ARturo COlombo

L'Europa è uno sciame: molte api e un unico volo

219

Settembre-Dicembre 2008

Anno LXXIII    n. 3

Summary - Through the critical and interpretative analysis of a wide group of essays and texts, which, especially during the last decade, have been dedicated to Europe and to the complex shaping and development of the European Union, the Author borrows an original image, suggested by José Ortega y Gasset since 1949 – “Europe is like a swarm: lots of bees and one single flight” – in order to point out how the unification is still a “work in progress”, still open to different, or even alternative, solutions. As a matter of fact, someone – like Jeremy Rikfin, for example – privileges the role of the so-called “European dream”, while someone, instead, blames with increasing concern “the eclipse of Europe”, even identifying it as a “crisis and decadence of a civilization” phenomenon. But there is also someone who, even though worried for the incapacity, or impossibility, of present Europe to be a real “power” – beside the five presently operating powers in the world: United States, China, Russia, India and Japan – insists on the need, and urgency, to establish a “strong Europe”, like Christian Saint-Etienne requires, as finally geared with a real federal-style supranational political system. Therefore, the issue is the re-launch of the brave project-program, which, already during the first part of the fourties in the xx century, had defined the Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli’s “free and unite Europe manifesto “ (better known as “Ventotene manifesto”), now recovered also by Guy Verhofstadt, just marking a “new Europe”, doomed to form the “United States of Europe”. Of course, the recent “widening”, which required the transit from the Europe of 15 to the Europe of 25 and then of 27 (with even wider enlargement hypothesis, as requested, for example, by Turkey) presents again the eventuality – or better still the opportunity, according to some thinkers – of committing one selves to the “bedrock research” of Europe – like Karl Lamers claims – which means setting against the present, and frail, “intergovernmental Europe”, the strategy of a “variable geometry” Europe, also indicated as a “two-speed” Europe.