Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta recently met with his Greek counterpart Antonis Samaras in Athens to discuss the eurozone crisis and Greece in particular.
Letta argued that Brussels made big mistakes in dealing with Athens, using instruments unable to avoid financial disaster and significant loss of employment.
Letta and Samaras established an informal agreement to set the agenda during their 2014 presidencies. Next year first Greece and then Italy will assume the six-month presidency of the EU Council.
"Those periods will represent a chance to demonstrate that these two countries are not nations of the past but future," Letta said.
Letta's words may build confidence, but the data doesn't back him up. Standard & Poor's has just downgraded Italy once more, and rating agencies evaluate Italy's growth prospects more bleakly than its government does.
Letta has put forward a plan of liberalization according to which some state-owned enterprises and public properties will be put up for sale, including Eni, Enel and Finmeccanica.
Although the state will keep its golden share in these important strategic companies, this choice won't help Italy to decrease its public debt.
In fact, the government of interim prime minister Mario Monti already introduced new taxes bringing real fiscal pressure to 55 percent, among the highest in the world, but public debt increased in 2012.
EU fiscal pressure has increased to 40.8 percent in 2012 and about half of the EU's GDP is obtained through the fiscal policies of national governments.
In theory, this choice could be considered positive, because it could ensure more social services and employment guarantees for every citizen. But in practice this is not true. Unemployment and underemployment are rapidly conquering Europe.
Letta said that the sacrifices imposed by austerity are just an instrument while the aim remains economic revival. A similar view has been voiced by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who continues to repeat that austerity and development are not in contradiction.
But the results obtained until now demonstrate that this policy has nothing to do with the traditional European social market economy built by Germany, Italy and France after the end of WWII and thought to be a fundamental part of the so-called Brussels-Frankfurt Consensus.
State intervention in the economy remains one of the most important concepts in the European mentality, and it still represents the biggest difference between the Continental model of capitalism and free market-oriented Anglo-American model.
German industrial competitiveness and Italian-French ideas of diversification have been the winning cards of the European economy for several decades, but the continental model now needs to be updated.
This can be possible only when the EU redefines its economic space as a geopolitical third pole which is representative of a modern social democracy, different from both the US and Asian models.
The author is a journalist and foreign affairs analyst based in Perugia, Italy. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn