THE EUROPEAN FAILURE OF “FALSE ANALOGY”: UNITE TO COMPETE AND WIN IN THE GLOBAL ARENA

The Italy of the Berlusconian twenty years, or rather, to be precise, the Berlusconian Italy of the twenty years in which the knight dominated the scenes of national politics as a protagonist, grew and prospered also and above all by virtue of this fallacy: the false analogy .

We have a false analogy when two phenomena, two subjects, two different aspects have some properties in common. This something common, analogous, can also be unduly extended, beyond the limits of the logical and the permitted. In this way, the analogy is stretched to draw completely incorrect conclusions, or in any case unproven and therefore unfounded.

In the case of Berlusconi and the Forza Italia epic, the false analogy concerned the State (understood as a legal person incarnating in the Public Administration) and any joint stock company. The state, in fact, was equated to a company by Silvio's supporters. It is a bit like the ante litteram version of the complex equivalence that NLP talks about and that we have already dealt with previously (regarding the equation State = Family). In fact, both a company and a sovereign state have a year-end balance sheet and are required to draw up budgets and balance sheets. However, it cannot be inferred from this common property that a State is tout court comparable to a company.

The first, in fact, is made up of a community of citizens rooted in a territory and expressing, through free elections (where organized according to democratic criteria) a government endowed with imperial powers. Its ultimate goal is not to make profits, but to provide for the safety and well-being of its inhabitants. The company, or the SpA, on the other hand, is a company destined for the production or trade of goods or services with the specific objective of grinding profits. Well, from the false analogy between state and company, Berlusconi's fans (and many of the Italians who, even with less enthusiasm, nevertheless trusted him) drew the following conclusion: if Berlusconi has done well as an entrepreneur, he can only succeed as a politic. In fact, managing a state is like managing a company.

The false analogy in a pro-European key, however, has always consisted in equating global geopolitical relations with a sort of arena in which warlike teams clash, one against the other armed, a sort of universal Champions League in which the participants they are not football teams, but sovereign nations, or presumed such.

What do these two situations have in common (geopolitical relations and football competition)? What is the property shared by both that can trigger the mechanism of analogy? For example, both in the case of the Champions Cup and in the case of international political and commercial relations, competitors are confronted. In the first hypothesis, we will have Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, Juventus, etc. In the second case, we will have the USA, China, Russia, Italy, France, etc. So far, the analogy runs.

So when does it turn false and turn into a dialectical trap? In the instant in which we pretend to overestimate (inflating it beyond measure) this partial analogy between two completely different sectors, such as the sporting one of top-level football and the international political and commercial one.

In fact, while the first is conceived and calibrated, by natural competitive vocation, on the reciprocal and continuous competition between participants called to challenge each other in "to the death" match (with the aim of winning a coveted trophy), the second instead concerns entities eminently "Politics" such as nation states. The ultimate goal of which should certainly not be to compete with other states to win a "game", but rather to cooperate to guarantee peace and justice in the world. In short, the exact opposite. And this, at least, as long as we reason in a logic of peaceful democracy inspired by the essential respect for fundamental human rights. That is, according to the "philosophy" to which, until proven otherwise, the Constitution of the Italian Republic refers.

Therefore, the analogy between states and soccer teams is fallacious. Yet it forms the basis of a great many pro-European arguments. They start from the assumption that the very partial analogy in question justifies an unlimited extension of the logics, strategies, and competitive techniques to the sphere of international politics.

An example above all concerns the potential winners of a very important tournament, let's say the Champions League. At the beginning of the football season, the teams able to aspire to the most prestigious goal of our continent: the cup with big ears can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And why does this happen? Because the strongest win, those with the most resources, the clubs richest in history, tradition and above all in money, able to attract the sights of the emirs or some foreign fund with unlimited (financial) firepower or some multinational or a Chinese business chain, etc.

Try to think how many times you have heard the concept that the European Union is indispensable, if nothing else and above all, because otherwise we would end up crushed by global competition. Or that Italy is destined to succumb if it does not adapt to the changed geopolitical conditions and the dynamics of transnational trade. Or, again, that a strong, cohesive and united European pole is indispensable to face the emerging "challenges" of the new giants such as China, India, Brazil, Russia. Either Europe unites or it will be swallowed up, bought, invaded and so on and so forth. Obviously, this fallacy lends itself to being used in conjunction with other fallacies that we will examine later as the fallacy ad metum.

However, it also works great on its own. It has a primordial evocative power. Man is a warlike animal by nature – the philosopher Thomas Hobbes taught – and the history of humanity does not seem to provide many examples capable of contradicting this self-evident truth: homo homini lupus, that is, man is a wolf for his similar. Furthermore, this fallacy also urges the basic instinct for competition and supremacy inherent in all sportsmen in the world, practitioners or mere spectators. We always compete to win, despite De Coubertin's self-consoling slogan according to which the important thing is to win and not participate. For all these reasons, the fallacy of the false competitive analogy is taken so directly and effectively. So direct and so effective as to convince, as we have already said, both the cultured and the ignorant.

Times have changed, gentlemen, they tell us: in the world economy of the 21st century, either we adapt or we are overwhelmed. Therefore, it is better for the peoples and nations of Europe to unify – but what do I say, to cement themselves! – as soon as possible to avoid being shredded by the Chinese, the Indians, the Americans and so on.

Now that we have clarified what this sophism consists of, it will be appropriate to reflect on the possible contraindications to it, on the logical and dialectical antidotes capable of weakening its scope. I would say there are basically three:

. 1) the simplest one we have already made explicit: the false analogy is a fallacy precisely because it is false, because the analogy between sports teams and free and democratic nations is based on very few common properties and does not allow further, and undue, extensions.

