On 19 November, in Brussels, Foreign Minister Luca Beccari sat down with the President of the European Council, Antonio Costa.
Official reports described the meeting as cordial, constructive and cooperative. The usual diplomatic packaging to soften a scenario that was anything but reassuring.
Because in that meeting Costa made one thing very clear: the Association Agreement has already come close to collapsing and remains on highly unstable ground.
It is precisely in light of that meeting that the three real options still open to San Marino can be laid out today.
Three paths, all problematic, all heavy with consequences, all stemming from the fact that EU member states are not aligned, and that France, now unambiguously, demands mixed competence.
The first option is to continue the showdown with the European Union: insist on exclusive EU competence while Paris and other states hold their ground on mixed competence.
This strategy leads straight to one outcome: total paralysis.
Costa hinted at it clearly: if San Marino insists on this line, the agreement risks sinking into indefinite deadlock.
The second option is a piece of diplomatic engineering: “splitting” the agreement.
In practice:
– isolate the two articles France considers sensitive,
– treat them as mixed competence,
– leave the rest of the agreement under exclusive competence.
Legally speaking, it is possible, but it is a time bomb:
– it reopens the text,
– extends the timeline,
– exposes the agreement to new vetoes,
– and may derail the balance achieved over ten years of negotiation.
The third option, the most politically delicate, is to formally accept mixed competence and notify the member states.
This is the path that, in Brussels logic, would unblock the dossier.
But it is also the one that opens the longest, most fragile and most exposed route:
– ratification by the 27 national parliaments,
– a mandatory referendum in Andorra,
– a process that could last up to a decade,
– and the certainty that a single NO can collapse everything.
Costa didn’t spell it out explicitly, but he implied it with the clarity of someone who knows how the EU machinery works:
if you choose the mixed option, the responsibility is yours; no one can guarantee the outcome.
Then comes the factor that complicates everything: Andorra.
It is not a detail; it is a structural variable.
Due to constitutional limits:
– Andorra cannot provisionally apply the agreement;
– must wait for the referendum and the ratifications;
– and its timetable is inevitably much longer than San Marino’s.
This means San Marino may begin provisional application in 2026, but Andorra remains frozen for years.
This is an agreement born asymmetric, and in international law asymmetric agreements are the most unstable.
The most critical scenario is clear:
if San Marino implements the norms, invests money and political capital, and a few years later a national parliament —or the Andorran referendum— says NO, the agreement implodes.
And at that point we will have done all the work for nothing.
In Brussels this is well understood.
Costa made it clear.
The same warning circulates in the corridors of the European Council.
Meanwhile, San Marino stands before a strategic crossroads:
– insist on exclusive competence and risk indefinite stalling,
– split the agreement and reopen all vulnerabilities,
– or accept mixed competence and enter a long, fragile, rupture-prone process.
With two truths never stated publicly:
– a mixed agreement automatically overrides all previous bilateral agreements with EU states,
– and if, after years of procedures, Europe —or even a single state— says NO, San Marino loses everything: the new agreement, the old ones, and its institutional credibility.
This is what truly emerged on 19 November:
not a “constructive” meeting, but a clear political warning.
A President of the European Council signalling that the dossier is in the red zone.
The rest is theatre.
Reality is this: the agreement is hanging by a thread, and one wrong move can make it fall.
Marco Severini – Direttore GiornaleSM
