The redefining of the Middle East’s borders, the cry of Christians and minority groups hit by the jihadists’ blind, viral violence and the humanitarian emergencies that the war has generated alongside the realignment of Europe, America and the Arab countries: the Italian view on what is happening on the shores of the Mediterranean and beyond.
Last update: 2025-01-21 15:45:14
Following his trail on the social networks means a virtual journey around the world from the United Nations in New York to the refugee camps in Erbil, moving between diplomacy, humanitarian emergencies, co-operation and a re-launching of international relations. Born in 1964, a Political Science graduate from Florence University and politically committed since a boy, Lapo Pistelli has been a Democratic Party Member of the Italian Parliament and vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2013. The ante-room of his office and his Facebook profile both display ancient maps, as if to suggest his broad geographical and historical horizons. The conversation takes its cue from a page of recent history.
‘[It has been] easy to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses….’. So said Bin Laden in 2004. Ten years later, the names of the actors have changed but isn’t the same dynamic of provocation and war repeating itself?
I would like to answer by making two observations. The first is that the Twin Towers have been rebuilt and Bin Laden is no longer around. The triumphalist intention in that statement of his has been brought to a halt. Of course, any comparison with terrorism is always asymmetric, insofar as the latter, by its very nature, ‘wins when it doesn’t lose’, whereas ‘lawful institutions lose when they don’t win’, as Kissinger taught us. Defeating terrorism was and remains an absolute objective and therefore one that, by its very nature, is not achievable through politics, which always pursues relative goals. It would be like saying that we want to defeat evil: a noble goal but not achievable politically. We can limit its offensive capabilities but we can’t defeat it. The second observation has to do with the nature of the ISIS threat, which is qualitatively different from that of Al-Qaeda. The 11 September attack constituted both Al-Qaeda’s apogee and the beginning of its decline: its most spectacular act and, at the same time, one that was unrepeatable. Al-Qaeda wanted to provoke the West’s implosion through an overexposure of its economic and military capabilities. History has nevertheless subsequently demonstrated how Al-Qaeda was divided and fragmented through a terror franchising that led the organisation to fight for different objectives in the Islamic Maghreb, in the Arabian peninsula, in Yemen and in Iraq in the time of Zarqawi….. The Islamic State’s strategic plan is quite different: it is a jihadist terrorist movement that, as it conquers territory, proclaims itself a state on the basis of a seventh-century map, not a twenty-first century one. I.S. is fighting the ‘Muslim apostates’, whether they be Sunnis or Shi‘ites, and all the more so all the non-Muslims. By virtue of its potential ability to dismantle the borders and redraw the map of the Middle East, it is qualitatively more dangerous than Al-Qaeda.
Exactly: the borders. Chasing the myth of the Caliphate, ISIS is destroying them. Syria and Iraq are no longer the Syria and Iraq that the maps showed a few years ago. How real a threat is ISIS to the West and how much is just effective terror propaganda?
ISIS is certainly attempting to destroy the borders but the politicians are committed to ‘restoring’ them. It constitutes a threat that, in its ancient barbarity, makes use of the media’s modernity; frightening the West with cruel images of its executions, using the social networks to create advance panic in the cities to be conquered and seeking to prevent any military reaction on the part of its targets. The ISIS threat must be taken into consideration but, at the same time, it mustn’t be overestimated, which would be to play the game of the ISIS narrative itself. The number of fighters is nothing like the numbers involved in other conflicts during the twentieth century: we’re talking about tens of thousands, not millions. Furthermore, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s very first call was ‘to fight here’ to realise the Islamic State: the fighters’ call is not in the European capitals or in the United States, something that was true of the Al-Qaeda threat, on the other hand. Nevertheless, the fact that we are not facing a direct threat today does not mean that we can sleep peacefully in our beds at night. The threat could be greater tomorrow, if we think of the phenomenon of foreign fighters returning to their countries of origin. The international community’s awakening and Obama’s initiative constitute the right recognition of the challenge we are facing.
Also the right response to the Eastern Patriarchs’ cry for help in defence of all the minorities being persecuted by Isis?
Their cry was really what caused this reaction. As long as the jihadist conflict appeared to be a civil war between Sunnis, many western chancelleries didn’t dedicate that much attention to it. However, when it began to concern other minorities that were risking extermination, there was another type of reaction. I hope the image of the Middle East that many of us have does not become a black and white image of the past. The Middle East was and is a kaleidoscope of ancient cultures capable of living alongside each other. The uprooting of thousand-year-old minorities from the land where they settled is a barbarous reduction to a monochromatic world that tells us a lot about ISIS: extermination of everything that is different in order to make room for a totalitarian monoculture.
