Travaglio and Tremonti united by the exploitation of Iceland

Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, coined the eponymous law in the 1960s, which states: “If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” For Giulio Tremonti and Marco Travaglio, Maslow’s law is an oversimplification because, as well as having only a hammer, the two also have just one fixed obsession: Mario Draghi and Ukraine, respectively.

They are held responsible for everything that is wrong, and therefore crushing them is presented as the solution to every problem. It is no coincidence that both Tremonti and Travaglio can clearly see their two thorns all the way to Iceland – namely, in the referendum that rejected the reopening of negotiations for the island’s accession to the European Union. 

This is how Tremonti’s interviews work. He says that Europe has replaced its original values with ‘market fundamentalism’; he claims that he predicted everything that is now going wrong in an interview or a book at least twenty years ago; he quotes a few philosophers; he recalls events and figures from the Middle Ages to the Congress of Vienna; he points out that he was the first to propose Eurobonds; and, finally, he accuses Mario Draghi of something (usually the topic of the day). The interview he gave yesterday to Il Sole 24 Ore follows this script to the letter. The topic was, in fact, the Icelandic referendum. For Tremonti, the rejection stemmed from Europe’s obsession with ‘competitiveness’: “The gravest mistake lies in having set up a market-driven, dogmatic and fundamentalist scheme, extended to Arctic fisheries.” And so the Icelanders refused to submit to European rules on the fishing industry, which accounts for around 40 per cent of the island’s exports. And what does Mario Draghi have to do with it? Nothing, in everyone’s eyes. But Tremonti sees a nail and hammers away at it, taking his newly formed think tank, the Rhine Group, as a symbol of this bureaucratic Europe: “I would simply point out that the Rhine mysteriously originates in Switzerland and recall that Switzerland is a place where few things are born and many things die,” says the former Minister for the Economy cryptically, adding that he would start with the “Danube”.

This line of reasoning is untenable. In fact, the reality is the exact opposite of what Tremonti is saying. Iceland is already part of the European single market and the Schengen Area, and it is doing just fine: Icelanders are happy with the free movement of goods and people, but not with excessive regulation. Europe’s problem, at least in this case, is therefore not ‘market fundamentalism’ but its opposite: excessive bureaucracy. And Mario Draghi himself, first with the Competitiveness Report and now with the Rhine Group, has set as the Union’s primary objective the removal of barriers and bureaucracy that hinder innovation and development.

For Travaglio, however, the problem is clearly Ukraine. According to the editor-in-chief of *Il Fatto*, Icelanders do not like the fact that “those lucky enough to be part of the EU are constantly pressured to give money and weapons to Ukraine and are sanctioned if they do not”. For Travaglio, Iceland feels threatened by the “insane warmongering and Russophobic frenzy that is turning the EU into a branch of NATO”. Here too, reality suggests the opposite. Firstly, because Iceland is a founding member of NATO, precisely because it fears the threat posed by Russian submarines in the Arctic. And secondly, because Reykjavík has a clearer stance on Russia and Ukraine than many European countries. For example, Iceland has clearly condemned Putin’s invasion, suspended the activities of its embassy in Moscow and joined the European sanctions against Russia, even though it is not part of the EU. Furthermore, it is aligned with Western countries in its support for Ukraine: the island has sent humanitarian aid to Kyiv as well as financial support for security and military defence.

If you keep hammering at the same nails, you’ll end up hammering your own fingers.