According to the words of President Christian Solinas, "the Government's commitment to remove the economic imbalances deriving from insularity, now also enshrined in the text of the bill approved unanimously by the Council of Ministers, bears witness to the will to give due attention to the rights of the islands that have been ignored and denied for too long". Nothing quaestio, the reference in the bill on Differentiated Autonomies was there. But in what would this appeal be substantiated in practice? How, in the context of the specific regulatory provision of reference, should insularity find its actualization in order to become concretely appreciable for the Sardinian people in terms of benefits? In what way, wanting to understand better, "insularity", inserted in that specific regulatory context, should pass from its condition of "significant" (i.e. from the mental representation that everyone can have) to that of "signified" (i.e. its expression concrete by filling itself with contents)?
Minister Calderoli's proposal on differentiated autonomy would seem to propose the intention of conferring wider and more intense powers on the regions in relation to some specific competences, in compliance with the principles dictated by the Constitutional Charter. But it would probably be appropriate to understand each other by asking ourselves more: are there differences between the concept of differentiated autonomy and the concept of regional autonomy sic et simpliciter considered?
The question seems to be far from trivial. First of all because, by regional autonomy, we generally mean the potential of the various regions to "support themselves" autonomously within a broader, more articulated and complex state system. Therefore why, consequently, such regions would have, as in fact they already have, the power to legislate and take decisions on public policy matters concerning their geographical perimeter of reference with the intention of pursuing the objective of ensuring greater democratic participation and a more efficient management of local resources: by way of example, the Lombardy Region, as the region of maximum managerial efficiency (the circumstance certainly cannot be denied), has the power to manage its own health system, being equipped with a plan organizational and "planning" autonomous with respect to the central government to offer a more prompt response to the needs of its population and to adopt more effective health policies. Also because, and this is the other side of the coin, regional autonomy can also collide with the interests of the central government: a circumstance, the latter, which takes shape when regional policies come into conflict with those since, clearly, the decentralization of power can also lead, as it often seems to happen, to inequalities between the richest and least developed regions. Lastly because, even in the simplified and already existing context of regional autonomies, it is fundamental, and not always easy to achieve, to guarantee a constant balance between the different regional autonomies and the indispensable principle of national cohesion. The latter element which could indeed be seriously compromised in the hypothesis of concrete expression of the bill on Differentiated Autonomies although supplemented by the generic (because generic at present it would appear to be) reference to the principle of insularity.
