Rome 25 March 2017
The ten years that the 27 EU members gave themselves on the occasion of the EU 60th anniversary in order to reform its institutions and bring them closer to citizens – whatever that means – look like the last chance for Europe to make its voice heard in a world dominated by extra-European forces. But is it really the way it is?
It is necessary to go back at least 60 years to understand what went wrong – because what went right has been extensively recalled by most participants in the Rome jubilee. Only if we understand what went wrong – and when, and why – shall we be able to find the road to unity and freedom, however long and tortuous it may turn out to be.
As I pointed out more than once in this blog, it was the failure of the European Defense Community (EDC/CED) that decided in the early fifties there woould not be any European federation, meaning the United States of Europe that a group of Italian anti-fascists had anticipated with a manifesto in the island of Ventotene during World War two. The alternative road – “Europe step by step” was taken in the following Messina conference and in the treaties of Rome that were inaugurated precisely on 25March 1957.
But a misunderstanding was entrenched in the very structure of the European institutions. While the Europen partners had given up the federal way and proceeded according to the suggestions of Jean Monnet, European politicians kept talking about a gradual transfer of sovereignty to the European institutions while no such a thing was foreseen by the treaties, with the exception of the High Authority for Coal and Steel, the first of the communities to be inaugurated. Besides, while political leaders paid lip service to a political unity that wasn’t there, they effectively prevented any federalist development.
But the federalists were there nevertheless: groups of diehard militants and convinced thinkers who would not give up their “dream” that they rightly didn’t consider a dream but a realistic and necessary option. Let me add my personal memoir on this point. In 1962 I had written an article for the Italian christian democratic weekly “Politica” explaining the point of view of the European federalists. The article was published although I wasn’t a christian deomocrat, but the title that the director Nicola Pistelli, chose (“ Europe of my dreams“) denied my very intentions. For me Europe wasn’t a dream but a necessity. But “Politica” had by then chosen the policy of the ” third world” of non-aligned countries, while the federalists were anchored in western liberal and social democratic values.
Not all federalists shared the same convictions. The prevailing movement was that of the “communitarians”, whose main figure was one of the authors of manifesto di Ventotene, Altiero Spinelli, with his wife Ursula Hirschmann. Then there were the catholic-oriented fédéralistes intégraux led by Alexandre Marc, a follower of Proudhon’s anarcchist federalism (see picture). Libertarian federalists of the American kind weren’t very common in Europe, although they represented Alexander Hamilton’s thought that was behind the U.S. constitution and the liberal/libertarian roots of American federalism.
It seems significant to me that the American motto first inherited by Europe, the longing for an ever closer union, was remembered today only in the celebration at the Beijng people’s university, summoned to show China’s support of the European Union’s policy.
The united Europe that was born with the blessing of the U.S. and the hostility of Russia ends up with both countries turning their back to it. And China becoming a fan…
umbertosite 
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