13.02.2023 Forum of the Consular Corps "Europe, war and the cost of freedom"

The Forum of the Consular Corps "Europe, war and the cost of freedom" has been held in Venice on Monday 13 February 2023 at 4.30 pm by the Consular Corps of Venice and the Veneto in collaboration with the Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Department of Linguistic and Comparative Cultural Studies, PISE), The Home of the Human Safety Net and the Europe Direct Office of the Municipality of Venice.

The Forum has been held in the headquarters of The Home of the Human Safety Net at the Procuratie Vecchie, Piazza San Marco 128, Venice. Free admission to citizenship until all available places are exhausted.

The meeting, dedicated to students and citizens, has been moderated by Professor Stéphanie Novak, Ca' Foscari University of Venice and saw the intervention of Professor Vittorio Emanuele Parsi professor of the Catholic University of Milan, International Relations in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and editorialist of "Il Messaggero".

After almost eighty years, war has reappeared on the Old Continent. The wicked aggression that Vladimir Putin unleashed against Ukraine on 24 February 2022 broke decades of peace and caused Europe to return to what it had always been for centuries until the end of the Second World War: 'the place of war'. How could such a disaster happen in the 'civilized Europe'? In the place that represented a pillar of that liberal order that transformed the international system by gathering around it a family of fraternal democracies and weaving a dense web of institutions and treaties guaranteeing cooperation and peace? If peace, therefore, was broken precisely where the conditions for maintaining it were the best possible, what hope is left to prevent force from starting to be the only 'rule of the world' again? The answer to this question passes through the awareness that the possibility of excluding war as a prospect derives precisely from the credibility and survival of that liberal order that Putin's war has put under attack: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in fact not only a declaration of deadly hostility towards that country, but it is also an outright aggression against the democratic West and the principles and rules on which it is founded. Rethinking the war, and its place in contemporary European political culture, after Ukraine is the only way not to find yourself faced with a broken design again without any strategy to be able to rebuild it on more solid and more universal foundations. Because if there is one thing that the fierce resistance of the Ukrainian people has taught us, it is that one must never give up, that the defense of one's freedom has a cost but it is the prerequisite for pursuing every dream, every hope, every goal, that things worth living for are the same things worth dying for.

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For more informations:

EUROPE DIRECT/EURODESK DEL COMUNE DI VENEZIA