The Global Cable, Europe The Future of Italy and the European Union with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni

Below is a transcript of William Burke-White's conversation with former Prime Minister of Italy Paolo Gentiloni, for Perry World House's podcast 'The Global Cable.' Music and Produced by Tre Hester.  

BURKE-WHITE, HOST: Welcome to The Global Cable, a podcast at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm Bill Burke-White, the inaugural director of Perry World House, and with me is John Gans, our Director of Communications and Research. Hi John!

JOHN GANS: Good to be with you here.

BURKE-WHITE: So John, we've been having Paolo Gentiloni, the former Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister of Italy with us at Perry World House the last couple of days and in a little while we’ll hear a conversation I've just had with him. But to start off, John, who is this guy Gentiloni anyways?

GANS: Well, as you mentioned, he's the former Prime Minister of Italy and he started his career as a journalist, actually. Journalists have a robust role in Italian politics both as correspondence but also as participants very often. He joined parliament, I think in early 2001 and then went on to be a Minister of Communication, which I think makes sense for journalists. But then, worked also as foreign minister and then, eventually, was Prime Minister.

BURKE-WHITE: And he just stepped down in June, and while he was Prime Minister, he engaged in a lot of work on refugee and migration issues but also had to combat a rising populous nationalism in Italy. And in the most recent elections, the five star movement, the sort of right wing party there, got 32 percent of the vote, won 277 seats in parliament. So, a lot of what he and I talked about in this conversation is nationalism. It's something you've done a lot of work on with us here at Perry World House. What have we been up to on nationalism?

GANS: Well, I mean, especially in our global order theme which looks at technology governance and power, populism and nationalism are two of the things that are complicating the global order in many different ways and in many different countries, Italy being one of them. And so, this is a conversation that's been going on at Perry World House for over a year and a half now. I think one of the best distillations of it is our nationalism explainer, which I think did a good job of both diving into the research on nationalism that's happening in the academic community now, but then also trying to find the questions that policymakers like Prime Minister Gentiloni and others need to be asking and thinking about as they think about this new wave of nationalism that's rising all over in Italy, in the United States, and elsewhere.

BURKE-WHITE: And what is a nationalism explainer and where would somebody find it if you wanted to learn more about nationalism?

GANS: Well, the best place to find it would be on the Perry World House website, which you can Google. I'm on our research page, but in general, I think what it does is give a very quick distillation of both the thinking about nationalism that's going on in the academic community, but also pointing you to more resources. So whether it's writings, books, things along those lines and the questions that everybody needs to be asking the years ahead.

BURKE-WHITE: Cool. Well, let's talk about Italian politics, the future of nationalism, also, the future of leftist parties during the rise of  the right and so many places with Paolo Gentiloni, the former Prime Minister of Italy. 

Paolo, thank you so much for being with us today at Perry World House and at Penn. I want to start by asking you a little bit about the state of a Italian politics today. You recently served as Prime Minister until June of last year. And in that election, the Italian right party, the Five Star Movement, won 277 seats and the far right took a bigger role in Italian government. What's the state of the Italian political scene today?

PAOLO GENTILONI: Well, first of all, I would like to thank you very much for this opportunity. Yes, we have since June of last year a rather unusual government. I would stress two things: one is that the popularity of this government is slowly but surely declining on economy. A lot of problems created both from the European slowdown in economy and from what the government announced indeed in these eight months, made the results that since January, Italy is the only European country in recession. So there is great disillusion from the economic and social point of view, and the government popularity is declining on this subject. The other aspect of the government, which is a nationalistic populistic attitude, triggered particularly by migration flows, is for the moment still very popular. And this I think is a challenge for several governments in Europe and in the world: how to tackle this issue of identity and migration. Avoiding this can boost the popularity of nationalistic and driven schist political parties.

BURKE-WHITE: When you were Prime Minister, how did you think about navigating that line on migration? On one hand, responding to the need of refugees and other migrants and on the other hand, not fueling more of a populist, nationalist backlash?

