L’INTERVENTO DI MELONI AL VERTICE DELLA COMUNITÀ POLITICA EUROPEA

Dear Colleagues, good morning everyone.

Let me say thanks to Edi for his warm hospitality at this Summit, and also for making me feel very young again with that video he showed at the inauguration. I want also to congratulate Edi for his – absolutely unexpected – re-election as the leader here of the Albanian Government. I’m happy that Europe will continue to count on his spirit and his determination.

Albania is hosting the European Political Community for the first time. I value it as particularly significant, not only for this Nation, but for all of us. I have always considered the European identity as fact, established by history even before geography, a concept harder to enclose in a definition than to understand by impulse.

Albania is, of course, Europe – just like Italy or Serbia or Norway, regardless of whether they are part of this or that organisation. That is why it always makes me smile when someone attempts to claim the right to decide who is European and who is not. Among the States that are around this table today, several have decided not to join the EU, others aspire to be part of it; both are no less European than the 27 EU Member States.

Yet, the EU is to date the soundest common home to achieve what I like to call the “European reunification”, attained amongst peoples who may differ from one another and yet they are part of one whole, like the different fingers of a hand. Peoples who have fought each other over the centuries, yet are in reality one single people.

Also for this reason, being here today means taking a step forward in the historic process of reunifying Europe. Because, if we really want to build “a new Europe, in a new world”, we cannot imagine doing so without the Western Balkans, without their peoples, without their identities and historical backgrounds.

Western Balkans do not lie on Europe’s fringes or beyond our Continent. They are in the very heart of our Continent; they are the bridge region between the East and the West, between what Saint John Paul II liked to call the “two lungs” of Europe.

For this reason, Italy is committed, in Brussels, to asserting a strategic approach to the Western Balkans, to take into due account – despite the complex challenges posed by the region – the need to provide these countries with a clear EU integration perspective. Of course, enlargement involves new challenges, but I am convinced that the European integration of the Western Balkans – as well as towards the East – is also a strategic investment on Europe’s own security, even more so in light of what is happening on our borders.

We live in an extremely interconnected world, and our destinies’ interdependence is fact. What happens on Europe’s Eastern borders is connected to what happens on its Mediterranean borders, and vice versa. Everything is interlinked. The wound that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has inflicted on the rules-based international system still produces destabilising effects well beyond the war borders. And, like a domino, this contributes to reigniting, or detonating, other crisis hotbeds. We have witnessed this in the Middle East, and not only there.

That is why we will continue to stand by Ukraine, and to strive for this war to immediately come to an end, because our security and freedom depend on restoring the force of law over the law of the strongest.

And speaking of Europe and freedom, I believe there is nothing more European than a people willing to risk everything to defend its own freedom and independence. Every day the heroism and tenacity of the Ukrainian people remind us what Europe is and what the deepest aspect of our common identity is: freedom.

We defend our freedom. And we want peace. Volodymyr and the Ukrainian people want peace, and we newly witnessed it yesterday. The world saw who was really willing to sit at a negotiating table, and who was not. And this shows, also with respect to certain propaganda, who looks for peace and who doesn’t.

At the same time, we must not interpret what happened yesterday as a setback, and throw in the towel. Instead, we must insist with determination to finally achieve an unconditional ceasefire and a true peace agreement with Ukraine.

However, building “a new Europe in a new world”, as advocated by this session, means starting from our very foundations and reflecting on who we are. None of us is interested in strengthening any form of union amongst European States, if not for protecting what we are and what we want to continue to be in the coming decades and centuries in such a fast-changing world.

Because, if Europe sometimes proves unable to face the great challenges, it is no one else’s fault. It is our responsibility, and it is up to us to choose whether to go along a decline, or – instead – fight it. And if we decide to fight it, first of all we need to regain awareness, which is mainly awareness of who we are; of what the European civilisation is; of the great achievements it has accomplished across the history of humankind.

A synthesis of values resulting from the encounter between Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christian humanism. A synthesis of values that allowed European civilisation to conceive a world in which the person is central, life is sacred, and human beings are free and equal. A civilisation that respects the identities of others without denying its own, and that builds peace where instead others seed destruction. We are this, we are this before everything, and I think we have first of all to remember it every day, if we want to build a Europe up to the role received from history.

Thank you.