Integrazione o ReImmigrazione

Mobility Without Accountability: The Bologna Case Seen from Post-Brexit Britain

Written by

Fabio Loscerbo

in

For a British reader, the homicide that occurred in Bologna is not primarily an emotional story, nor a question of European identity. It is a clear case of policy failure. The kind of event that raises a typically British question: did the system work, or did it not?
Viewed from a post-Brexit United Kingdom, Bologna becomes a test case of the European Union’s ability to manage the real-world consequences of its own policies. It is not a British failure. It is a European one, observed from the outside.

Bologna as a failure of early intervention
According to media reports, the suspect in the Bologna homicide was a European Union citizen, lawfully present, but living for a long time in a condition of extreme marginality, without stable employment, housing, or social integration, and visibly present around the railway station area.
For a UK audience, this detail is decisive. Not because it explains the crime, but because it shows that the situation was known and tolerated. The system did not react early. It allowed a condition of obvious non-integration to persist without triggering any corrective response. In British terms, this is a textbook case of policy inertia.

Integration as behaviour, not identity
In the British debate, integration has never been about identity or cultural assimilation. It has always been understood as behaviour within the shared public space. Respect for rules, contribution to the community, and the absence of persistent disorder.
Seen through this lens, the Bologna case is not about who the individual was, but about how he lived within the community, and how long that situation was tolerated without consequence. For a British reader, integration without consequences is not integration at all. It is simply a refusal to govern.

The European Union observed from the outside
The United Kingdom left the European Union partly because of a perceived imbalance between rights granted and responsibilities enforced. From outside the EU, the Bologna case reinforces that perception.
The EU constructed free movement as a structural right, but never created an effective mechanism to address failed integration. When a person is legally present yet clearly non-integrated, the European system struggles to act. Tolerance becomes indefinite, and intervention arrives only after irreversible damage.
For a British audience, this confirms a familiar lesson: systems that refuse to act early inevitably end up acting too late.


Integration or ReImmigrazione as a common-sense response
In this context, the paradigm Integration or ReImmigrazione can be understood by a UK audience not as an ideological doctrine, but as a common-sense administrative response. It is not deportation, and it is not criminal punishment. It is the withdrawal of tolerance when integration has clearly failed and no realistic prospect of recovery exists.
From a British perspective, the issue is not moral but functional. A system that recognises integration only in theory, and never attaches consequences to its failure, cannot be taken seriously.

Europe’s unresolved ambiguity
The Bologna case exposes a structural ambiguity that the UK chose no longer to manage from within. The European Union has never decided whether it wants to be a genuine political community with shared responsibility, or merely a system of mobility with nationally fragmented accountability.
If the EU were to evolve into a truly integrated framework, with shared responsibility for social policy, public order, and enforcement, the problem would largely disappear. But as long as that evolution remains unresolved, member states are left to absorb the consequences of European decisions alone.
From a British point of view, this unresolved ambiguity is precisely what makes the system fragile.

Bologna as a European case study
For the UK audience, Bologna is not an ideological argument against Europe. It is a case study. It shows what happens when policy prioritises abstract principles and indefinitely postpones practical consequences.
The lesson is simple and difficult to contest: a system that refuses to intervene early ends up intervening only after harm has occurred. In this sense, Bologna is not a tragic anomaly, but a predictable outcome of a policy without accountability.
Seen from post-Brexit Britain, Integration or ReImmigrazione appears not as a provocation, but as an attempt to correct a structural weakness that the European Union continues to defer.

Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Lawyer – EU Transparency Register Lobbyist
EU Transparency Register No. 280782895721-36

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