GENTILONI: Yes. Difficult challenge. I think you have to be very clear in what is your target and the target should be shifting. Migration flows that are not avoidable. We will have migration flows in Europe coming mostly from Africa in the next 20 years for sure. Shifting these flows from a illegal, a dangerous, and managed by human traffickers story to a legal, safe, and managed by government stories. This is possible. It is even a necessity for our economies because many of the European economies couldn't afford a block of migration because we have in several sectors of our economies migration fundamentally occupied. So this shift from irregular, dangerous, and criminal, to safe and also matching our economic necessities and interest is what we have to do. I have to say, my government was in a good path in this direction. We managed to reduce substantially the irregular flows, but my opinion and my concern is that the government now in Italy is only, giving a message of closure. You're closing our ports. We are—

BURKE-WHITE: —and cutting off assistance and protection status to even those who are already in Italy.

GENTILONI: Yes, we are interrupting the integration process and you're sending the message that migration can be completely eliminated, which is totally untrue. But it is also very dangerous, because the message of breaking every integration process is a message that could provoke hate and reactions that, frankly speaking, Italy doesn't want and doesn’t deserve.

BURKE-WHITE: So let's talk about the Italian economy for a minute, which Italy has some economic challenges. The debt to GDP ratio is very high, even potentially out of alignment with EU rules. What is Italy need to do to get the economy back on a more solid footing?

GENTILONI: Well, in the last four or five years, Italy's economy was climbing a sort of narrow path. Trying to avoid increasing our debt and gradually reducing these debts and, at the same time, to have more growth and a decent growth rate. This narrow path was functioning until 2017, the beginning of last year. Now it has been interrupted, but we have a problem because the interruption was a sort of a declaration of war towards the European institution. And this declaration of war at the end was concluded with a peace and substantially with a new budget without measure to push for growth. And only with some measure that our respecting electoral promises of the government, though this is one of the reasons why the Italian economy is technically now in a recession. Because confidence in consumers, entrepreneurs, and financial foreign investors has very sharply and rapidly declined. And this is in total contradiction with the fundamental of Italian economy because we have, at the end of the day, very good fundamentals. We are the second manufacturer in Europe, the second exporting countries in Europe, in both cases after Germany, and we have a great process of renewal of our industry going very well.

So Italy is a competitive country and Italy's economy has great potentiality, but, this mixture of announcements and quarrels with Europe, with neighbors, with everyone, created this lack of confidence, the growth of interest rates. If you have low growth and high interest rates, the new pressure of the public debt is inevitable. And this is what's happening now in these very weeks. I hope that this will change, but unfortunately, the government looks more concentrated in trying to fulfill some of the promises in the election than to face the newest lowdown of European economy.

"Italy is a competitive country and Italy's economy has great potentiality, but, this mixture of announcements and quarrels with Europe, with neighbors, with everyone, created this lack of confidence, the growth of interest rates."

BURKE-WHITE: The populist challenges you've talked about in Italy are also surfacing in other parts of Europe. You go to Hungary and you have Orban who is even more vocal. Poland has its own populous challenges. The far right in Germany seems to be more active. And in Austria, there's far right parties in government. What is your sense of the broader state of the populist nationalist movements in, in Europe or even in here in the United States or in Brazil and elsewhere? How is it reshaping global politics?

GENTILONI: Well, I think you have to take it very seriously because it is not something occasional and destined to finish tomorrow, because the roots of this race are very serious from one side. The fact that inequality is growing in our economies, not withstanding growth rates, we have growing inequalities because the quality of jobs is at risk. Digitalization and artificial intelligence are wonderful things and create wonderful opportunities, but they are also putting at risk the quality of dozens of millions of jobs in our societies. And thirdly, because the unrest about identity created by migration is an easy trigger for nationalists, for turning backwards your mind in what the wonderful ancient times were, and to fuel nationalistic sentiment. So this is what is at the roots of this different political surge of national populism. On the other side, we will have not to imagine that this is destined to become a wave in all countries reaching powers in the European Union or in old relevant countries in the world. I think it will remain, at least in Europe, a minority, but it could be an influential minority.

"The fact that inequality is growing in our economies, not withstanding growth rates, we have growing inequalities because the quality of jobs is at risk. Digitalization and artificial intelligence are wonderful things and create wonderful opportunities, but they are also putting at risk the quality of dozens of millions of jobs in our societies. And thirdly, because the unrest about identity created by migration is an easy trigger for nationalists... to fuel nationalistic sentiment."

