Ask a European politician what the Union is for in the world and you will hear a familiar litany: a united Europe would be stronger, more integrated, and finally able to carry weight in the international arena. Then ask the simple questions. Stronger for whom? Integrated around whose interests? The answers tend to dissolve quickly, because the honest reply is that the costs of European foreign policy land on ordinary households and ordinary firms, while the benefits are hard to find.
Foreign policy used to feel like something happening far away. The last few years ended that illusion. It shows up in energy bills, in factory closures, and in whether a company survives or not. When Brussels and national capitals choose sanctions, confrontations and diplomatic theatre, someone pays. It is almost never the people who made the decision. It is the exporter who loses a market, the family who sees the bill rise, the worker whose employer cannot compete. Socialising the cost of your own choices, making others pay for your mistakes, is not ethical, and it is exactly what the European establishment does as a matter of routine.
The contradictions are hard to miss. We were told that cutting gas flows from Russia, which supplied 45% of EU gas imports in 2021, was a weapon in our hands, one that would hurt them more than us. Yet the same voices insist that Russia sabotaged its own pipeline. Both claims cannot be true at once. It is one more alternative truth, handed from one government to the next, and nobody is asked to account for it. Meanwhile, Hungary refused to join an energy embargo that would have multiplied hardship for its own citizens, and it attracted a €7.34 billion battery investment that creates growth and jobs at home. That country is the one lectured for putting its people first. The question is why that is considered scandalous.
The institutional picture is no more reassuring. The European Parliament cannot legislate on its own initiative and cannot, in practice, remove the executive. Calling that a democracy is generous. The Union is said to speak with one voice, yet it is divided on nearly every issue that matters, which is hardly surprising when national interests differ. Even the person holding the post of EU foreign affairs chief has, in effect, described the role as one that serves no purpose. When the office itself concedes it, citizens are entitled to take it at its word.
There is also the old promise that justified surrendering sovereignty in the first place: the external constraint. The argument was that we were not very good at managing our own finances and economy, so handing authority to those who do it better would be a favour to ourselves. Decades later, we should ask whether the supposedly better managers have delivered. The Union has fought the large internet companies instead of building European champions, leaving us weak and exposed before American and Asian giants. It threatens Russia with sanctions even as the real growth, about 60% of the global total, is in Asia and Europe risks losing its access to it. Countries outside the Union have more room to negotiate targeted tariff reductions and protect their own exporters. Inside, leaders too often serve the interests of other capitals instead of their own citizens.
Italy should know better than anyone. The government that promised a decisive foreign policy has delivered reversals, and reversals have a price. The U-turns on relations with China hurt Italian companies, and the world is full of capable people who notice who keeps their word and who does not. Stepping out of agreements without any reason, then asking exporters to absorb the consequences, is not strategy. It is the same habit of imposing costs on others. The finance minister who is now the foreign minister is not an expert on bond markets or collective action clauses, yet he is asked to pronounce on the new MES. The citizen has every right to ask a plain question: how would ratifying it improve the economy, the firms and the families of this country?
None of this requires hostility toward other peoples or nations. It requires the opposite: friendship and loyalty to allies should never be confused with an obligation to fight battles that others are perfectly capable of managing themselves. A mature country can be a friend without being a vassal, and can trade with everyone without lecturing anyone.
If voters keep turning to parties that, at least on paper, promise to defend their own citizens and firms rather than those of other countries, where exactly is the surprise? The world turned upside down is the one where that is considered extreme. Europe's role in the world should be measured by one test only: are the people who live here better off? So far, the answer is no, and the invoice keeps arriving.
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