Personally, I would not have nothing to add that’s not in line with the principles of European federalism, and there’s no need to do so, considering that there are lots of European federalists who follow the European debate more carefully and knowledgeably than me. But maybe I could say something from the perspective of a European citizen who was born outside Europe, of a convinced “Spinellian” who lived in Europe only ten years of his life, and of a global federalist who just for these reasons might have an alternative vision with respect to those expressed so far.
The first thing I would like to say is that Europeans don’t have the right appreciation of the extraordinary success that the European Union has been, and of the importance of the European political model at the global scale. It’s sufficient to look at the 20th century and divide it into two halves centered on the year of the creation of the European Coal & Steel Community, to understand how the events unfolded.
Basically, Europe in the hands of nationalisms gave the world the worst fifty years of the history of humanity: plenty of wars, genocides, hunger, poverty and totalitarian dictatorships. On the other hand, the United Europe, from the ECSC and then the EEC and then the EU (and maybe thereafter a real federal republic), offered to humanity the deeper progress of its history. Even now, despite the crisis, four countries that form part of the European Union are within the top ten in the world for the best conditions of human development, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and other three are also in Europe.
Better than celebrating the successes achieved by the Union, it would be to think about how to support them now, and reinvigorate them in the future. The consolidation of the federalist project and the creation of a truly democratic republic is certainly being debated now, as shown by the debate on that matter that already unfolded on these same pages. But despite the central importance of that aspect, I would like to add the global perspective: the project of a United Europe was born, of course, by an innovation concerning the historical dialectic between nation and continental region, of which the Ventotene Manifesto was the original and maybe the clearest expression.
If Europe was considered earlier as the sum of what was happening at the level of its countries, Spinelli’s Manifesto made a Copernican Revolution on this concept, a revolution that led, in the course of time, to view the European successes in the broader scenario of the globalization of the social processes. I mean that Spinelli understood that there was no chance of having any European country democratic and progressive – a democratic and progressive Italy, if you wish – in a Europe dominated by nationalisms, totalitarianisms and wars. And if all that was happening, it was because the Nations, as Altiero understood, were no longer the ones determining what had to happen in Europe, but vice-versa: it was the overall situation in Europe to determine what was happening inside the European nations. In a Europe dominated by nationalisms, trade-wars, armed wars and genocides there was no way for any European country to override the general entropy.
Well, today this statement by Spinelli about the supremacy of the whole over the single parts has become valid, at last, worldwide. The Copernican Revolution brought about by globalization makes it so that there is no hope to have a democratic and civil Europe if the world keeps moving towards trade wars, nationalisms and wars. In short, the world, in this newborn 21st century, overlooks the same abyss – and the same challenges – that Europe had to face at the beginning of the 20th century. We either go towards a more peaceful, democratic and civil world scene, following the federalist guidelines, or towards its contrary; and in such a case Europe will not have any way out.
Spinelli himself asserted that the European unity was only the first step towards a world federation; and in this sense Europe has failed, because she didn’t give the contribution that was possible and proper to expect of her. In this perspective, the European Union must be re-thought as a big “internal” success but a big “external” defeat. It is true that not everything depended or depends on Europe, but it is nevertheless also true that the contribution given by the European Union to bring about a stronger and more democratic global governance has been limited and unsuccessful. As a paradoxical but inevitable result, nowadays there is no one of the so-called “European” problems that is not actually a global problem. Or rather we might say that Europe has almost no problems because no one of the problems the European Union is facing today is strictly European. The European issues of today, the European crises still in place, are simply regional reflexes of bigger global crises that beset the world and arise from the inability of the national-international political system to act globally through a federal and democratic approach. Migration, financial instability with increasing poverty and inequality, fundamentalist terrorism, climate change… none of these is a European problem in itself: they are all just symptoms at the European level of huge global problems that are not rationally answered by the political system; a global political system in its dimension, but still national-international from an organizational point of view.
So, this is exactly the Copernican inconsistency that the ECSC, the EEC and the EU have succeeded in handling at the European level, thanks to the premises set by Monnet and Schuman on the one hand, and to the political struggle of federalists like Spinelli on the other. The need for a federal, democratic, integrated political system, able to leave to the nations the national problems but to take upon itself at the same time at the regional level the regional problems. Why then this concept that we accepted as valid for the dialectics European Union vs. Nations is not valid for the dialectics European Union vs. the World?
Nowadays the global issues that affect Europe find no actor capable of making decisions and intervening in a scarcely democratic national-international system, lacking a true capacity of enforcement. Of course, the G7, G20, the UN Security Council, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and so on are all the embryos of a possible global governance, but they still have at their disposal reduced powers, are subjected to the principle of unanimity and have no trace of democracy within. Europe has truly done little for this political architecture, whose deficiencies are pouring onto the European continent.