BURKE-WHITE: So we've talked a lot in global politics lately about the rise of the far right. I want to ask you about the left for a minute. What does the rise of the right mean for the left, here in America we’re watching lots of Democratic candidates announce that they are running for President and staking out different positions in the American left. You're someone who, you know, was deeply engaged in party politics in earlier parts of your career. What do you see as the future of the left, both in Europe and more generally?

GENTILONI: Well, I have two remarks. One is, I would say the way we are fighting in politics, and I am firmly convinced that the left and the progressive forces should not imitate the national populistic way of doing politics. If we accept the idea of oversimplification of problems, if we accept the idea of creating always enemies, if we accept the idea of factionalism one against the other, we are not only creating damages in our own political systems, we are also losing our fight with national populism. So we should contrast national populism with our way of doing politics: trying to solve the problem, knowing the problems that we deal with, and building a popular and passionate narrative without concentrating this narrative on enemies and on simplistic solutions of problems. This is the way national populists who it’s working—it is not the progressive and democratic way. My second remark is we should learn the lesson of the end of the golden age of globalization and concentrate on how democratic and progressives are capable to face both the issue of inequalities and fragile jobs, and social unrest, and the issue of identity. If the democratic is only a democratic and progressive proposal is only a cosmopolitan offer based on issues like civil rights and so on, this is what we have to do, but this cannot be our main and core focus of attention. We leave, in this case, too many room to national populism.

BURKE-WHITE: So, I want to talk to you about America for a second. You were foreign minister and dealt with the US in that capacity and then again as Prime Minister. When you look at America today, and as you just said, the golden moment of globalization, the moment of American kind of unipolarity seems to have passed, what do you make of America? What do you think of working with the United States and partnering with the United States at a moment where we seem to be looking inward and withdrawing from a lot of institutional structures of the global order?

GENTILONI: Well, it's not the first time that America is looking inwards and this was the choice in the past also from a democratic administration, democratic presidents many decades ago, but now in the world we are living in we need the American leadership in the free world just to be very clear and sharp. Without an American leadership, and so without an American commitment in transatlantic relation, in the promotion of democratic and liberal in the European sense values, I think that the dynamics also of global relation. For example, the dynamics of the relation between America and China are more dangerous because there is not an obvious, common interest. If our common interests are not connected also with a common fight for our values. So America is obviously deciding to be more selective in it's foreign commitments and this is understandable and we have to respect these decisions. But, this cannot, from my point of view, mean that there is a disengagement from the global role that America should play, that only America can play. And without this global role, I think that every single country will, in the near future, find its own accommodation based on its own economic and geopolitical interest.

BURKE-WHITE: And you know, luckily the United States and Italy get along pretty well generally. But are there a couple of issues that are particularly important to Italy for the United States to do more of, or when you think about the bilateral agenda between the US and Italy, what's on it, where are there opportunities for greater partnership, or what are the issues that are in tension?

GENTILONI: What my opinion is that the Mediterranean scenario is still a fundamental area of commitment for the United States.

BURKE-WHITE: Yes.

GENTILONI: I cannot accept the idea that this small Mediterranean sea where Asia, Africa and Europe cross, where the religions of the world cross, and where many of the contemporary tensions are fueled, is an area with an American disengagement. Yes, I perfectly know that the idea of pivoting to Asia is not a recent one and it is perfectly understandable because of the challenge of China and have the potentiality of the Pacific, but the Mediterranean will remain for historical and contemporary reason, a crucial area of the world. So one interest Italy has is to have America committed in the Mediterranean and particularly, for Italy’s concern, in Libya. It was difficult for the US administration and for the Secretary of State Kerry to commit the US in Libya, but it was decisive for the steps we were able to do.

So first of all, Mediterranean. And secondly, I would say, we need a United States respecting the European Union. And not believing that the European Union is again, an obstacle. Again, it is not something new. The problem, the secretary Kissinger famously said: I don't know who to call when they call Europe. And this is still a problem, but the European Union is the biggest economic area of the world, and we need a in trade relationship, a positive relation with Washington. We cannot accept the idea that Washington is considering the European Union as a competitor at the same level as China or other countries because there is a fundamental historical and political difference. We are free economies and the others are not.

