Troops in Milan, and the Pattern Europe Keeps Repeating

The foreign wires this week have carried a single Italian image: five hundred soldiers on the streets of Milan. France 24 reported that the Prime Minister announced the deployment on Tuesday, alongside cabinet measures to make the detention of minors easier and to fine parents for damage caused by their children. The Guardian noted that most of those arrested over the weekend were under eighteen. We record these facts as the world recorded them, and we note how quickly the story moved from the grievances of the young to the machinery of public order.

What the international coverage has done, almost without exception, is place Milan inside a continental sequence. The Guardian's correspondents have traced the same anger from Paris to Porto, from Tirana to Lisbon, and The Local's editors in three countries have asked whether the grievances are shared. Housing costs, tuition, the price of ordinary life: these appear in every dispatch. Seen from outside, Italy's weekend is not an Italian aberration but a chapter in a European argument about who the state is for.

We would add a caution that the wires have only half-stated. The Guardian reported that Europe's far right has seized on the unrest, framing it as the consequence of liberal governance and open borders. That framing is convenient because it requires no answer to the housing question. A government that responds to a protest about rent with the detention of teenagers has chosen which half of the argument to hear. The troops may restore the pavement; they cannot address the reason the pavement filled.

There is a temptation, in a newspaper that reads Italy at one remove, to treat such scenes as confirmation of an old stereotype about disorder. We resist it. The more telling detail in the foreign reporting is the ordinariness of the demands — a room, a fee, a wage — and the difficulty European governments, Italy's among them, have shown in answering them in any language other than security. Further demonstrations are already announced for Saturday, according to The Local. The pattern, not the pavement, is the story.