Will those who have had to escape return?
No. It is impossible for everyone to return. It is right to work for their return or to prevent any more leaving but, in certain contexts, the trust that one community had in the other broke down during the summer of 2014. A good part of the people fleeing felt betrayed by communities they had been living alongside right up until the day before. When ISIS arrived, some Sunni communities preferred to sink to deals rather than protect the original plurality of the society to which they belonged. This created a profound rupture in many people and they now consider it impossible to return. The main challenge now is to create minimum security conditions in those zones by driving ISIS out. Recreating degrees of mutual trust will then be a second chapter. We will then have to build much more robust reception policies for those who have decided not to return.
Who are the parties deciding the destiny of these peoples? Who are the real players?
In the shadow of the WikiLeaks decade in which not even encrypted diplomacy succeeds in remaining such, I don’t think there are players. I think it’s a big game happening at a moment in which all the players at the international level are redefining their roles: America, Europe and the Arab countries, to say nothing of the role of the non-state actors… This makes the game more complex nowadays.
And what role are the Gulf States carving out for themselves?
They have been hit by a process of transformation like all the other states and they have reacted to the blast of the Arab springs by protecting their monarchies. But they are unlikely to think that they will remain unchanged over the medium term, because of the modernization processes that are hitting them.
How is diplomacy changing in the era of the immediate communication created by the social networks?
Conducting international relations nowadays is much more complicated than it was in the past because the interweaving of international relations, cultural and religious ‘subsurface currents’ and economic interests is much more intricate that it was thirty or a hundred years ago. The conditioning force of both the economy and the media and information environment is greater and the actively sought influence of international parties that are no longer just state bodies has also grown: churches and movements, the media and civil society, NGOs and the custom trend-setters are capable of fomenting forms of agitation that condition international relations. This has a direct impact not only on the role of states but also on their most sophisticated arsenals nowadays, which comprise traditional diplomacy and the soft power that states can exercise according to their own national characteristics. To give you an example: it is far more important for the United Kingdom that English is this millennium’s global language than it is to have nuclear warheads - the classical twentieth-century instrument of hard power - on its territory. Italy is a stronger player than the economic or political weight she actually manages to express would suggest because, in the collective imagination of many people, she represents a way of life and this fact allows her to get involved in the management of various agendas.
So how to balance the demand for transparency with the need for confidentiality?
There are some actions that by their very nature require maximum publicity. Here I’m thinking of civil society or co-operation campaigns, which need the widest range of people being involved in order to get through to the chancelleries and produce cultural change. Whereas in the case of hostages or individual cases that have to do with the protection of human rights, the duty of discretion prevails: raised voices made public would have got nowhere in the case of the young Sudanese mother, Meryam, whereas a firm but polite dialogue with the authorities in Khartoum produced her liberation. The choice regarding the best technique for reaching an objective is inspired by common sense.
Meryam’s case drew global attention to the issue of religious freedom as the basis of all the other freedoms. How is this topic perceived at the level of international relations?
For several years now, Italy has been unaggressively introducing the topic of freedom of expression, of belief and of religion in conversations with its friends, allies and partners, including those in the Arab world, and she has been getting people’s attention. It’s not the topic that makes the difference but the way it’s presented for discussion. Of the things Pope Francis has said, I found his response to Shimon Peres’ idea of a so-called ‘United Nations of Religions’ fascinating, because just as the United Nations was the response to the Second World War for the protection of peace after conflicts between states, so the idea of a ‘United Nations of Religions’ indicates the need for the means of personal growth that faith can offer man to find a place where this same need will not be brandished as a cause of conflict.
Regarding the religion/violence pairing: some see religions as the heralds of peace, others see them as the cause of conflict and still others see them as an alibi for justifying other things. Which view do you take?
There’s some truth in all three claims. On the one hand, there is a ‘must be’ in religions: they must be peace generators. Then, religions are sometimes used to fight other kinds of battle. And lastly, in the ‘wars of religion’, there is even a ‘not to be’ i.e. what a religion should not be. Christianity made its negative contribution five hundred years ago in the form of wars that racked Europe but nowadays it tries to operate on quite another wavelength, as the reflection of the most recent popes, from John XXIII to Pope Francis, demonstrates. For this reason and with the exception of a few groups still anchored to the neo-con narrative of a good ten years ago, I place Christianity on a different level, promoting both peace and ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue. Islam is undergoing a great internal upheaval nowadays, as it rethinks how to tackle modernity and the relationship between faith and civic and political life. The answers the Arab governments are giving relate to the brief span of their term in office but Islam’s reflection about its own identity is a further-reaching phenomenon and it is right that we prepare ourselves in that perspective.
