Europe rests on Monti’s shoulders

by Philip Stephens

Financial Times
January 26, 2012

Italy is back. Germany’s Angela Merkel sits at the top of Europe’s power list. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy can lay claim to be the continent’s most energetic leader. Mario Monti is its most interesting. After an absence lasting a couple of decades Italy has returned to the stage. Mr Monti’s fate may turn out to be Europe’s.

The other day the White House said that Italy’s prime minister would soon meet Barack Obama. To describe its announcement as effusive would be an understatement. Mr Monti and the president would discuss “the comprehensive steps the Italian government is taking to restore market confidence and reinvigorate growth through structural reform, as well as the prospect of an expansion of Europe’s financial firewall”. Translate and you get: “Mr Obama is behind Mr Monti all the way – including when he puts pressure on Ms Merkel.”

There was a time when Italy had something to say in Europe. The Italians championed the great integrationist leap of the 1980s. The Milan summit in 1985 gave the push for the single market. Five years later a meeting in Rome set the timetable for the euro. This provided the occasion, incidentally, for the toppling of Margaret Thatcher: her “No, No, No” to the single currency stirred a Tory rebellion. Strange as it seems, British Conservatives were once mostly pro-Europeans.

The era of Silvio Berlusconi put an end to Italian influence. Though always assured of a warm welcome from Vladimir Putin, Mr Berlusconi was shunned by his European Union peers – seen by turns as a cause of irritation and embarrassment. Mr Monti, a serious-minded academic with a serious plan, is different in every dimension. Mr Berlusconi made crude jokes about Ms Merkel’s appearance. Mr Monti talks to her about economics.

More