Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa suddenly passed away in Rome on December 18, 2010, during a dinner he was giving to his friends on the occasion of his 70th anniversary. With this obituary, The Federalist Debate intends to remember a remarkable man and a precious contributor to this review.
Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa has lived with civil and moral dedication his being simultaneously an Italian, a European and a world citizen. Provided with a rigorous intellectual education and an unusual capacity of realizing things, he was able to give on every occasion a contribution to the advancement of humanity. In fact, Padoa-Schioppa has been one of the creators of the euro. Convinced of the necessity for Europe to proceed on the road of monetary unification, he gave the theoretical demonstration of that by pointing out, through the idea of the “quartet”, that it was impossible to go on in the European integration process if the States were allowed to keep the power of changing the value of their currencies.
As the European Community's General Director of Economic and Monetary Affairs, he promoted in the early 1980s all the necessary steps to build the European Monetary System. Delors entrusted to him the preparation of the works of the Committee, set up by the European Council, which drafted the project of a monetary union, later adopted by the Maastricht Treaty at the end of 1991. It was natural then that the Italian Minister of the Treasury, Ciampi, proposed him for the Board of the freshly-instituted European Central Bank, where he dedicated himself to the setting up of the technical infrastructures necessary to make it operational in a very short time.
After he left the ECB, he worked with all his energy and his great talent in the fight for giving the European Union an accomplished federal structure, and to that end he was appointed to the Presidency of Notre Europe in order to continue Delors' work. So he moved from Rome to Brussels, Frankfurt and Paris, and was able to carry out a synthesis of the action of Spinelli and Monnet: he contributed as a founding member to the birth of the Spinelli Group in the European Parliament.
Padoa-Schioppa then accepted Romano Prodi's proposal to take the post of Minister of the Economy in his government, with the task of bringing Italy back to the center of the European unification process. After a few months, the economic trend was reversed and the financial position of the Italian State was back in the virtuous European circle. Debt went down from 120% to 103% of GDP, and the deficit in 2007 was lower than 2%. The economic turn produced by Padoa-Schioppa cannot be questioned, and has been marking the political and economic debate even after he left the Government.
Padoa-Schioppa had become a prominent Italian and European citizen, and could therefore act as a world citizen, in which guise he worked for giving humanity common rules after he became president of the foundation tasked with the unification of the accounting principles of company balance sheets, but in particular with his initiatives, following Triffin's teachings, for a world monetary standard, thus leaving an indelible mark on the future structure of the world monetary system.
The federalist thought was a key reference in his intellectual mindset, and he knew how to translate it into concrete actions. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa was deeply impressed by his participation in the federalist seminar in Ventotene, Italy, in 2003, where he saw the spirit of Spinelli and Albertini still hovering in the air. And we cannot forget the articles that he gladly wrote for or agreed to be also published in The Federalist Debate, in which he was always urging people, in particular the young, to have a broader vision of the world than one limited to one's nation, and to consider first and foremost the general interest instead of private interest in public life.
We can say that Tommaso was able to carry more than “one particle of sand” to the construction of the future of Europe and of the world, and in this way he rescued Italy from the present dark times.
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