How would you answer those who say that all the problems would be solved if religions were kept out of the public space?
That religions are so profoundly ingrained in human nature that I do not think man can get rid of them once he enters the public space. One must simply find the point of distinction between faith as a motivation and expression of values and secular dialogue within institutions, where each person brings his own imperfections and inclination towards improvement. Those who think they can mechanically transpose great, transcendent and absolute principles into an institutional ability to function are making the greatest of mistakes.
You were one of the first to take aid to Erbil. In refugee camps, the urgent needs are tangible. But the emergency care needs to be flanked by a wider-ranging development project. How to work along these two lines?
Emergency and development go hand-in-hand at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the face of an emergency, there is a first response, which regards basic needs. Then there is a second, post-relief phase when one passes from the basic needs to the rebuilding of basic services. For example, in Lebanon we are trying to re-organize care and education services for a generation that has left Syria and, certainly, needs to eat and sleep but also needs to study. The school system needs to double in size. The development agenda works to eradicate the deepest causes - whether they be political, economic or climatic - in a long-term perspective and one, I would add, that is sustainable. There is a problem, however. Just as cold and hot water taps draw from the same tank, so the more instability fault lines the world presents, the more resources are drained off for the emergencies and the fewer are channelled into development projects.
International relations, too, are put at risk by the ‘presentism’ virus, so that we reach the point where last month’s enemies become today’s friends…. Is it possible to remain immune?
This is an element that is permeating contemporary culture, not just international relations. It is the same principle that makes us communicate via Twitter in 140 characters and on the basis of which the big corporations are obsessed with quarterly balance sheets and politics reasons in terms of weeks. Genuine, far-reaching processes need time to be understood and applied. But the lovers of presentism object that even the slowest full-length film is composed of individual frames that one needs to know how to read. These are the playing conditions we find ourselves in: we can’t choose them but we must be able to live the present frame by inserting it into a film that has a longer plot, so as to avoid an inconsistency that goes beyond every bearable limit.
Italy in Europe and Europe in the world. Can the changes taking place in the world show the European Union a new road? Will countries learn to all go at the same pace?
Europe is going through a phase of existential crisis. We are miles away from the phase of the great geopolitical work of re-establishing Europe through the big-bang enlargement of 2004, the long-awaited European Constitution and the launching of new, common policies…. The Union is digesting the results it has achieved before it throws itself into new challenges. But whoever travels regularly can understand that if, on the one hand, it’s true that Europeans are in a crisis with themselves and the system that has preserved peace for two generations, there is, on the other, a great demand for Europe in the world. That which, for us, is an imperfect structure becomes a model for countries that know the threat of division or war and fear of their neighbour. This ought to be a good lesson for us in not desisting from intensifying European integration and not automatically renouncing further enlargements both in the direction of the Balkans and elsewhere.
Also in the direction of Turkey?
I have always maintained that Turkey’s future is inside Europe and that Europe’s future is to include Turkey. It is an engagement that has gone on too long and that will end in marriage. I know that it will not be a matter for this government but I hope it will be for one of the governments during my children’s lifetime.
During a Euro-Arab meeting in Florence in 1977, Giorgio La Pira said, ‘Building the peace tent is also part of the Mediterranean’s destiny’. Nowadays, the Mediterranean is often more like a tomb…
The Mediterranean is not a boundary area but a sharing between different cultures and societies that see this sea as their meeting point: between Europe and the Arab world, between Islam and Christianity. It is here that one of the most important challenges this decade is posing us is being lived out.
Have the Arab rebellions taught the West something?
They have taught us that it was short-sighted to think that immovable regimes could act as a guarantee against our fears about immigration and jihadism. It is nevertheless clear that the Arab world is going through a transition that does not have a predictable outcome. There could be an internal deflagration mid-voyage or the ship could reach port on a more democratic, plural(ist) shore. But we cannot watch this voyage of transformation as if it didn’t concern us. There are short-term responses regarding security, a shared management of immigration and the terrorism emergency but there is also a far greater interweaving of our destiny with theirs, in which we can accompany societies more than governments towards a positive relationship with modernity. After all, this was the demand that the younger generations were making when they took to the streets in 2011: they were asking for freedom, economic prosperity, democracy and work. There have been many obstacles since then but that demand requires a response.