ELENA  SAVINO

Alle origini del federalismo di Piero Calamandrei

N. 167

Summary - After the 8th September Piero Calamandrei went in a lonely exile in a small town in Umbria, Colcello, where he remained until the beginning of July 1944. Returning to his hometown he stopped almost for two months in Rome, where he was welcomed like one of the leaders of the new-born Partito d’Azione. He plunged into political life satisfying what in his mind was a "moral duty". According to his thinking about peace and federalism, the 27th January 1945 in Florence he held his first speech on Europe at the first official meeting of the Associazione Federalisti Europei, organised during the Resistance by Paride Baccarini. The subjects of his speech, based on the past history experiences and on his personal meditations about the juridical organization of a modern State, revealed a deep feeling with Cattaneo’s ideas. Without cutting off his mazzinian roots, but going against one of the main pillar of Mazzini’s thought, Calamandrei stated the need of sovereignty’s restriction as the first step towards peace in Europe and moreover in the world. All his speech, afterwards titled "The Federalism is not an Utopia", showed that the federalist project was the main expression of his politics’ idea as "profetic vision". His thought’s evolution on federalism after the exile in Colcello was influenced by Carlo Rosselli and Ernesto Rossi. In the following years he will be a sincere heir of the first one, having supported the idea of a European Constituent in the framework of a socialist revolution and, as for the second one, an allied in the battle for the political unity of Europe.