WATCH THE VIDEO MESSAGE : Ambassador Massari on the occasion of the Italian National Day
TEXT
*Courtesy Translation from the Italian language to English
On the anniversary of the founding of the Italian Republic and in sending my best wishes to all my fellow Italians, now more than ever, I feel compelled to quote the article 11 of the Italian Constitution:
“Italy repudiates war as a means to hurt other peoples’ freedom and to settle international disputes”.
The unjustified aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine is a flagrant violation of this principle and challenges the concept of an international system based on rules, including the UN Charter above all. Article 2 from the Charter requires that all the UN Member States refrain from the use of force that might undermine the territorial integrity or political independence of another State.
It is exactly to defend the UN Charter’s tenets that three months ago, on March 2, 141 UN Member States voted in favor of the historical General Assembly’s Resolution, with only five votes against out of 193 states. This resolution was passed to deplore the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to demand the withdrawal of the army from the Ukrainian territory, and to urge a diplomatic settlement.
The international order founded on the compliance by all states with the UN Charter and with all the main international conventions is the one and only scenario where states and powers with different interests can live together and find opportunities for cooperation based on the multilateralism principle, despite the normal competition among them.
This cooperation is necessary today more than ever to tackle shared global challenges, ranging from climate change, to pandemics, worsening and increasingly disruptive economic and social inequalities between the Global North and Global South, migrants’ flows, nuclear arms’ proliferation and terrorism. These shared challenges inform the 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed in 2015 in the 2030 Agenda, but the path for their realization is, unfortunately, still very long.
For multilateralism to become reality and not to be just empty words we need political will in the first place, then, all states and governments must take on their responsibility.
Multilateralism needs a mindful and growing allocation of financial and human resources that reflects the size of the challenges we are facing. Multilateralism costs money. Italy and the EU are and must remain on the front line to invest in and defend the order based on rules and on the achievement of “global commons”. We need to realize that the alternative to this order is war, destructive competition, growing impoverishment and destruction of our planet, depletion of its resources, and annihilation of its human values.
