The surviving of Europe depends on its capability to become a country and create a sense of identity in its citizens. How? We try and look back to Italian history in search of tips.

«We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians». That’s what Massimo D’Azeglio said in 1860, at the dawn of Italian unification. Politics and battles had created one state from Etna to Mont Blanche, but most people, especially lower class people, and especially Southern people, didn’t feel any sense of belonging to a nation. This situation caused a civil war in the former Two Sicily Kingdom and it made the unification process – I’m not talking about the unification of territories, but the unification of souls – a long, hard and dramatic matter for generations of governors.

In my opinion there are some common issues in the Italy 19th century history and in the current path to make Europe a unified country. First, there are the same main obstacles: the influence of localism on people‘s thought, the will of oligarchy to preserve political power in local areas and the linguistic gap. Plus, at least in Italy, there is the same difference in the feelings of the upper, highly educated, English-speaking and Hi-Tec skilled class and the worker, (and more and more often unemployed) class about the European Union. The cultural closure and the linguistic gap have always been the fertile hummus for the sprouting of localism and educating people to have open minded thoughts should be one of the main goals for the EU.

So, the main topic we should face is how to make this integration process. Europe invested mostly on two ways for reaching its people with a message of integration: students’ special projects and WEB 2.0. Both of these media, in my opinion, are not adequate. Recent statistics warn us that in Italy, 45% of the population has never surfed on the net. And among this percentage are not counted only people from old generations: 1,700,000 youths from 15 to 29 (source: Istat) never used a PC in the last 12 months. If we go deeper inside the data we discover the digital divide grows in the lower class families and in the southern Italy family. With internet the rich becomes richer and the poor is more and more marginalized: he doesn’t have access to information. We can make exactly the same speech about school with students‘ special projects made for elites. The risk is to see a Europe more and more similar to 19th century Italy, where the sense of common fate is perceived only by the leading class. That would mean the collapse of the European project.

Anyway, Italian history is not only the EU’s bogeyman: this country, sadly famous in Europe for economic instability, leader’s lust and a stereotyping folklore, could teach the continent an important lesson about integration, a lesson made of victories and mistakes. The unification process of Italian population lasted more and more than the territorial one. Historicists are used to say the main contribution came from three agents: school, military service, and television. The Casati Act, and the following Coppino Act, made compulsory to attend the primary school for every Italian of every city, town, village. People became able to read and write. But, most at all, every child, from every social or geographic background, had the same school-program: he learned the same history, the same values, the same language, the same sense of being Italian. It’s not a chance that the most fortunate patriotic book written after Italian unification, “Cuore”, is about a pupil of a primary school. I think that the EU should be more involved in making the school curricula of the member states. A part of the topics during the whole period of compulsory education should be chosen by a European committee in both scientific and humanistic fields. Part of the teaching process should be given directly in English, so that every European citizen could have a percentage of his training in common which each other.

Military service was the main, often unique occasion that Italians had to meet people from different regions of their newborn country. I think that the physic, face-to-face relation in a cooperative situation is still an indefeasible method to make people have the feeling of a common fate. Of course, I’m not a pro-military service partisan. the EU could substitute the army experience with the extension of the current studying and working abroad experiences to the whole under 25 population.

The last lesson Italian history can teach us is about the importance of television. We could say that Italian culture and Italian language belonged to few upper-class people before that Mike Bongiorno started to talk through the small screen diffused in the whole territory. If there’s still a wide portion of EU citizens unable to use the web, we can say that television is an universal phenomenon. We should take Europe in television. And I’m not just talking about political tribunes or European TGs. It’s necessary to reach the heart of people showing European sport, music coxntests, talent shows. Programs where people are not divided for country (like Eurovision, or Jeux Sans Frontières) but compete as citizen of a same country. And English, that, we like it or not, is the language of European interactions, should be represented in national televisions as much as the local speeches.

To reach the goal of a European federation, it’s necessary to create a sense of common fate between the member citizens. No government can, otherwise, act for the interests of the whole community without clashing with the public opinion. What happened in Germany, with Prime Minister Angela Merkel delaying the financial aid to Greece because of the local elections is a clear example of the necessity to create an European feeling before we will be able to build Europe as a country: TO MAKE EUROPE WE MUST MAKE EUROPEANS. 2