During an interview given to a foreign broadcaster, the President of the United States claims that, on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Évian, the Italian Prime Minister had insisted on obtaining a photograph with him. He says he could have refused but chose to agree. The Prime Minister replies that the episode never took place. Around the words spoken, a controversy opens over the transcript released afterward and the accurate reconstruction of events. For several days, Italian political debate focuses almost exclusively on this.

So much for the news. But the news, on its own, rarely explains what deserves to be understood.

Let us suppose that the photograph was indeed requested. Let us suppose, on the contrary, that it never was. Let us suppose even that the historical truth remains, as so often happens, confined to the memories of those present. Would the political meaning of the affair really change? I don‘t think so. Because the point is not the photograph. The point is that a photograph has become the chosen language for describing the relationship between two governments.

This is a distinction worth holding onto. Photographs do not belong to diplomacy; they belong to its representation. No treaty has ever been signed thanks to a camera lens. No alliance has ever been born from a smile directed at photographers. And yet images accompany international politics to the point of almost supplanting it in the public imagination. We remember them more readily than joint communiqués, than minutes, than official statements. The handshake, the seat occupied around a table, the order in which leaders file past cameras end up conveying a hierarchy that often precedes even the content of the meeting itself.

This is not a recent phenomenon. What is new, if anything, is that the representation seems to have devoured all the rest.

There was a time when images served to document a decision already taken. Today the reverse is increasingly true: the decision seems to exist in order to produce an image. The summit becomes the backdrop to the photograph; the photograph becomes the summary of the summit. The symbol devours the fact it was supposed to represent.

For this reason, the Évian controversy deserves to be taken seriously — but not in the way it has been told. Not because it reveals the character of this or that leader. Not because it licenses improbable psychological diagnoses. And not because it allows us to determine who lied and who told the truth. These are legitimate questions, but secondary ones. Their answer, even if definitive, would change little. What matters is the language.

When the relationship between two States is narrated as the relationship between a celebrity and an admirer, something happens that goes beyond the anecdote. The categories of diplomacy give way to those of personal prestige. The national interest cedes ground to individual recognition. Allies cease to be interlocutors and become supporting players in a narrative centred on the leader. It is a subtle but profound shift. It does not merely change the way politics is communicated: it alters the way we end up imagining it.

For centuries, power sought to appear just. Later it sought to appear strong. Today it seems above all concerned with appearing central. Centrality has become a form of legitimation. What matters is not only deciding; what matters is being perceived as the point around which all others are compelled to orbit. In this logic, every gesture acquires a symbolic value: a visit, a telephone call, an invitation, an exclusion, even a photograph.

The question, then, is not whether someone truly desired that photograph. The question is why the story of that photograph seemed credible to millions of people. Would a similar episode have had the same effect thirty years ago? Hardly. It would have been dismissed as personal vanity, little more than gossip. Today, by contrast, it appears plausible because we live in a time that has learned to read power through the grammar of visibility. Authority no longer merely exercises itself; it must continually represent itself. Every leader is called upon to perform their role before a permanent audience that observes, comments and judges.

Politics, of course, has always been theatre as well. But that presupposed a stage separate from reality. Today that separation has become far more uncertain. Representation no longer follows action: it often precedes it, sometimes replaces it entirely.

It is from this slippage that we should begin.

Because the mirror of Évian, in the end, reflects neither the face of an American president nor that of the Italian Prime Minister. It reflects something closer — and for that very reason harder to observe: the way in which we ourselves have learned to recognise power.

There is a reason why apparently insignificant episodes occupy so much space in contemporary politics. It is not the shallowness of information, as is often repeated with a certain nostalgia for an imaginary past in which debate was more serious. It is something deeper. Societies have always attributed particular value to the symbols of power, because power, before it can even be exercised, must be recognised.

This is why the history of diplomacy is made not only of treaties, armies and trade. It is also made of precedence, rituals, ceremonies, formulas, and chairs placed a few centimetres ahead of others. An inexperienced observer might dismiss these details as matters of mere protocol. In reality they constitute an essential part of international politics, because they transform a relationship of force into a shared representation. The order in which two sovereigns entered a room, the number of steps leading to the throne, the seat occupied at a banquet, even the length of the wait before being received: every detail spoke. It was not folklore. It was political language.

