Antonio Megalizzi and the Silicon Valley of Politics

Michele Ballerin
Former Vice-Secretary of UEF Italy

The death of Antonio Megalizzi and four other people in the terrorist attack in Strasbourg last December 11 is a sad fate on which there is no need to spread rhetoric: enough has already been written about it. But beyond personal cases – whose substance today is the pain of those who knew and loved the victims, a private matter –, a general reflection can certainly be attempted.

And it could start from considering the reason why the twenty-nine year old journalist was then visiting Strasbourg.

I'm not talking about the contingent reason. We know this: Antonio Megalizzi was in Strasbourg to work as an editor of the Europhonica project, a transnational student-radio born a few years ago as a European projection of the Italian RadUni, a university-radio network. I refer instead to the deeper reason, the one that unites him to the thousands of young people like him, and has made him in recent weeks indeed the mirror of a generation: he was in Strasbourg because he wanted to be there, in the democratic heart of Europe, to gravitate around the first and only supranational parliament in history.

To use an expression that Megalizzi was referring to himself, there exists a generation of young Europeans “in love with Europe”, on which the Union's institutional centers exert an almost irresistible attraction. At the heart of this attraction there is an intuition that is anything but fanciful: the idea that in those places, in that political and cultural space, people are working for the future. This is so very sensible that it does not seem exaggerated to establish a similarity with the magnetism that the Silicon Valley has been exerting on technology enthusiasts for decades. If, in this part of California, a future of digital technologies is invented day by day that will have an almost incalculable impact on the daily life of billions of people, Brussels and Strasbourg represent the world's epicenter of political innovation, the laboratory in which people are working on an unprecedented experiment: the overcoming of national sovereignties.

I would like to draw the attention of the reader to this extraordinary event, which I believe is destined to open up an increasingly vast and central space in the political debate: for the first time in history a transnational generation has appeared in Europe, which has in supranationality its main anthropological characteristic. It is the young people who have been formed at the turn of the third millennium between the web, the social networks, low cost flights and international mobility programs promoted by the Union, and for whom neither the restoration of frontiers, nor the return to monetary sovereignty or any other national sovereignty could ever have the slightest appeal. What the federalists, the new Diogenes, have been seeking for decades with the lantern of their faith in European unity and in its historical necessity, has emerged all of a sudden from the subsoil of society, and offers itself today to our analysis as the most solid bulwark against the wave of neo-nationalisms, as the most certain foundation for our hopes in the future of the continent: the European people, the ripe, by now, fruit of a globalization which, apparently, does not produce only inconveniences.

European, mind you: not simply pro-European. There is a difference between owning an ideal and embodying it, and it is a crucial difference. A citizen who is dreaming about the political unity of Europeans is certainly useful to the federalist cause, he is someone on whose vote, at the right time, one can count; but an anthropologically European citizen is something more: he is – whether he acknowledges it or not, whether he wants it or not – a soldier of European unity, an individual whose destiny is so intimately linked to that of the integration project that he is obliged to support it without reserve. The former aspires to the supranational dimension, the latter lives in it.

And it does not matter if our young man is called Antonio, Jean, Hans or John, or if he will follow his path undisturbed between masters and internships, or if he instead will meet an absurd death among the stalls of a Christmas market. It will always be the same person, the same fragment of present heading towards the only conceivable destiny: that of belonging to a spiritual and political community whose boundaries range from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, and from Lisbon to Warsaw.

Translated by Lionello Casalegno