The fact that a thousand people have signed up to a committee to discuss the Association Agreement with the European Union is good news for the Republic: it means that a decision decades in the making has stopped being a matter for insiders only.
Pity that this milestone has, in recent days, been celebrated with the one phrase capable of setting the whole thing on fire: now we start scaring people.
Scaring people is not a political achievement: it’s what you say when you don’t have one yet, and in San Marino, after sixteen hundred years spent up here cultivating the word Libertas, it’s also a rather out-of-place thing to boast about.
Let’s pause on that phrase for a second, because it deserves it.
A movement that has a point says which articles of the Agreement it disagrees with.
A movement that has the numbers says how many they are and what they’re asking for. A movement that presents itself by announcing it intends to instil fear has just explained to the country that its strongest argument is the effect it thinks it can have on others. And this in a Republic where the so-called powers that be bump into each other at the bar and are on first-name terms, no less.
And the beauty of it is that the other side of the table is playing exactly the same game, just with the arrow pointing the other way. Those pushing to sign quickly rarely explain, line by line, what actually changes: instead they wave the spectre of isolation, of the missed train, of the country left behind while the world moves on.
Those pushing not to sign wave the invasion, the sell-out, the end of local trades. Two rival camps accusing each other of psychological terrorism while wielding the very same tool, and neither of them noticing they stopped making an actual argument months ago.
The detail that makes the whole thing unintentionally comic is the calendar.
Four days ago this Republic celebrated over sixteen hundred years of existence around a single word, one written on its coat of arms and no mere ornament: Libertas. And in the Basilica, before the Captains Regent, the concept was laid out without concessions: freedom is demanding, it can sometimes be frightening, but it is the only way to be truly yourself. Note the direction of that sentence.
Freedom can be frightening.
Fear has never set anyone free.
In between lies the whole difference between a grown-up country and a country held by the throat.
Because fear, as a method of communication, has one enormous advantage: it costs almost nothing.
Building an argument requires data, time, rebuttal, and the unpleasant risk of discovering the other side has a point on something. Building an enemy requires a sentence and a half a day of comments. Fear doesn’t ask you to be convinced, it only asks you to stop reasoning too quickly. It works on the citizen, on the entrepreneur, on the civil servant. And it works beautifully on journalists.
And this is where the matter stops being a question of style and becomes a problem of press freedom. In a country of thirty-four thousand inhabitants, where everyone knows everyone and a surname carries as much weight as a résumé, you don’t need to shut down a newspaper to silence it: the climate alone will do.
All it takes is for someone with something to say to run a quick calculation of how many clients, how many relatives, how many offices might remember it, and decide that no, perhaps it’s better to let it go. The most effective censorship ever invented has never needed a decree.
It’s called self-censorship, and it’s free. Whoever boasts of scaring people, whether they realise it or not, is laying claim to a small piece of that same mechanism.
A free press is not one that frightens people.
It’s one that takes fear away: it lines up the facts, distinguishes what is actually written in the text from what someone fears might be written in it, and leaves readers to form their own opinion instead of handing them a ready-made one with a complimentary side of anxiety.
News that lives on alarm is not independent: it depends on the alarm.
And so to the constructive part, the only part that really matters.
If something doesn’t sit right with you, you shouldn’t be afraid of it: you should work to change it, or to build an alternative.
Whoever wants a referendum should call for one because they believe citizens are capable of deciding, not because they fear the text.
Whoever wants the signature should explain it article by article, with real figures on cross-border workers and quotas, not with an apocalypse of isolation. Whoever fears a race to the bottom on competition should bring a written proposal for safeguards, not a post with four hundred comments.
A thousand members is a serious democratic resource: using them to measure how much fear can be generated is the quickest way to waste them.
A country that is doing well — and San Marino, it must be said, is doing well — holds exactly the position of strength needed to afford the luxury of reasoning calmly.
It’s countries on their knees that have to decide in a panic, at night, with their neck on the line. We can read, we can object, we can negotiate and even change our minds — which is a perfectly legal move, and a strangely rare one.
Terror is not a strategy.
It’s just a quick way of not having to explain anything.
And after sixteen hundred years spent up here minding our own business, it would be a mediocre ending to discover that fear is the only thing capable of keeping us together.