"We cannot accept the idea that Washington is considering the European Union as a competitor at the same level as China or other countries because there is a fundamental historical and political difference. We are free economies and the others are not."

BURKE-WHITE: So I want to turn now to what we call our “Two and Twenty” segment. I'm wondering as you look at the world, what do you see as the biggest threats or challenges the world faces over the next say two years?

GENTILONI: One of the biggest challenges next two years is for sure the American election. Sorry to say this to you, but obviously, what the American election will decide will be key in the evolution we are talking about in this confrontation of a open and pro globalization and pro trade war/world. And on the other side, her rise of national populism. So, I would take American elections.

BURKE-WHITE: Well, we're going to hear a lot about them in this country over the next 18 months. And I'm hoping there might be some elections in Italy too, but we'll see.

GENTILONI: But they’ll not be so crucial.

BURKE-WHITE: What about the next 20 years if you look at a longer time horizon?

GENTILONI: But by far I think the relation between US and China. How will they change how this story will be forged, and in this case, I am convinced that Europe could and should play a relevant role because if the dynamic are only a China-US dynamic without a multi-polar, a balance in the world, these dynamics could become rather dangerous if we have other actors playing a relevant role. This dynamic could be helped to evolve in a better way and the only global player I can imagine with US and China is Europe.

BURKE-WHITE: So I want to ask you now about an interesting global fact. Is there some fact that it helps you understand some issue or that you want to share with people that you know that's important in how we see the world?

GENTILONI: Well, one fact that I could mention is what is happening in Africa, the internal migration happening in Africa. Numbers are enormous in a continent that will shape part of the future.

BURKE-WHITE: It’s the fastest growing continent in the world.

GENTILONI: Yes, fastest growing continent. In twenty five years, one single African state, Nigeria, will have more or less the same population of the European Union. And the movement, the internal migration in Africa, are mostly connected to climate change. So we have to—

BURKE-WHITE: —so there'll be exacerbated in history moving forward.

GENTILONI: Yes, we have to consider this new form of migration in the last 10 years, a migration caused by climate change. If we don't stop climate change, we will not only have this extreme phenomena, we will not only have pollution in megalopolis in Asia, we will have a non manageable situation in migration in Africa. Give a look to this because it is very, very relevant.

"In twenty five years, one single African state, Nigeria, will have more or less the same population of the European Union. And the movement, the internal migration in Africa, are mostly connected to climate change... we have to consider this new form of migration in the last 10 years, a migration caused by climate change. If we don't stop climate change, we will not only have this extreme phenomena, we will not only have pollution in megalopolis in Asia, we will have a non manageable situation in migration in Africa. Give a look to this because it is very, very relevant."

BURKE-WHITE: I want to see if you have any advice that you would want to share briefly with students who are graduating from college and university and might want to go pursue a career, maybe they dream of being Foreign Minister of some country some day.

GENTILONI: Well being Foreign Minister is a very good target. Yes, my only suggestion is to try it is not easy. To combine what you learn and what you know very well in your specific sectors, you can be an expert in algorithm or in climate, and a general awareness and, if possible, a sort of commitment in how the world is evolving. I think that always in a more interconnected world, it is difficult to be a super expert of something without having also a general view and the sort of public commitment. These two thIngs should be a intertwined if possible. And this is a great opportunity if you are studying in Penn and in such important and global institution, you have this opportunity and please use it at best.

BURKE-WHITE: So last question, is it a little bit of a surprise: what's your favorite place in Italy?

GENTILONI: My favorite place...

BURKE-WHITE: You have a corner of Italy that you always love?

GENTILONI: My favorite place is my hometown. I roam and place I love and they go frequently to is a little sea place, very famous called Amalfi. If you don't know Amalfi, you have to go there.

BURKE-WHITE: Well, thank you for leaving Rome and coming to spend some time us here on The Global Cable, a production of Perry World House. That's been Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni of Italy. I'm Bill Burke-White and thank you for joining us on The Global Cable today.

GENTILONI: Thank you.