“There can be no future for Italy outside the Euro”

 

Mr. Marinelli:  “Let’s talk about business and trade.  Trade with Italy is something that San Francisco Italians probably don’t even think about.  A hundred and sixty years ago, it was the number one reason why Italians came here.  As you no doubt know, San Francisco Italians are not the same as any other Italians in the United States.  They came here a full generation before the Risorgimento when southern Italians came to the eastern and southern shores of the United States in droves.  

 

The Italians that came to San Francisco, however, were primarily northern Italians, they were mostly Genoese merchants, they had money in their pockets, and they understood business.  They came here to start businesses in San Francisco.  It wasn’t until twenty-five years later that all the other Italians started arriving.  So this is an Italian community based on business from the beginning—something San Francisco Italians may have forgotten.  How do you as Consul General intend to help San Francisco Italians once again understand the importance of trade with Italy?”

 

Mr. Battocchi:  “I think that if we market the attractive aspects of our economy, our technology and of our modern life, things will happen.  We have to market our country better.  There are very attractive aspects: let’s start with the easy ones.  Consumer goods:  Italy is still a large manufacturer of consumer goods.  We’re talking about fashion, we’re talking about design, products.  We have to do more to promote our brands and the awareness of the quality of Italian products.  Then there are capital goods and manufacturing goods, investment goods like machinery.  Italy is the third largest [manufacturer] in the world after Germany and Japan.  Not many people know, though.  This is something that is kind of a hidden treasure.  We have to make people aware of how much Italian machinery is part of economic growth everywhere else in the world. 

 

“Then we have High Tech.  This is even more difficult to explain, because generally when you think of High Tech, you don’t think of Italy.  And yet, we have very important districts and niches of High Tech in Italy that should be explained, and we want to do that on Italian Innovation Day in March. There is a revival of interest for High Tech in Italy at the moment, in some parts of the country.  Also, it’s a new generational factor.  Many young people are now betting on their abilities to generate new technological ideas.  We have channels that allow us to communicate between Silicon Valley and Italy.  I can mention the Mind The Bridge Foundation, BAIA itself, M31, and then different professionals that are already working in terms of, for example, promoting private equity investment from California to Italy.  There are lots of activities going on.  Some of it is not well marketed, I think.  Also, our efforts should be to make people aware of what is happening.  And once the awareness is there, I think also, there is a full recognition and acknowledgement of what is there, it will be easier, there will be a snowball effect.  Things can flow much more easily.”

 

Mr. Marinelli:  “Back in 2003, you were a graduate student at Princeton working on your Master’s degree, and you wrote a paper on the Euro, and how you felt it was the future of Europe.  Here we are many years later, and people are starting to doubt that.  You spoke a week or two ago in Berkeley at the International House were you re-affirmed that the Euro is the future of Europe, and that there’s no going back.  Italian Americans are beginning to doubt that—mainly because of what they hear in the media.  They’re afraid that the Euro will not be the currency of the future, and that there will not be centralized banking in Europe.  That makes people nervous.  How do you address that?”

 

Mr. Battocchi: “I think that Europe is an existential choice for Italy.  There can be no future for Italy outside the Euro.  And the same can be said about other continental European countries like Germany, France, and Spain.  This crisis is a crisis of growth.  Europe doesn’t proceed linearly—in a linear way—but goes with moments of acceleration and slowing down, crisis and new acceleration.  Probably the crisis has now shown that we do not only need a central bank, which already exists.  We have a federal central bank, completely independent and making monetary policy decisions autonomously from governments.  

But also, we need forms of centralized federal fiscal policy decisions.  

 

This is tougher to achieve, but probably it’s one of the results coming out of this crisis.  So to our American friends we say, remember that Europe is existential for all of us, and we shouldn’t mistake a growth crisis—a crisis in the path of growth—with a failure crisis.  This is not the case.  In recent months we have seen that the political leadership has acted—as it should have—to reassure the markets that all steps will be taken to make the Euro stronger and not weaker in this crisis.”

 

Mr. Marinelli:  “So you are as optimistic about the future of the Euro as you were back in 2003?”

 

Mr. Battocchi:  “In 2003, I wrote about how Italy was part of the European Union from the very beginning and it was not easy, but then it happened, and that it was a good decision for Italy to be a part of the hard core of the European countries.  Still today, I think that things are not necessarily easy.  This is a wonderful experiment that Europe is making.  It is not by chance that the Nobel Prize organizers awarded the European Union with the Nobel Prize for Peace, and we have to take this into consideration.  Things are not easy, but to some extent, they are existential, and therefore inevitable.  It just depends on how quickly we can learn from our mistakes.”

 

Next week, we will continue our interview with Consul General Battocchi as he discusses Italian culture and language, how we can battle Italian stereotypes, and his thoughts about expanding the Italian community in the San Francisco Bay Area.