Modernity has not abolished that language. It has simply translated it. The place at table has become the place in the official photograph. The private audience has become the bilateral meeting in front of cameras. The ceremonial procession has become the leaders‘ walkabout before the photographers. The instruments change; the function does not. They continue to tell a single story: who recognises whom.

It is in this sense that a photograph can become a political fact. Not because it adds anything to the substance of the relations between two countries, but because it claims to sum them up in an immediately comprehensible image. Symbolic language possesses a characteristic that diplomatic language does not: it is instantaneous. It requires no expertise. It does not demand knowledge of dossiers, agreements or compromises. A glance is enough. The power of images lies precisely in their apparent innocence. They seem merely to show what happened. In reality, they continuously suggest an interpretation.

A photograph in which two heads of government are smiling suggests harmony, even when the summit has ended in nothing. A cold photograph hints at tensions that may not even exist. A handshake held a few seconds longer is read as a signal of trust. A handshake withheld becomes a diplomatic incident. There is nothing new in any of this. What is new is the growing disproportion between the symbol and what it is supposed to represent.

Throughout the twentieth century, images accompanied politics. Today they increasingly precede it. Governments seem compelled to produce continuous representations of themselves, as if the exercise of power were no longer sufficient to legitimate it. Communication no longer describes action: it becomes part of the action itself. This is a slippage affecting all contemporary democracies, but it takes a particular form when it involves international politics. Within a State, power can be corrected by the vote, by Parliament, by the courts, by the press. In relations between States, these counterweights are inevitably weaker.

For this reason, prestige continues to exercise an enormous influence.

Not because it replaces material interests, but because it helps organise them into a recognised hierarchy. The mistake would be to believe that prestige belongs to the sphere of vanity. It belongs, rather, to the sphere of authority.

Every great power, in every era, has sought not only to be stronger than others but to appear as the natural point of reference for the international order. Force persuades. Prestige achieves something more precious: it induces others to accept that force spontaneously, as though it were almost inevitable. This is where the Évian episode definitively ceases to be about a photograph. What is being staged is not a snapshot but a relationship. On one side, the one who grants attention; on the other, the one who desires it. On one side the centre; on the other, the periphery. On one side the subject who distributes recognition; on the other, the one who receives it. Whether this representation corresponds to the facts or not is, from this perspective, almost beside the point. Its function is not to reconstruct an episode. It is to propose a hierarchy.

And that is precisely why it provokes such intense reactions. People rarely take offence at a photograph. They take offence when they believe that photograph tells the story of the place their country occupies in the world. The question then becomes far broader. What happens when a relationship between States is described through categories belonging to personal relationships? What changes when words like “friendship,“ “loyalty,“ “gratitude“ or “admiration“ progressively replace the vocabulary of interest, cooperation and disagreement? It is from this question that we should set out again.

International politics is often described as the realm of interests. States, it is said, have no friends — only permanent interests. The formula has become a commonplace precisely because it contains a share of truth. No government survives for long by systematically sacrificing what it regards as essential in order to please another. Interests exist. They weigh. In the end, almost always, they prevail.

But this observation leaves out a decisive part of reality. Interests explain why States act; they explain far less why they choose to represent their actions in a particular way. Two governments may sign the same agreement. They may obtain the same economic and military results. And yet one may emerge strengthened, the other weakened — not for what it obtained, but for the way in which the relationship was narrated.

This is a dynamic as old as politics itself. Every international order, whatever its form, inevitably produces a centre and a periphery. The centre is not only the place where the greatest quantity of material force is concentrated; it is the place from which recognition flows, the point towards which the others turn their gaze. This is why great powers have always devoted an almost obsessive care to symbols. It is not enough to be strong. That strength must be perceived as natural, almost inevitable. The most stable supremacy is not the one that constantly compels obedience, but the one that induces others to organise their behaviour around it spontaneously.

