Mattarella alarm: "They want to overturn international law"

Rarely was a quote so thoughtful, so thoughtful: Sergio Mattarella mentions the liberal Catholic philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and his”Democracy in America” to ask that the current drift which risks leading democratic systems towardsautocracy and the caesarism.

The same phenomenon that leads men and nations, in recent weeks and months, to try to overturn the basic rules of international law created to counterbalance the immoderate desire for power.

Mattarella quotes Tocqueville and warns of the risks for democracy

Receiving in Florence the honorary degree caused by “Cesare Alfieri”, the Head of State recalled how in the Florentine institute of higher studies the translations of the French thinker were taken care of and even before that questions were being raised about the crisis of the liberal democratic regimes. In particular, “among Tocqueville’s many prophecies” was that of “a future oscillating between democratic freedom and Caesarist tyranny”.

The reference to the prophecies is explained with the pages of the French thinker, who went to America in spite of the regime of Louis Philippe of Orleans, in which an unimaginable – for that time – confrontation between the United States and Russia was imagined. Or he predicted what would be the fate of democratic systems, at that time limited only to the former overseas colonies.

The defense of international law born after the Second World War

If that was the era of the Europe of the Great Powers, destined to die out in the disaster of two world wars together with the liberal regimes that governed them, today – says the President dressed with the touch of Alfieri – the “claim” emerges to break down those rules which, through the international law developed after the Second World War, they manage coexistence between states.

“Contemporaneity is imposing revolutionary challenges in the international and economic order, with clear repercussions on institutional settings”, he weighs the words, “the protagonists of global scenarios, with great and growing influence on the daily lives of individuals and communities, are technological and financial subjects”.

“Often the two aspects merge”, he adds and underlines, “these are not completely new phenomena”. What is new, if anything, is “the claim to abolish the commitments undertaken after the Second World War to give order to international relations on the basis of equality between States”; the claim “to act outside the rules of states and supranational bodies, eroding the sovereignty of the former and the growing positive role of the latter”.

The challenges of social media and artificial intelligence

In this context “i social they have changed the way of communicating, changing social relationships and the way of operating also in political life; artificial intelligence is modifying forms and methods of work and innumerable and still undefined aspects of life in the world”. New challenges which however represent a danger with a taste already known, with a bitterness already experienced. And so, asks and hopes Mattarella, “let’s not let this happen, let such a regression take place”.

The risk of “Caesarist tyranny” in Tocqueville’s prophecies

In fact “in the many prophetic intuitions of Tocqueville, the most disturbing for our time is perhaps the one which foresees a future oscillating between democratic freedom and Caesarist tyranny, to which the modern science of despotism suggests that philanthropic aspect, those fraudulently representative forms, that fearful guardianship of the individual, which Tocqueville masterfully defined, capturing its intimate spirit, in concluding that it tended to be perpetuated the childhood of man. Let us not let this happen, let such a regression take place.”

The appeal to young scholars and the reference to Lincoln

The audience applauds with conviction, and not only because in the President’s speech there were many references to a School of Higher Studies which has seen many of the Italian democratic intelligentsia parade on its chairs. To them, before leaving to visit the Museum of the Resistance, Mattarella dedicates a thought that is an invitation: “it is necessary, as many of those who have worked in this School have done, to dedicate themselves to study with passion, in the different fields of knowledge so that the new boundaries of knowledge can be explored and cultivated to achieve collective well-being that starts from the centrality of the person, of each person, of their rights and their duties”.

A few years after Tocqueville’s return to Europe someone had the opportunity to assure: democracy will never disappear from the face of the Earth. He was an American president who was writing history and his name was Abraham Lincoln.