Spain-Italy Dialogue Forum

In a passionate speech in favour of renewed promotion of European integration, Giuliano Amato, ex-President of the Italian Council, spoke of the need to approve the Lisbon Treaty, even making explicit references to negative consequences for Ireland, and to seize the opportunity that the Treaty offers to set up strengthened cooperation to create a new integrating nucleus around countries such as Italy, France and Spain. Amato was speaking at a dinner in Pisa with the participants of the Spain-Italy Dialogue Forum, now in its ninth year. 

The Forum is a meeting between representatives of the highest levels of civil society of both countries, and is organised in Spain by the CIDOB Foundation under the presidency of Narcís Serra, and in Italy by Enrico Letta with the support of AREL (Agenzia Ricerche e Legislazione fondata da Nino Andreatta). On this occasion, the Forum also featured the participation of the foreign affairs ministers of both countries, Miguel Ángel Moratinos and Franco Frattini, as well as the Spanish Minister of Public Administrations Elena Salgado and her Italian counterpart Raffaele Fitto, the Presidents of the region of Tuscany, Claudio Martini, and of the Government of the Balearic Islands, Francesc Antich, and the heads of the main authorities in Pisa. 

The Spanish and Italian foreign affairs ministers expressed their desire for union during these times of economic crisis. Frattini, the Italian minister, said that ‘an end has come to the age of unregulated capitalism and the illegal use of financial instruments; the response should be of a political nature and coordinated at a European level; the problem cannot be faced in the way that Ireland and the United Kingdom have done, without seeking agreement with their other European partners’. Therefore, ‘it is vitally important that politics be globalised to respond to the crisis of the global market’, claimed the Spanish minister Moratinos, ‘and to do so we have to coordinate our actions at a European level, because otherwise not only our economies will suffer, but also those of the southern regions of the world, and the result will be a new migration emergency’. In fact, it was the migration issue, together with those of the crisis of the economy, energy and Mediterranean cooperation that was the central theme of the meeting. During the debate on regions and decentralisation, the minister Salgado linked the results of a recent survey that placed Spain as the leading receiver of immigration out of the 27 Member States with her country's experience of managing internal diversity. Anna Terrón, Secretary for the European Union of the Generalitat of Catalonia, summarised the feelings of the Forum's migrations work group when she pointed to the ‘great need for political discourse to foster coexistence and tolerance’. 

The debate on decentralisation and regions led the President of the Balearic Islands Francesc Antich, to stress the urgent need to revise the present system in which his autonomous community ends up being ‘the worst affected’. The Balearic Islands have also presented their candidacy to host (in their capital, Palma de Mallorca) the 10th Spain-Italy Dialogue Forum. >> See activity