Italian Magazine on the Messina Bridge, LaRouche and the World Land-Bridge

Aug. 12—The Sunday, Aug. 10 weekly magazine of the daily Calabria Live published an article by Claudio Celani, identified as co-editor of the EIR Strategic Alert and collaborator of Schiller Institute chair Helga Zepp-LaRouche, entitled “Messina, the Bridge of Records—Italy Challenged the World”. The magazine has several other articles dedicated to the Messina Bridge, including an interview with Italian Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini.

What follows is the translation of Celani’s feature:

The bridge that will break all records has already broken one, that of the opposition. Never before has there been, in the world, such procrastinated hostility against a project as bold as it is necessary to connect two territories of the same nation, a hostility that has at times turned into political sabotage and has postponed the work on a project that has been talked about for fifty years. Indeed, for 2,000 years, if the Romans were already thinking of a bridge, but, since at the time they were made of stone, they could not go beyond a pontoon bridge, not exactly destined to last. It is only thanks to the industrial revolution that today we possess the technology and materials that allow us to realize a 2,000-year-old dream.

Now that the construction of the Strait Bridge is a state law, its detractors will have to give up, even if there is reason to fear that organized minorities will continue to try to sabotage it. They do not realize that they are acting as useful idiots for interests that transcend national borders, and harken back to the times when colonial empires fought for supremacy in the Mediterranean. The times when France and England fought for control of Suez or Italian commercial ambitions in Tunisia were overridden by the French expeditionary force. Yes, the strategic function of the Mediterranean Bridge has not escaped those nostalgic for those times, if Anglo-American high-finance figures even write, without fear of ridicule, that the Strait Bridge will favor Putin, because it diverts resources from Defense (google: Brooks Sicily Bridge, to believe it). In reality, London, Wall Street, Brussels, and Paris understand well that the project will immeasurably increase our country’s political clout in the geographical area of reference.

We all understand that the Bridge, together with the high-speed train and highway connections, will bring Sicily closer to Italy and vice versa, but also Sicily and Southern Italy to Central and Northern Europe. If everything works north of the Alps, it will be possible to travel from Berlin to Palermo in eight hours. Furthermore, the Bridge will bring Italy and Europe closer to the African continent, whose development is Europe’s natural—and obligatory—mission. It is, in fact, inconceivable to stem the migratory phenomenon without intervening to create development, with a vision that goes beyond the Italian government’s Mattei Plan, laudable though its intentions are, but entirely insufficient.

In mid-July, I attended an international conference in Berlin that addressed precisely this topic, with the participation of European, Chinese, American, Russian, and African experts. One of the proposals that has gained support is to establish trilateral cooperation agreements between Europe, Africa, and China for major development projects capable of acting as “game changers,” that is, driving the agro-industrial development of large regions. The model has already been tested, for example in the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project built by the Italian company Webuild, the French company Alstom, which supplied the turbines, and the Chinese company, which, in addition to building the power lines, co-financed the project. The same model can be applied to bring water to the Sahel, through the Italian-led Transaqua project, which would serve as a driving force for the whole of Central Africa.

The Bridge thus fits into the perspective of integrating the Euro-Afro-Asian continental economies, defined by the great American economist Lyndon LaRouche as the “Land-Bridge of Development.” It’s no coincidence that LaRouche, who was well acquainted with the Strait Bridge project and had discussed it with Italian interlocutors, is considered the forerunner of the New Silk Road, “a visionary,” according to Giulio Tremonti, who anticipated its lines well before it was launched by the Chinese leadership under the name Belt and Road Initiative. The benefits of the Bridge for the Sicilian and Southern Italian economies have been extensively described, and we won’t repeat them here. We’re keen to broaden the framework within which it fits: A global economy driven by the great growth coming from Asia, from which it would be foolish to isolate ourselves. To conclude, we can already look to the future, in the TUNeIT and GRALBeIT projects of our friend Enzo Siviero, the stable connection between Sicily and Tunisia, the first, and between Italy and Albania, the second. A dream? Perhaps today, but not in the near future, just as the Strait Bridge was in the past and is no longer.