From the great hall of the University of Salamanca, one of the cradles of European legal thought, Sergio Mattarella launches a warning that sounds like a final warning to international politics. It is not just a lectio magistralis: it is an indictment against what the Head of State defines as a “vis destruens” that is dismantling, piece by piece, the world order built on the rubble of the twentieth century.
The President photographs a disturbing reality: the return to a sort of state of nature among nations, where international law is dismissed as an annoying obstacle. «We are witnessing the delegitimization of the International Courts and their judges, denying the value of international law», denounces Mattarella. The result is an arbitrary “no man’s land”, a regulatory vacuum that becomes the stage for “unjustified raids”, aggressive commercial expansions and the creation of supposed security areas that crush the poorest peoples.
According to Colle, we are not faced with a physiological paradigm shift, but with the deliberate desire to eliminate the limits to state sovereignty to allow the “richer and better armed” powers to exercise unbridled hegemony.
From Ukraine to the Middle East: aggression as the norm
The heart of Mattarella’s speech touches on the open wounds of contemporary conflicts. The Head of State draws a clear line that unites the Russian invasion with the most recent crises: Russian aggression in Ukraine has validated the idea that force can be “regularly practiced” in relations between states. The Middle East: from the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 to the escalation involving Iran and Lebanon today, an “arc of crisis” has been created with no apparent outcome.
In this scenario, the three pillars of modern civilization – prohibition of the use of force, sovereign equality of states and human rights – seem to falter under the blows of a purely contractualist vision of foreign policy.
The role of Europe: the duty to say “No”
Faced with the “recession of the cooperative model”, Mattarella assigns the European Union a precise and non-delegable mission. It is not just about mediating, but about actively opposing a moral and legal decline. “It’s up to Europe to know how to say no,” urges the President. A firm “no” to the multiplication of crisis fronts and to the claim that brute force can replace the shared norm. The message from Salamanca is clear: if Europe abdicates its role as guardian of the law, the world will definitively slide into an era of global instability where only missiles, drones and nuclear weapons will decide.