ARTURO COLOMBO

Europa: la lunga marcia di un'idea 

N. 2/1986

Summary – Europe as an idea, as a symbol, as a cultural model has a tradition of many centuries; on the contrary, Europe as a "political unit", to be attained to through the overcoming of each single national sovereignty, is a recent phenomenon. The a. starts from Carlo Cattaneo’s thesis ("we shall have real peace, when we shall have the United States of Europe"), to recall the "long march" of the political idea of European union, how it forms in the last century, but above all, how it consolidates in our century, particularly on the morrow of the Great War. The proposals of Luigi Einaudi, those of Lord Lothian and of the Federal Union, the "Discours à la nation européenne" of Julien Benda, the severe diagnosis of Thomas Mann (in "Achtung Europa!"), up to the "federalist" project of Lionel Robbins are some of the most qualifying elements of the "reply" to the terrible risks, during the thirties, of exasperated nationalism. But the a. shows that it was the so-called "Manifesto di Ventotene", drawn up by Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni, to constitute, already during the last stages of World War II, the most original and lucid political platform, that would gather all those who saw (and still see) in the end of those petty and anachronistic national sovereignties the starting point for the setting up of a political order (European parliament, European government, European defence) able to take up the challenge of a multipolar world. Thence the criticism of the "functionalists" model who believe (and delude themselves) to attain to the political Europe through a series of small sectoral institutions (OECE, CECA, MEC, CEE) but leaving incredibly "intact" the decisional powers of the single countries. Thence, again, the alternative upheld by the "federalists", who for years have denounced the flimsiness of the technocratic Europe and at present deem it indispensable to succeed in accomplishing the so-called "Spinelli project" approved since February 14, 1984 and still waiting to be ratified by the national parliaments, so as to give to the European parliament some of those "minimum powers", the only ones able to change into decisions those that hitherto remain frail, often inoperative "recommendations". The a. concludes proposing again Einaudi’s alternative: "the problem for Europe is not between independence and union: it between exist united or perish"