. 2) The fallacy is denied by history and news. Even in the contemporary economy and in the globalized world there are countless examples of countries that live, indeed even thrive, without being inserted within some colossal state or supra-state entity with the dimensions of an empire. Think of the States, albeit of considerable size, foreign to the European Union (in short, we are not talking about micro realities such as San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Vatican City or Andorra): in addition to the United Kingdom, officially exited from the EU, the Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro. But that's not enough: a lot of countries belonging to the European Union do not have the euro: Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Sweden, Denmark.

. 3) Finally, the last point, the most important: the false analogy is also atrociously contradictory with respect to the alleged founding "values" heralded to the four winds and propagated extensively by pro-Europeanists to the bitter end. This fallacy presupposes, in fact, that the world is a battlefield where the only conceivable relationship between peoples is that of ruthless competition. Mors tua vita mea, the ancients said. The exact opposite of the principles of peace, cooperation and democracy which, according to its champions, would inspire the EU.

This fallacy is sometimes declined in a slightly different way: since the market dominates unchallenged on a planetary level and therefore inevitably leads to increasingly stronger mergers of economic-corporate-financial "realities", then – by analogy – the States must also unite and federate in supra-national realities if they want to compete.

But even in this case, the sophism is "broken" from the beginning: a state is not a company and, as such, precisely because it is the undisputed sovereign over its territory, it can impose laws on anyone who transits, including multinationals. To the point of nationalizing, if needed, entire sectors of the country's industrial and energy sectors. In the case of Italy, we even have an extraordinary article of the Constitution, 43, totally outstanding to date, that is, never completed, but still in force, which reads like this:

"For purposes of general utility, the law may originally reserve or transfer, by expropriation and subject to compensation, to the State, to public bodies or to communities of workers or users, certain companies or categories of companies, which refer to essential public services or sources of energy or monopoly situations and are of a pre-eminent general interest ».

Yet the false analogy is often used by pro-Europeans all in one piece. Let's take a recent interview granted by Massimo D'Alema to «Il Foglio» where the unforgettable "Baffino" literally says:

"In a world dominated by the confrontation between the United States and China, individual European countries are destined to have no weight, so the answer to the question of sovereignty I mentioned at the beginning cannot be a return to nationalisms but is instead the affirmation of a European sovereignty ”.

When Napoleon occupied half of Europe – and the same applies to any other previous and subsequent conqueror – he used the same fallacious justification with those who persisted in not understanding his excellent "reasons": it was necessary to replace the sovereignty of the subjugated states with a new enlarged sovereignty ( to be precise, in the case of the Corsican general: a “French” sovereignty).

Another unsurpassed example of this sophism is the following incipit of an article published in "Micromega" by William Mitchel and Thomas Fazi on November 13, 2017 with which the authors ironically "made the verse" in a certain "corrupt" way of reasoning typical of pro-European fanatics and above all, and paradoxically, of the modern continental left:

«Let's put it as it is: in today's increasingly complex and interdependent international economy, national sovereignty has become irrelevant. Growing economic globalization has made individual states increasingly powerless in the face of market forces. The internationalization of finance and the growing power of multinationals have eroded the ability of individual states to autonomously pursue social and economic policies – in particular of a progressive-redistributive nature – and to ensure prosperity for their peoples. Therefore, the only hope of achieving any significant change is for countries to "pool" their sovereignty and transfer it to supranational institutions (such as the European Union) that are large and powerful enough to make their voices heard, thereby regaining at the supranational level, the sovereignty lost at the national level. In other words, to preserve their "real" sovereignty, states must limit their formal sovereignty ».

In reality, states do not need to come together so as to be "large and powerful enough to make their voices heard, thus regaining sovereignty lost at the national level at the supranational level."

And this for the simple fact that state sovereignty either belongs to the state or it is not. But even here the false analogy prevails and its development, in simple terms, is the following: since the name of a company, even a famous one, let's even put the "Alfa Romeo", it continues to exist even if Alfa Romeo was eaten by Fiat and then perhaps by FCA (simply, its management is transferred to a higher level of the corporate hierarchy), then Italy also continues to exist even if it is "eaten" by the United States of Europe; simply, Italian sovereignty is exercised in the United States of Europe.

Except that, in this case, we would not already have a sovereignty of the Italian state, but a sovereignty over the Italian state by a third entity.

Sovereignty is not like a car factory brand, which can be transferred from one capitalist to another without the risk of discoloration. Rather, it is the quintessence of the identity of a civic community of citizens who recognize themselves in a symbolic, traditional, linguistic and value heritage.

A state is a state and, in its own territory, it does and decides what it wants and what it believes. Switzerland and Norway are there to prove it, but it would not even be necessary to disturb these examples if there were not the false analogy in question to pollute our correct way of thinking.

Therefore, it is by no means true that globalization has rendered individual states powerless towards the forces of capital. If anything, globalization makes those who abdicate their sovereignty over capital and the economy impotent. And this is even more true where the supranational reality (which de-sovereigns, that is, drains the autonomous independence of a nation) is something analogous to the EU. That is, an organization born not to defend sovereign states, but rather to render them powerless in the face of the free deployment of the forces of trans-national capital.

We must free ourselves from this pseudo-analogy if we do not want to fall victim to a "performance anxiety". According to which, the only acceptable logic in relations between peoples would be that of the market: where the good export at breakneck speed and are therefore virtuous; the others, on the other hand, the “scarce” ones, are forced to import so as to get into debt and risk default. Let us not forget that the frenzy of predatory capitalism is at the root of phenomena such as colonialism and imperialism and, ultimately, the carnage of the short century.

Francesco Carraro

www.francescocarraro.com