International politics abounds in examples: state visits deferred at the last moment, press conferences cancelled, receptions cut short, invitations extended to some countries and denied to others. These are gestures that, taken in isolation, may seem insignificant. Sometimes they genuinely are. But their effect never depends solely on the gesture itself. It depends on the meaning the gesture assumes within an already existing relationship. A great power can afford to ignore a telephone call without anyone drawing definitive conclusions about its role in the world. A weaker country rarely enjoys the same privilege. Silence, in one case, appears as a choice. In the other, it risks being interpreted as marginalisation. The difference has nothing to do with protocol. It concerns the position occupied in the international hierarchy.

When prestige becomes the primary criterion through which every international relationship is read, politics is slowly transformed into a competition for recognition. Decisions are evaluated less for their effects than for the symbolic message they convey. Photographs end up obscuring agreements. Declarations outlast the policies they were supposed to accompany. This is the point at which diplomacy begins to resemble spectacle. And spectacle, by definition, needs protagonists, supporting players and an audience.

Perhaps this is also why the language of contemporary politics so often resorts to personal categories. Leaders are described as “strong“ or “weak,“ “loyal“ or “ungrateful,“ “friends“ or “enemies.“ Far more rarely is mention made of the structures within which those leaders operate. People occupy the stage; institutions retreat into the background. It is an understandable simplification: stories need characters. Relations of force, by contrast, are difficult to narrate. They have no face. They afford no memorable lines. They demand patience, memory and comparison. But for precisely that reason, they risk becoming invisible.

The Évian episode, observed from this perspective, takes on a different meaning. It is not interesting because it allows us to establish who told the truth. It is interesting because it shows how easily a discussion about Italy‘s place in the international order can be reduced to the narrative of a personal relationship — a reduction that simplifies everything and, in simplifying, ends up concealing the essential question. Not which leader got the better of the other. But what, today, is the nature of the relationship between the States we call allies.

Words, like men, have a biography. Some age well; others end up meaning something very different from what they once indicated. “Alliance“ belongs to this second category. It is a word we use constantly and which, precisely for that reason, risks becoming opaque.

What does it truly mean to be allies? The simplest answer is also the least satisfying: it means having common interests. This is true, but insufficient. Two governments may share an objective without being allies; they may be allies while having divergent interests; they may even remain formally allied while quarrelling over essential matters. The history of the West since the second world war is traversed by episodes of this kind. An alliance, therefore, does not coincide with unanimity. Nor does it coincide with obedience. To confuse these two concepts is to lose the very meaning of cooperation between sovereign States. An alliance is born precisely because each of its members retains an interest of its own. Were that interest to disappear, there would no longer be an alliance. There would be a single political authority.

In recent years, public language has progressively replaced the category of agreement with that of loyalty. One speaks of “reliable“ governments, “loyal“ partners, countries that “stand on the right side.“ These are comprehensible expressions, especially in moments of international crisis. But they carry an ambiguity that deserves attention. Loyalty is a personal virtue. An alliance is a legal and political relationship. The first presupposes a bond of belonging; the second an equilibrium of interests. The two things may overlap. They are not the same thing.

The simplest proof is offered by recent history.

During the Cold War, the United States had extremely difficult relations with governments that no one would have dared describe as hostile to the West. The tensions with Charles de Gaulle‘s France, the confrontation with Germany over the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, the differences with Italy during the Sigonella crisis all point to a reality that is often forgotten: disagreeing with an ally did not mean ceasing to be one. Indeed. Precisely because an alliance existed, there also existed space for dissent. A relationship in which one of the parties can never say no is not a particularly solid alliance. It is a relationship in which stability depends above all on the distribution of power.

Naturally it would be naïve to ignore the asymmetry that characterises the international system. The United States possesses military, economic, technological and financial resources that no other Western country commands to the same degree. To pretend that all allies sit at the same table with equal weight would mean mistaking desire for reality. But acknowledging an asymmetry is not the same as attributing a moral value to it. Hierarchies exist. The political question is how they are exercised. A leadership can be authoritative without being arbitrary. It can persuade rather than impose. It can build consensus rather than merely demand it. The difference is not only ethical. It is functional. The most durable alliances are not those in which the strongest always obtains what it desires, but those in which even the smaller partners feel they are participating in a common decision.

