Today we launch a new column dedicated to political analysis, a space devoted to examining and debating the key issues shaping current affairs in San Marino. Accompanying us on this journey will be contributions from Sara Conti, a member of Repubblica Futura, who will offer her perspective on the questions at the heart of the country’s political and institutional debate.
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There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the way the issue of sovereignty is sometimes framed: the idea that it can only be preserved by keeping one’s distance from others, avoiding obligations, and limiting relations with larger entities than our own.
But sovereignty, especially in the contemporary world, is not measured solely by the formal freedom to decide. It is also measured by the concrete capacity to shape one’s own future.
This is a reflection that closely concerns San Marino, a small Republic that has built its thousand-year history on freedom, independence, and the ability to safeguard its own institutions and traditions.
It is precisely this history that should help us look with confidence at the new season of relations with the European Union.
The Association Agreement does not represent a renunciation of our sovereignty, but rather its evolution. For a small state, the chance to enter the European single market — a space of more than 450 million citizens — means enormously expanding its economic, commercial and social prospects.
It means offering businesses new opportunities, giving younger generations greater possibilities, and equipping the country with tools better suited to facing the challenges of an increasingly interconnected economy.
Moreover, in a world where major economic, technological and regulatory decisions are increasingly made in supranational settings, believing one can defend one’s sovereignty by remaining on the sidelines risks being an illusion.
The true strength of a state lies not only in being able to decide autonomously, but also in being able to take part in the processes that shape the future of communities (to borrow a well-known phrase: it’s better to have a seat at the table than to be on the menu!).
Association with Europe offers us exactly this possibility: to build a stable and structured relationship with European institutions, to take part in a system of shared rules, and to assert the specificities and interests of the Republic within a context where decisions are made that will also affect our everyday lives.
Naturally, integration brings responsibilities, adjustments, and the need to engage with common rules. It would not be honest to deny this.
But it is precisely in the ability to face these changes, while keeping firm one’s own institutional and identity-based peculiarities, that the maturity of a state is measured.
Our identity is not a heritage to be protected through inertia, but a wealth we can carry out into the world, making it known and recognised even beyond our borders.
Being Sammarinese and feeling European are not opposing conditions: they belong to two dimensions that can coexist and reinforce one another.
For a liberal, pro-European political culture — one to which I firmly belong — the Association Agreement therefore represents a fundamental milestone: not the abandonment of who we are, but the chance to give new life to the values on which the Republic was founded and which it has preserved through the centuries.
San Marino has managed to make its way through history without losing its freedom. Today it has the opportunity to show that this freedom is not afraid to open up, to engage, and to grow.
Because sovereignty is not only about preserving who we are, but about having the strength and vision to decide what we want to become.
