Year XXXVIII, Number 2, July 2025

Alessandro Cavalli
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Pavia.

Sovereignist parties are on the rise throughout Europe. The trend is clearly across the board: most pronounced in the so-called right-wing alignments, but it is not absent in the so-called left-wing either. In Italy, sovereignists are in government even if, in order to govern, they have had to moderate or conceal their sovereignist leanings. The interdependence between European societies-states is now too strong to break the bonds that unite them. Giorgia Meloni’s path, from Italexit slogans to de facto support for Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission, is exemplary of the fact that one can obstruct completion; however, it is impossible to demolish the European structure totally. However, even in Portugal, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Hungary the sovereignists seem firmly in the saddle and in Poland and Romania are in key positions. In France, Spain and Germany they stand a good chance of success by upcoming elections. They have a strong representation in the European Parliament, on both the right and the left.

Many commentators portray them as being nostalgic for times past. I rather fear that they are the forerunners of possible, and undesirable, times to come. The sovereignists are the allies of the empires that want to keep Europe divided.

Let us look to the West. Faced with the threat of Soviet Russian expansion, the Americans first substantially supported the European drive toward greater unification of the continent. After the death of Stalin and the establishment of a stable bipolar balance, American support for any attempts to unify Europe waned considerably. The French immediately took advantage of this, causing the attempt to form a European Defense Community in 1954 to fail because of an alliance formed between the Gaullists and social communists. In the unipolar phase that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some influential American powerhouses began to see the European Union, and especially the single currency, as a potential competitor. The euro could have undermined the dollar as the dominant currency of international trade and reduced its ability to finance US public debt.

Today, with the advent of the Trump presidency, the European Union is not perceived as a reliable interlocutor (and indeed, EU representatives were not even invited to the inauguration ceremony and are de facto excluded from the negotiations about Ukraine’s future). The announced battle over import-export duties has yet begun. But the new president prefers to deal with individual countries, which means establishing a colonial-type relationship with each of them. The support given to the sovereignists by the shadow president, Elon Musk, is a clear sign of this. Someone (a few) was shocked to see this highly influential figure openly support the Brexit supporters and the (neo-Nazi?) AfD extremists in Germany. In short, we will see, it is not NATO that is in question, but the meaning and content of the alliance.

Let us look to the East. The invasion of Ukraine, despite Russian propaganda stunts, is a clear sign of hostility against the EU’s tendency to expand peacefully to the East. The territorial enlargement of the Union happened by voluntary accession without firing a cannon. It may be that Putin wants to renew the imperial aspirations of Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia. What is certain is that he perceives the model of coexistence represented by the European Union, and the force of attraction it exerts, as a threat to the stability of the autocratic-oligarchical power he has established in Russia. The real goal of the Ukraine war (“special military operation”) is not in the first instance the conquest of Crimea and the territories bordering the Black Sea, but stopping the eastward enlargement of the EU and, if possibly, to reverse it.

This explains the more or less covert funding of sovereignist forces (such as Salvini’s League in Italy), the support given and received by Orbán, the events in Moldova and Georgia, as well as other signs, such as the sympathy from and for Sahra Wagenknecht’s neo-movement party in Germany. A clear example of the sovereignist left approaching the sovereignist right.

So, it must be recognized that, as things stand at the moment, objectively Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia have a common interest in keeping Europe divided. The sovereignist parties are, in fact, defending an emptied sovereignty, to the advantage of new forms of colonial domination. Beyond the definitions of legal doctrines, sovereignty is the ability of a people to co-determine their own future. In a relationship of imperial dependence, one’s future is in the hands of others. Europe is faced with this dilemma: either assert its sovereignty or put itself under the protective wings of an empire. The various formally sovereign states will not even be able to choose which empire to serve, because this will depend on the power relations between the empires in play. There does not seem to me to be an acute awareness that this is what is at stake in these months. Take, for example, the Ukrainian issue. Trump seems willing to concede a substantial part of Ukrainian territory to Russia and, more importantly, he does not see Ukraine as a vital interest in his design. His idea is that Putin’s victory in Ukraine is not a defeat of America but, if anything, of Europe, and it is therefore Europe that must get its act together and secure its borders.

Today, it must be acknowledged, it is not easy to convince a large enough section of public opinion in the various European countries that it is necessary to defend the eastern border, whatever it takes, and to reorganize its military engagement not so much and not only in terms of resources, but above all in terms of strategy, efficiency and, above all, political leadership. With what institutions, how and why, the issue of defense must be at the center of the political debate in the months that lie ahead. It has been comfortable to remain under the protective American umbrella for eighty long years. Today, Europe must respond to the Trump’s challenge if it does not want to be destined in the future to be a collection of colonies serving the empires that will carve up the domination of the world among themselves. If it responds to this challenge by strengthening its own institutions and its own security, it will then be able to play a role in the concert of the great powers and perhaps invite them all around a table to decide, together, to dismantle armies and allocate the resources saved to fight hunger, achieve the energy transition and lay the groundwork for sustainable development on all continents. Otherwise, it cannot even choose which master to serve.