It is here that language again becomes decisive. When dissent is narrated as betrayal, the alliance changes in nature — not because the treaty governing it changes, but because the way in which its protagonists learn to imagine it changes. The dissenting party is no longer an interlocutor: they become an ingrate. Whoever proposes a different course of action is no longer an ally defending their own national interest: they become someone who has disappointed a personal expectation.

Confirmation came almost immediately. What had begun as the story of a photograph shifted, within a matter of hours, to the opposite terrain: the accusation of not having shared in a military decision, the reproach of ingratitude after decades of resources spent on the common defence. The personal pretext fell away on its own. What remained was the disappointed expectation: the claim that an alliance should coincide with obedience.

It is an almost imperceptible slippage, but one rich in consequences. Political categories slowly give way to affective ones. Discussion is transformed into psychodrama. Strategies become narratives of friendships, sympathies and resentments. The risk, at that point, concerns not only language. It concerns the quality of democracy. Because if foreign policy is interpreted as a system of personal relationships, the judgment of citizens changes too. The question is no longer whether a decision was useful, effective or consistent with the national interest. The question becomes whether it was a gesture of loyalty or of defiance. The rationality of choice retreats. The logic of partisanship advances. This is a shift affecting many Western democracies. But in countries like Italy it takes a particular form, because the national history has built a complex relationship with the very idea of sovereignty.

Every country develops a particular idea of itself. This is not a matter of national character — a category that more often serves to simplify than to understand — but of political memory. Institutions change, governments alternate, international balances shift; and yet certain historical experiences continue to influence the way in which a community interprets its place in the world.

Post-war Italy is born from a singular condition. It is a defeated nation that, within the space of a few years, participates in the construction of the Western order. It undergoes extraordinary economic growth, consolidates its democratic institutions, enters the ranks of the major industrial economies of the world. But all of this unfolds within an international system in which the great strategic decisions are taken elsewhere.

There is nothing scandalous in this observation. Every international order knows an unequal distribution of power. It would be childish to imagine a community of perfectly symmetrical States. The question is a different one: what happens to the political culture of a country when this asymmetry lasts long enough to be perceived as natural? Succeeding generations come to regard it as a given of experience rather than a historical choice. The question of whether a particular equilibrium is desirable ceases to be asked; one merely administers it. The possible contracts until it coincides with what already exists.

The words remain the same — independence, national interest, strategic autonomy — but they slowly change in meaning. They become ritual formulas, pronounced without truly imagining the conditions necessary to realise them. Sovereignty, then, is transformed into a curious word: everyone claims it, few define it. For some it coincides with economic self-sufficiency, as though a modern country could truly be sufficient unto itself. For others it means absolute freedom of decision, forgetting that no medium-sized European power today possesses the strength necessary to act entirely alone. Others still reduce it to an identity symbol, useful above all in electoral campaigns. These definitions share one feature: they are all insufficient.

Sovereignty does not consist in the absence of constraints. It consists in the possibility of participating in the formation of the constraints that will bind us tomorrow. This is a decisive difference.

Every contemporary State lives within a web of economic, financial, technological and military dependencies. None can fully escape it. The political question, therefore, is not whether dependencies exist. It is who contributes to determining them, and according to what procedures.

Observed from this perspective, Italian discussion often appears paradoxical. Two opposing rhetorics alternate without ever meeting: on one side, those who consider any request for greater autonomy a dangerous nationalist illusion; on the other, those who imagine sovereignty as an act of will, as though proclaiming it were sufficient to make it effective. Both end up evading the real problem.

Democratic sovereignty is always an institutional practice before it is a political declaration. It requires industrial capacity, financial credibility, administrative competence, diplomatic continuity, internal consensus. It does not emerge from a slogan. It is built slowly, often in ways that are almost invisible.

And it is precisely this slowness that makes it unattractive in the age of permanent communication. Photographs are produced in a second. Sovereignty requires decades. This is why public debate prefers to discuss the symbol: the symbol offers an immediate emotion, whereas the construction of an autonomous international position is measured in investments that no one photographs, in supply chains that are noticed only when they break down, in technical competences that make no news until they go missing.

