PIETRO GIUSEPPE  GRASSO

Il  diritto costituzionale dei popoli europei e l'unificazione politica del vecchio continente  

N. 3/1987

Summary — In the member Countries of the European Communities are accepted the same forms of State (constitutional democracy) and of government (parliamentary). Among the written constitutions of those Countries there exists also a fundamental uniformity of nomenclature and of style. From a formal point of view, therefore, there seems to be the characters of homogeneity deemed necessary to a federal union. In the practice and in the theory of constitutional law, there appear, instead, tendencies to "particularism" and to the isolation of each member state system. It would not be correct to detect in such tendencies signs of new statalisms and nationalisms. In fact, the decadence has to be admitted of the national State "sovereign" meant as an historically identified type of juridical system and of political unity. On the hand, among the peoples of the Old Continent spontaneous sufficient signs of bents towards new forms of unification do not appear. The political parties act as close bodies and separate. Home politics seems to waver between two opposite directions, both irreconcilable with the unity and the order of the old constitutionalism: the possibility of a return to civil war, through ideological or ethnic conflicts; the reduction of every public activity to the mere meeting the demands for ever greater material welfare.