In 1861 some revolutionaries and Garibaldi with his thousand young men conquered the Kingdom delle due Sicilie – later called Southern Italy – and delivered it to Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Piemonte and Sardegna. Prominent Italians argued that states which for centuries had separate political and administrative arrangements, and were only united by a common culture, shared however by small elites, should adopt the political structure of a federal state. The Piemonte’s ruling class and the king, who had reluctantly accepted Garibaldi’s gift, opted instead for a centralised state: in little more than a year, laws, regulations and the bureaucrats of Piemonte were transferred to Southern Italy.

Their politicians and bureaucrats knew little of their new subjects, not even the language. Their credo was laissez faire and the survival of the fittest.

In many economic fields, North and South were then on par; but capital, entrepreneurs and skilled people moved to the North and the South soon lagged badly behind. Then tens of millions of southerners migrated to North Europe, the US and Australia. This was a tremendous loss of talent from which the South never recovered. In 1947 regions were created with the only real objective of counteracting separatist movements but the political caste remained as centralised as ever; the regions became another layer of bureaucracy.

Fast forward to the present time and replace Piemonte with Germany and other little north Europe states. The picture is amazingly similar. History does repeat itself and not only in the case in point. They already like to call us “the Med club”. They find Europe in its present state quite satisfactory: a common market with secretaries sitting in Brussels at their orders and an inactive European Parliament. The Germans and their allies have the best of all worlds: they dominate the European market, cash in fat agricultural subsidies and in exchange contribute reprimands, dubious economic recipes, foreign policy directives and some handouts.

I believe that the European Parliament should call for a Constitutional Convention with the object of taking the European unification to its natural conclusion, a federal state which should ensure that every state of the federation has its fair share of industries and general economic development. The US Constitution is an egregious example to imitate.

Otherwise, the dominant states will rule over a large section of Europeans increasingly poor, therefore, different, therefore inferior.

Emigration has already resumed.