The EU  has maintained its emphasis against state aids, considered as measures which undermine market competition. The approach has however been strongly tested by the law to counter climate warming which the Biden administration passed through the US Congress.

Entitled the Inflation Reduction Act, the law provides for significant state aids in favour of American business when investing in big projects intended to fight back climate warming. They will be extended to US companies only, but including those from Canada.

When the European side protested against this, the American reply basically amounted to “why don’t you do the same for your firms like we’re doing for ours? Nobody is preventing you from doing so”.

Given the machinery it developed over the years to monitor and eliminate state aids, it is not such an easy task for the EU to change tack. But European investors are already envisaging transfering their investment towards the US as they’re afraid that its markets could be totally taken over by American firms, levered by state aid.                         

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Inconvenience

 It does not happen just in Malta. Consider Rue des Halles in Strasbourg, a street that leads to the commercial centre and then to the town centre. The pavement on one side has been closed off for weeks now, so that the building on that side can be demolished and redone. The works being carried out by Bouyges, the big construction group, are sometimes switched off for days on end.

Pedestrians need to either cross to the other side of the street or walk along a centre strip designed for cyclists.

To me this way of doing things, no matter where it happens, has always seemed abusive. Access to a road or pavement is a public good; it forms part of a general endowment that belongs to one and all. When it is denied, the society and citizens suffer “collateral” damages.  This may be justifiable when it happens to accomplish a useful project that brings with it public or private benefits. Still it needs to be implemented with a commitment that obligates the respect of a reasonable timetable for the completion of whatever needs to be done.           

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The Mediterranean

 The political-strategic discourse about the Mediterranean has increasingly come to revolve around the migration issue. The approach by which the Mediterranean had to become a united zone that would serve as a cross road for Europeans, Africans and the peoples of the Near East now gets mentioned (when it is) as if it is just a ritual callsign. The development of new and strong neighbourhood links between the East and West of the Mediterranean has lost all momentum, if one ever existed.

Some say this happened because Europe preferred to concentrate on “its” own unity project that brought together the west and centre of the continent. Others mention how the crisis of 2008-2012 wiped out any real interest in all longstanding  political projects that were not related to its resolution; that Egypt entered into a crisis and then stagnated. Or they point to the Libyan collapse or to how the Palestinian cause got undermined from the inside and the outside...

Indeed, perhaps these reasons taken together as well as others have served to stymie the efforts needed to keep alive the ideal of a political identity for the Mediterranean region.