From Salamanca, Mattarella's warning: "Europe must say no to the law of the strongest"

The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, during a lectio magistralis at the University of Salamanca, outlined a worrying picture of the current international order, characterized by a perpetual instability and the multiplication of crisis fronts. In the face of the recession of the multilateral cooperative model, increasingly supplanted by a contractual vision based on mere competition and the law of the strongest, the Head of State urged Europe to take on its own historical and political responsibilities. The European continent, bolstered by a thought developed over the centuries to which Italy and Spain have greatly contributed, must have the courage to oppose the expansion of conflicts and propose a concrete alternative vision, equipped with new and flexible tools for action.

At the foundation of this European relaunch, according to the President, must be the foundational values of human dignity and freedom, principles deeply shared with the other side of the Atlantic. Mattarella recalled in this regard the famous speech of the "four freedoms" delivered by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in January 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The latter point, Mattarella emphasized while quoting Roosevelt, translates globally into the necessity for a reduction of armaments to a level that would prevent any physical aggression between nations, a goal that today appears dramatically at risk.

The President of the Republic has indeed denounced a serious and dangerous regression of the multilateral arms control system, an architecture painstakingly built during the Cold War and consolidated after the fall of the Soviet Union. The continuous suspensions, withdrawals, and failures to renew treaties are causing not only a loss of transparency and mutual trust, but a true transformation of the international legal regime that undermines strategic predictability and nullifies the prevention of military escalations. According to Mattarella, the current push to destroy the old balances does not stem from the desire to build a more effective global system, but from the dangerous attempt to eliminate limits on state sovereignty, paving the way for the hegemonic aspirations of the wealthiest and most armed countries at the expense of the prohibition of the use of force, the sovereign equality of states, and the promotion of human rights.