Perhaps I have mentioned in previous posts that I am studying Italian. As a gesture in this direction I have taken recently to receiving via email a very useful service, entitled EasyItalianNews.com. This does exactly what you might expect. It distributes regularly news bulletins, read in Italian at a far more amenable pace than is normal with Italian news broadcasts. These cover events not only in Italy, but from all over the world. Because they include coverage of events in parts of the world normally ignored by the British media (such as Latin America) I am finding the service to be useful beyond its function as a means of exercising my knowledge of the language. Tonight I was struck by another reason for following it.
Three of its items tackled issues which were reported in relation to other countries, but which are important problems also in the UK. There was a piece from France dealing with agrarian protests in the face of the sector’s continuing problems. Another reported on the appointment of a commissioner in order to address the problem of rising racial and religious intolerance. The third reported on the threat to Italy’s coastal regions of rising sea levels. As it happens all three of these issues are also matters of current concern in Britain.
The thing that really grabbed my attention was the fact not only that all of these three problems also afflict Britain, but that they could also be addressed more effectively by some kind of coordination both at the level of shared information and action. I am sure that this is not an exhaustive list of questions that could benefit from a coordinated approach. Why on earth are we wasting our time with the totally pointless and damaging preoccupation with the fantasy of national autonomy when what we ought to be doing is engaging actively with other countries across a wider range of common concerns? We live in a lunatic world!