Same Score, Different Song
France, Italy, and the Mediterranean they share — but only one inhabits
I. The metaphor
France and Italy have almost everything in common. Latin culture, a Napoleonic administrative state, a Mediterranean coastline, a demographic crisis, a chronic unease with the Anglo-Saxon economic model. Comparable GDP for most of the twentieth century. The same awkward position in an international order run, in practice, by others. They are not rivals in the geopolitical sense — they are, structurally, cousins.
And yet one of them has a foreign policy.
France has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, an independent nuclear deterrent, a military presence across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, a cultural doctrine — the francophonie — that functions as soft power across four continents, and a strategic relationship with the Mediterranean basin that has been sustained, renegotiated, and contested for over two centuries. Italy has a coastline. And tourism.
The standard explanations for this divergence — colonial history, military tradition, sheer institutional momentum — are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They describe outcomes without explaining the mechanism. The mechanism is cultural, in the deepest sense: it is about what kind of thought each country has produced about itself and about power, and what became of that thought. France plays from a score. Italy sings a song it believes to be ancient. The song is not ancient. And this, in the end, is the problem.
II. The score
The French Enlightenment was not simply a philosophical movement. It was a culture of power produced, with remarkable precision, by those who did not yet have it.
The philosophes were not, in the main, aristocrats. Voltaire was the son of a notary. Diderot’s father was a master cutler. Rousseau came from Calvinist Geneva. Many were minor clergy, provincial lawyers, failed merchants — men who had to construct authority through argument, through reputation, through the force of a well-placed sentence. They had access to the salons of Paris but not to Versailles. They could influence opinion but not command armies. They had, in other words, to think their way into power rather than inherit it. And this necessity — this structural condition of exclusion — left a permanent mark on the culture they produced.
When the Revolution came, this was not incidental. The Third Estate, and the minor nobility that aligned with it, had been rehearsing for decades: rehearsing the idea that legitimacy derives from reason and argument rather than from blood and privilege, that the state is a project to be governed rather than an inheritance to be managed. The guillotine was the extreme expression of that idea. The grandes écoles were its durable institutional form.
Napoleon understood this perfectly. He did not dismantle the revolutionary culture of meritocracy — he systematized it. The École Polytechnique, founded in 1794, the École Normale Supérieure in 1795: institutions designed to produce a ruling class that was simultaneously technical and political, capable of building infrastructure and thinking strategy in the same breath. The synthesis that elsewhere remained accidental — the engineer who also read history, the administrator who also thought in geopolitical categories — became in France a curriculum. A score, written down, teachable, reproducible.
This is the inheritance that matters. Not the nuclear weapon, not the Security Council seat — those are downstream effects. What matters is that France produced a culture of the state as a project of conquest, maintained by a class that had once had to earn its position and has never entirely forgotten it. The score exists. It can be read, interpreted, argued with, revised. It has an author, a date, a history. It is, in the most precise sense, a document.
III. The invented song
Italy never had that rupture.
The Risorgimento — the nineteenth-century unification movement — was a revolution from above. Cavour engineered it. The House of Savoy provided the dynastic frame. A fraction of the educated bourgeoisie participated, but it did not lead. The majority of Italians, as Massimo d’Azeglio famously observed immediately after unification, remained entirely indifferent: Italy had been made; the Italians had not. What filled the vacuum left by the absence of a founding rupture was not a political project but an identity — and not even a newly constructed one, but a borrowed antiquity. The country of beauty. The cradle of civilization. The land where the past is so dense it becomes the present.
The historical substance behind this identity was real enough. Norman Sicily in the twelfth century was one of the most remarkable political experiments in European history: a court in Palermo where Arab scholars, Greek clergy, Norman knights, and Jewish merchants worked within the same administrative structure, producing a synthesis of cultures that had no equivalent anywhere in the Western world. The Neapolitan Enlightenment of the eighteenth century — Vico, Filangieri, Galiani — was intellectually sophisticated enough to anticipate arguments that the rest of Europe would not formulate for another century. The maritime republics of Venice and Genoa had developed a geopolitical intelligence of the Mediterranean that was, for several hundred years, simply without rival.
These were not myths. They were history. And precisely because they were real, their neutralization required work.
The work consisted in detaching these traditions from any political content and repackaging them as heritage — as something to be preserved, exhibited, admired, and sold. Norman Sicily became the mosaics of Monreale in a tourist brochure. The Neapolitan Enlightenment became the presepe of San Gregorio Armeno. Venice became a UNESCO site slowly sinking into the lagoon while debating cruise ship access. The traditions were not forgotten — forgetting would have left a space that something else could fill. They were converted into a product. And a product cannot be a political argument.
This is what Eric Hobsbawm identified as the mechanism of invented traditions — symbolic constructions that masquerade as ancient continuity to produce identity and legitimacy. The Italian case runs the mechanism in reverse. The traditions were somehow real. The invention consisted in what was done to them afterward: the deliberate extraction of their political charge, leaving the aesthetic shell intact. The song sounds genuinely old. That is precisely what makes it so effective — and so paralyzing.