For this reason, episodes such as the one in Évian risk becoming a trap. They induce us to concentrate all our attention on the visible gesture, while the material conditions that make that gesture possible remain in the background. The question becomes: “Who humiliated whom?“ Far more rarely does one ask: “What relations of force made it possible for that representation to appear credible?“ It is a less spectacular question, but it is the only one truly worth addressing.

At this point, the temptation is to attribute everything to the personalities of the protagonists. It would be reassuring. If the problem were the character of this or that leader, it would suffice to wait for the next electoral cycle. Unfortunately, it does not work like that. Controversies pass. Structures remain.

This is why the Évian episode probably says far less about the United States than it says about Italy. Not because our country occupies a marginal position. Nor because it lacks resources. Italy continues to be one of the world‘s leading manufacturing economies, an exporting power, a member of the G7, the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance. To reduce it to a simple periphery would mean ignoring reality. And yet there exists a different fragility, less conspicuous, which concerns the way in which we narrate ourselves.

Every discussion of Italian foreign policy seems to oscillate between two extremes. On one side, permanent self-deprecation: a country that counts for nothing, destined to absorb decisions taken elsewhere. On the other, muscular rhetoric promising sudden reconquests of sovereignty, as though a change of tone were sufficient to alter equilibria built over decades. These are opposing narratives, but they share a common premise: both measure Italy by looking at others. It is an ancient attitude.

Long before the United States existed, long before the European Union, long before even the modern idea of nationhood, Francesco Guicciardini observed how Italian politics was often dominated by the particulare: not simply self-interest, as the formula has been vulgarised, but the tendency to evaluate every choice on the basis of immediate advantage and momentary convenience, rather than the construction of a lasting common interest.

Over the centuries that judgment has been revisited, corrected, discussed, even contested. But it has continued to resurface in different forms. Every Italian generation has found a new name for a similar difficulty: at times the transformation of opportunism into virtue, at times the art of adapting to the victor, at times realism elevated to the only possible philosophy. The definitions change. The mechanism remains surprisingly stable.

For this reason, international controversies produce in Italy effects that elsewhere seem less intense. When a foreign government criticises France, the French debate tends to interrogate the correctness of the political choice made in Paris. When Germany is criticised, the discussion often concerns the German interest, the economic cost of decisions, their sustainability. In Italy, something different frequently occurs: before even discussing the substance, we ask what the episode says about us. Did we cut a poor figure? Were we treated with respect? Did we lose prestige? These are understandable questions. But they reveal how attention shifts rapidly from the merits of decisions to the judgment expressed about them. It is as though the image preceded the politics. The mirror, once again, comes before the face.

Perhaps this too is a consequence of our history. For centuries Italy was a space more than a subject: a contested territory, traversed and administered by different powers, often the centre of European culture but rarely the centre of its political decisions. National Unification radically changed this condition, but no historical process entirely cancels the memory that precedes it.

Political cultures sediment. They continue to influence the present long after the circumstances that produced them have disappeared. This is not a fate. It is an inheritance. And every inheritance can be administered or transcended — but only if it is first acknowledged.

For this reason, the decisive question is not whether Italy was humiliated at Évian. Diplomatic humiliations, real or alleged, belong to the physiology of international relations. No great power is immune to them. The question is why an episode of this kind succeeds so easily in transforming itself into a discussion of our national identity, why we continue to seek in the gaze of others a confirmation of the place we occupy in the world. Perhaps because it is far simpler to interrogate ourselves about recognition than to build the material conditions of autonomy. Recognition depends on others. Autonomy depends above all on us. And it is an infinitely longer undertaking.

There exists a curious illusion that accompanies much of the debate on international politics. It is imagined to concern above all heads of government, ministers, ambassadors, generals — as though diplomacy were a conversation reserved for a few hundred people who meet in wood-panelled rooms, shake hands before cameras and sign documents destined for the archives. It is a reassuring image, and it is profoundly false.

Foreign policy is probably the most concrete form of politics there is. It determines the price of energy long before it appears on a bill. It determines the security of supply chains long before a factory halts production. It determines which technologies can be purchased, which raw materials will become accessible, which investments will be encouraged or discouraged. Its effects always arrive later. This is why we tend to forget its causes.

