Italy counts for nothing in Europe, Europe counts for nothing in the world, “the West” is finished. It’s the defeatist mantra that bounces everywhere: talk shows, social media, family chats. It works because it is simple, emotional and above all convenient: if we “don’t count”, then we are not responsible for anything. We can limit ourselves to complaining, waiting, resigning ourselves.

The problem is that this narrative is wrong twice. The first: it confuses the fact that power has changed with the idea that it has disappeared. The second: it exchanges the complexity of the multipolar world with a block fairy tale – “the Brics against us” – where someone wins everything and someone else loses everything. But geopolitics is not a knockout championship.

The Brics, for example, are often evoked as a monolith. In reality they are a heterogeneous container, with divergent interests and agendas that are not always compatible. It is an arena of coordination, not a single power with a strategy and chain of command. And even where China has a long-term plan, it does not mean that “everything else is worth zero”.

Europe, like it or not, remains one of the great poles of the planet: market, rules, currency, industrial capacity, research, infrastructural networks. It is not a detail that millions of companies around the world adapt to European standards to sell in the single market: it is power, even if it does not resemble the power we imagine in films. It is a “silent” power, made up of rules, duties, controls, competition, commercial diplomacy. It doesn’t parade, but shifts behavior and capital.

Italy, within this framework, is not an extra. It matters to the extent that it chooses to stay at the heart of the European game: energy, defence, technology, supply chains, the Mediterranean, Africa, flow management, cultural industry, exports. If, however, he describes himself as “impotent”, he ends up behaving impotently: less investment, less vision, more dependence, more blackmail.

How to really count

Defeatism is not just an error of analysis: it is a political problem. Because it prepares preventive surrender. It transforms every choice – from the energy transition to security, from industrial policies to research – into a useless nuisance: “others decide anyway”. And this is where propaganda, external or internal, really wins: not when it convinces you that the world is bad, but when it convinces you that it’s not worth trying.

There is a more honest question to ask ourselves, then: not “do we matter or not?”, but “what kind of power do we want to exercise?”. Europe has a rare advantage: it can still afford to think in terms of law, alliances, shared rules. But that advantage only exists if it is defended and updated, not if it is turned into an alibi for inaction.

Stopping telling ourselves that we are “zero” is not naive optimism. It’s realism. The world is competitive, yes. Precisely for this reason, the only truly suicidal thing is to convince yourself that you are already defeated.