In order to solve its crises, the 21st-century world, that nowadays is facing the same problems that the EU solved in the second half of the 20th century, needs to take advantage of the experience developed by that lab of supranational democracy that is the European Union. We need to strengthen the powers of the United Nations and of the international agencies, to get it to do the decisive step from confederacy to federalism, and finally democratize it. These are the principles and ideas for which Europe is known today globally: the rule of law, democracy, respect for human rights and welfare state.
However, what did Europe not do and what could it do in this direction? First of all, the European Union has been lacking a true policy aimed at helping the integration of other regions. As an Argentinean and citizen of Mercosur, I witnessed how after the initial efforts and in front of the first inevitable failures, the European Union retreated. Actually, today there is no European policy towards Mercosur, nothing about other regional initiatives, no policy brought forward by Europe with political, and not economic, criteria. Let’s make an example: in Latin America, the European Union has generous programs that support human, women’s and children’s rights and sustainable development, and so on, but no one is targeted at sustaining concrete actions for its regional unity.
A similar argument applies to the trade agreements between Mercosur and Europe that, once established, would create the biggest trading space in the world. Those agreements, once blocked by Kirchner’s Argentina, now can only find obstacles from European countries and officials who only cater to the interests of a little part of the European economy, the agri-food sector (in particular the French one), instead of seeing them with a more farsighted political perspective. In fact, in this world crossed by trade wars, should not escape to European officials the importance of creating a trade agreement that brings together two continents that share the political principles of European history, like democracy, human rights, republicanism, liberalism and the respect for individual rights.
What is the EU waiting for in order to get rid of its lowly interests and get involved in a commercial agreement that helps Mercosur to organize itself? It seems to me that this is a question to ask and that does not find today an answer that is up to the renown of the Union.
The European Union has also failed in promoting any democratic and federal reform of the United Nations. In particular of the Security Council, for which it continues to suggest nationalistic measures instead of a federal restructuring of the Council that follows the regional logic and includes:
- The removal of veto when circumstances of serious violations of human rights are present.
- The regionalization of the Council, adapting it to our times and committing all its member states to give rise to regional agreements and some kind of regional political unity, no matter how embryonic.
Finally, little has so far been achieved to support valid and forward-looking initiatives like the proposal to create a Parliamentary Assembly of the United Nations – an idea of an important group of NGOs. The idea of the creation of an embryo of global parliament through the development of an advisory agency of the United Nations General Assembly could now look as utopia, but utopia was also the European Union in the times of the Ventotene Manifesto, and even more so after thirty years of war, when France and Germany, bled dry in nationalist conflicts, made a deal to create the ECSC.
Utopia? So, if it’s not Europe that proposes the application of federalism and democracy at a global level, then who will do it? If it’s not the European Union and its success to push through the proposal of a Parliamentary Assembly of the United Nations (similar to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly which later originated the European Parliament), who will do it? It’s time to ask these questions. It’s time to look at the future of the world with the same foresight that Spinelli and the founding fathers of the United Europe knew how to put into practice in much more challenging times. The fate of the European Union itself is at stake. If we do not move towards federalism and democracy on the decisive global scale, there’s no hope for the world to avoid a tragedy similar to that which occurred in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century – or perhaps even a bigger one. If European leaders don’t have this ability to look at the world and at the future, they will turn a blind eye to the urges of history, as did those who were against every type of democratic union of the European continent because they thought that it was necessary first to proceed to democratize all European countries, an impossible project.
If Europe doesn’t go ahead in this direction, nobody will. And if nobody will do it we are going to increasingly be in the hands of nationalistic populisms or, to say it better, of the populist nationalisms that are now advancing en bloc all over the world, from the USA to Brexit, to the different nationalistic populisms getting ready to enter the European Parliament and destroy the European project from within. Stopping them is part of a decisive battle not only for Europe itself, but also for the world, because the collapse of the European integration process would mean a return to nationalism, xenophobia, conflict at the global scale. But that is why we must also look at the world and not only to Europe, and understand that now Europe is the only political power with global impact that has the opportunity to propose itself as a model of democracy and federalism to be looked at.
Those who believe that is necessary first to fix the European Union and then look at the world’s situation, are making now the same mistake as those who believed that before the regional union there was to make all the European countries civil and democratic. They are not federalist but rather European nationalists. Luckily for Europe and for the world, this has not been the prevailing opinion at the end of the war, but it was that of Schuman and Monnet, strengthened by the contributions of the federalists and Spinelli.
In their name and following their vision, it is necessary now to find the resources and the ways to bring to the global level, gradually but resolutely, the two principles that we do accept at the national and European level: federalism and democracy. If not now, when the Union itself is at the mercy of the global processes, when? And if not Europe, who? The European Union cannot give up its battle because, in so doing, would lose itself, as we well understand from the consequences of having done so in the previous years.
* This article was published in the Italian review Micromega, on 6 September 2018