When an international relationship deteriorates, the first signal is rarely visible in daily life. No one walks out of their front door aware that an official visit has been cancelled or that a negotiation is proceeding more slowly. For a while, nothing seems to change. Then, slowly, the cost begins to distribute itself. It never falls all at once. It settles. A contract assigned elsewhere. An investment deferred. A supply chain that becomes more fragile. A technology purchased on worse terms. A company forced to seek new suppliers. Finally, almost always, a worker who loses an opportunity without knowing where that loss originated.

International politics has this singular characteristic: the benefits are often attributed to governments; the costs are absorbed by society. This is one of the reasons why democracies find it so difficult to discuss it with lucidity. Decisions are taken in one place; their consequences manifest themselves elsewhere. Those who choose rarely coincide with those who bear the effects of that choice.

This is why symbolic episodes can prove dangerous. When debate concentrates entirely on a photograph, an ill-chosen remark or a verbal skirmish, the discussion risks stopping at the surface of the problem. Not because symbols are irrelevant — they are very much so. But because their meaning always depends on a material structure that continues to remain invisible. Photographs do not, on their own, redirect investments. They do not modify trade flows. They do not change the price of gas. They are capable, however, of influencing the political climate within which those decisions will be taken. Communication constructs the context in which material interests are negotiated. It is the ground on which consensus forms, prestige is distributed, certain choices are legitimated and others rendered impracticable. To ignore this would be naïve. But to stop there would be more naïve still.

Because the decisive point always remains the same. Every time an international relationship enters into tension, one must ask who genuinely possesses the margin necessary to transform that tension into a decision. Who has alternatives. Who can wait. Who can afford to step back. These are the questions that describe a relation of force. Not the number of photographs, nor the tone in which a remark is made during an interview. The spectacle occupies the stage. Power continues to work behind the scenes. And it is there that, almost always, the bill is presented.

Every political controversy, sooner or later, exhausts itself. Declarations are replaced by other declarations. Interviews slide into the archives. Governments change. Protagonists grow old. Even the crises that, as they unfold, seem destined to redefine the course of history end up occupying a few lines in the textbooks.

Évian will be no different.

In a few years we will struggle to recall the exact words, the day on which they were spoken, the succession of replies and denials. Perhaps a photograph will remain. More probably not even that.

It is the normal fate of news. Far rarer is the survival of what the news, for an instant, allowed to be glimpsed. For this reason, the problem was never the photograph: photographs belong to the short time; the mirror belongs to the long time. A mirror does not necessarily invent what it reflects. But it does not produce it either. It merely shows it, for a moment, to whoever has the courage to stop and look.

The mirror of Évian has reflected a question that has long run through Italian public debate and which, perhaps for that very reason, we continually tend to evade. What does it mean, today, to be a sovereign country? It is not enough to reply that it means being able to decide for oneself. No medium-sized European power truly decides alone. Not Germany, not France, not the United Kingdom.

We live within a system of economic, military, financial and technological interdependencies that renders any form of self-sufficiency impossible. But there exists a specular error: thinking that, since no one is completely autonomous, sovereignty has become a word devoid of meaning. That is not so. Sovereignty does not consist in the absence of relations. It consists in the capacity to enter into relations without dissolving within them.

Mature nations are not those that avoid every conflict with their allies — that would be impossible — nor those that transform every divergence into a test of strength — that would be childish. They are those that manage to distinguish recognition from consent. Consent can be negotiated. Recognition, if it is continually sought, ends up becoming a dependency.

A photograph, on its own, proves nothing. It does not prove prestige. It does not prove subordination. It does not prove friendship. It is only an image. It becomes something different only when an entire political community begins to read it as proof of its own worth or its own irrelevance. At that moment we are no longer talking about the photograph. We are talking about ourselves.

Perhaps this is the question that the Évian episode leaves us as its inheritance. Not whether a foreign president uttered an ill-judged remark. Not whether a government responded in the best possible way. Not even whether a photograph was truly requested or not. The question is simpler, and it is also more difficult.

How much of our judgment about Italy still depends on the gaze of others?