IV. The sea neither country owns — but one ignores
The most visible consequence of this divergence sits between them: the Mediterranean.
France has maintained a strategic presence in North Africa for over two centuries — military, economic, cultural, often brutal, always intentional. The relationship has been contested, renegotiated, partially dismantled under pressure from postcolonial movements. But it has never been abandoned as a category of thought. France has always known that the Mediterranean is not a border but a system of connections, and that a power which inhabits that system — even imperfectly, even at considerable moral cost — exercises influence that a power which ignores it cannot.
Italy has a longer Mediterranean coastline than France. It has deeper historical roots in the basin — the Roman mare nostrum, the Byzantine legacy in Sicily, the Arab-Norman synthesis, Venice’s centuries of Levantine trade. And it treats the sea, in its political class, primarily as a migration problem.
In 2013, the government of Enrico Letta launched Operation Mare Nostrum: a naval mission in the central Mediterranean that rescued tens of thousands of migrants from unseaworthy vessels at a cost of approximately nine million euros per month. It lasted fourteen months before being dismantled under political pressure. The domestic debate focused almost entirely on whether the operation functioned as a pull factor for migration — a question that, whatever its empirical merits, managed to make the entire discussion about boats and numbers rather than about strategic presence in a basin that was being reorganized by other powers.
A naval force that operates continuously in a sea produces something beyond humanitarian rescue: it produces information, relationships, deterrence, the material preconditions of influence. Turkey understood this and formalized it in the doctrine it calls the Blue Homeland — a systematic claim to strategic presence across the eastern Mediterranean. France understood this and built it into its military posture across the southern shore. Italy understood it, briefly, and then the conversation moved on.
The Piano Mattei, launched by the government of Giorgia Meloni in 2023, uses the right vocabulary — Africa, energy, Mediterranean — without the underlying concept. It is a list of infrastructure projects without a theory of power, a catalogue of good intentions without a doctrine. Meloni had, in her electoral campaign, attempted to give her vision a Mediterranean inflection. The only concrete idea was defending Italy from migration flows. That is not a Mediterranean policy. It is the absence of one, dressed in the rhetoric of one.
V. Why the song sounds so good
The puzzle is that none of this has been obviously costly — not until recently, and not in ways that are easy to attribute to a cultural cause.
Italy became, by most measures, the world’s most desired tourist destination. The country’s patrimony — architectural, culinary, landscape, artistic — generated real economic returns. The model worked, in the narrow sense that it produced revenue. That it produced revenue of a particular kind — low productivity, dependent on inherited capital rather than created value, structurally resistant to the investment and innovation that compound over time — was a fact that remained largely invisible inside the success.
The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has argued that the great enrichment of the modern world was caused, above all, by ideas: by the emergence, in northwestern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of a culture that attributed dignity and moral value to bourgeois innovation and commerce. Before the ideas changed, the institutions and incentives and capital accumulations were already present — they simply weren’t producing growth. The ideas came first.
Italy’s trajectory suggests the mechanism operates in reverse with equal force. The ideas — the beautiful country, the ancient vocation, the irreplaceable cultural patrimony — produced a class of people who knew perhaps how to manage a heritage site and did not know, or did not feel the need, to develop the geopolitical imagination that goes with inhabiting a strategic space. The economy of tourism, with its structural low productivity and its extraction of value from the past, was not the cause of Italy’s strategic absence from the Mediterranean. It was the economic expression of a prior cultural choice, rationalized and monetized.
A country that gets paid to be looked at has little structural incentive to develop a gaze of its own.
VI. The score is changing
This would be merely a cultural observation — interesting, perhaps melancholy — if the Mediterranean were a stable stage. It is not.
Turkey’s Blue Homeland doctrine is not a rhetorical gesture. It reflects a systematic Turkish claim to sovereign presence across the eastern Mediterranean and into the Red Sea, backed by naval investment, diplomatic pressure on Libya and Somalia, and a readiness to contest French and Greek interests directly. China has been acquiring port infrastructure — Piraeus, Haifa, Trieste — with a patience and strategic coherence that reveals a theory of the Mediterranean as a node in a global logistics architecture. Russia’s presence in Syria gave it, for the first time since the Ottoman period, a warm-water naval base on the eastern shore. The basin is being contested, mapped, and claimed by powers with doctrines.
France is renegotiating its African presence under intense pressure — from postcolonial movements, from Russian mercenary forces, from domestic fatigue. The negotiation is difficult and the outcomes uncertain. But it is happening as a negotiation, conducted by a state that has a position, interests it can articulate, and institutions capable of executing a policy. The score may need revision. Someone is still reading it.
Italy’s absence in this context is no longer a cultural peculiarity or a historical irony. It is a compounding liability. The country sits at the geographic center of a basin that is being reorganized without it. It has the history, the coastline, the cultural depth, and the economic exposure — an enormous share of its energy supply transits through Mediterranean routes — to be a significant actor. It has, instead, a position on immigration and a lot of very beautiful churches.
The song was always an improvisation. The problem, now, is that the stage is changing fast, the other musicians have scores, and nobody in Rome wrote down the notes.