegance and who knows, maybe even a little vanity in not self-celebrating. But there is also the profound conviction that, as a people, we can be the architects of our own destiny, even when we are about to be overwhelmed by unexpected and brutal enemies, such as the pandemic. This is demonstrated by the intervention at the meeting in Rimini, when by now his government had already fallen and it was a month away from the political elections that would have brought Giorgia Meloni to lead the country. Draghi said, precisely referring to the darkest hour of the fight against the virus, with families and businesses who didn’t know if they would be able to go ahead: «It didn’t go like this. The Italians reacted with courage and concreteness, as they often did in the most difficult moments, and rewrote a story that seemed already decided”.

Rewriting a story that seems already decided is more than a challenge, not only against the pandemic, but against a specter that Europe deluded itself it had defeated forever: war.
On February 24, the continent wakes up with Russia invading a sovereign country, Ukraine
. Now it seems almost obvious to support an attacked people, to adhere to the sanctions, to collaborate with the allies, to send arms to help the resistance, to the point of saying that the most unfortunate and improbable of hypotheses could see us defeated tomorrow. but never as accomplices. This was not necessarily the case on the eve of the Prime Minister’s communications to the Chamber. Uncertainties, fears and complacency in the same majority of national unity are all too well known. The words of this anomalous banker, briefly lent to politics, left no room for cunning interpretations, despite the certainty that the line of firmness would not have guaranteed a good figure without paying a price: «Tolerating a war of aggression against of a European sovereign state – he said in the Chamber – would mean putting peace and security in Europe at risk, perhaps irreversibly. We cannot let this happen.” And again last September, at the UN, he recalled the reflections of Mikhail Gorbachev according to which, in a globalized world, force or the threat of its use could no longer function as an instrument of foreign policy, rather a new quality of cooperation is needed by the states.

And under the heading “cooperation” there is a large part of Mario Draghi’s thought. His speech in Washington last May sums it up: «It is evident that individual States cannot face the many and difficult challenges that await them in the coming years on their own. What is needed now is a collective effort, which will bring us together much more than it has in the past.” It applies to climate change. This applies to the pandemic, which is also being fought by rejecting health protectionism and bringing treatments and vaccines to even the poorest parts of the world. This applies to European integration, which needs a pragmatic and ideal federalism capable of overcoming the shackles of unanimous decisions. This is also true when, thinking of the path that led to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, he recalled, in his speech at the Accademia dei Lincei, that some governments, in other European countries, have taxed their citizens in order to be able to give money to us in the form of subsidies. «Protectionism and isolationism – he maintains – do not coincide with our national interest. From the autarkic illusions of the last century to the sovereign impulses that recently pushed us to leave the euro, Italy has never been strong when it has decided to go it alone”.

Draghi’s interventions to remember the thought of Jean Monnet, of Alcide de Gasperi, of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, all look to the same goal: Europe as an engine that guarantees not a transfer of sovereignty, but a higher level of it, a condition for growth, peace and well-being. Often her speeches end with an exhortative content, the drive to work together as the key to tackling all problems. Believe him, if it happens it will be enough.