Geopolitics is reshaping the future of energy in Italia
The war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East have forced the country to increase its electricity generation and reduce its dependence on foreign markets. The answer may lie in next-generation nuclear power
by Paolo Di Carlo
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‘Geopolitics’. Not a day goes by without this term featuring in everyone’s lives. It is often discussed rather casually; yet the concept is not always clear. Geopolitics is essentially concerned with the study of the state within its geographical context, in an attempt to understand both the foundations of a state’s power and the nature of interactions between different states.
The key to approaching this subject lies precisely in understanding what makes a state powerful. Several factors contribute to this outcome, and the starting point is the observation of the world from the perspective of the country one intends to make ‘powerful’. No state is the same as another: the differences are geographical (topography and hydrography, access to the sea, climate, territorial extent, shape of the country), political (forms of government, ethnic groups, religion, demographics) and economic (availability of raw materials, sectoral development, energy capacity).
The end of the bipolar world
In recent decades, following the collapse of the bipolar world order – which had been shaped by the existence of the two blocs that had divided the world’s spheres of influence between them, namely the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Warsaw Pact (1989), a mistaken belief has spread in the West that history had come to an end and that, with the end of the Soviet Union’s socio-political and economic experiment, all nations would adopt lifestyles similar to our own, with the assurance that trade and free trade in goods would be sufficient to ensure equilibrium.
Today we realise that this is not the case. There has been no shortage of financial crises over the first 25 years of the new century, but for at least the last twelve years Europe has been facing difficulties spanning a range of issues: foremost among these is the demographic decline of populations, accompanied by a large influx of migrants from Asia and, above all, from Africa. The economies of individual countries are struggling to provide guarantees of stability and, just when it seemed that the Old Continent was tentatively beginning to recover, Western democracies have been put to the test once again.
The importance of procurement
For almost five years now, in fact, the conditions that guaranteed the well-being of citizens in France, Germany and Italia have ceased to exist. The escalation began with the outbreak of a war between Russia and Ukraine; this was followed by the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the consequences of the clash between the United States and Iran, namely the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to the east of the Arabian Peninsula and, to the west, instability at Bab el-Mandeb, the gateway to the Red Sea, and hence to the Suez Canal, and consequently to the Mediterranean Sea.
