Sometimes we forget that the thought of unifying Europe in a Federation – born as a concrete project, as opposed to utopia, in the second World War...

Sometimes we forget that the thought of unifying Europe in a Federation – born as a concrete project, as opposed to utopia, in the second World War – does not aim at a simple ceasefire among countries that for centuries have fought each other, disseminating death. It is a project that has its roots in our collective crimes: totalitarianisms and wars. It searches for the reason why people reduce themselves to such a misery that they lose all hope, yearn for an astounding earthly Redeemer and imagine salvation crushing the neighbours: the weakest, most often. It is said that the reasons which pushed Europeans to unify in the 1950s have now vanished because the aim has been accomplished: war among them is nowadays unthinkable. This should explain the reason why there are no more statesmen of the likes of Jean Monnet, Altiero Spinelli, Alcide De Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer: men branded by the Thirty Years' War which inaugurated the first half of the twentieth century.

Those who talk this way neglect a fundamental aspiration of the founding fathers, and its extreme relevance to the present: the aspiration to look with an inquiring eye on the question of misery. They also neglect what the united Europe has tried to do, in order to create not only political but also social and economic institutions. In 1946 we left behind us the twentieth century’s crimes with a pact of mutual assistance among citizens. It is called Welfare because it was shaped in England thanks to the plan conceived during the war – on mandate of the British government – by William Beveridge, one of Federal Union’s founders: the Welfare State keeps the indigent, the outsider, the elderly, the pariah in a safety status.

This is the reason why it is such a serious oversight to think that Europe accomplished its mission, that the heroic times are over, that the Union should nowadays only be the strict guardian of public accounts. As after the war, we need today Founding fathers and heroic Inventors: if today’s crisis is a kind of war, it is urgent to imagine long lasting institutions, so that the troubles coming back (misery, inequality) will not generate again social despair, resentment and that hate of the neighbour which is only extinguished when a scapegoat is found (yesterday Jews, today immigrants, in the future maybe elderly people who “die so late”...).

Abolishing Misery: this was the title of the book that the economist Ernesto Rossi – co-author of the Ventotene Manifesto with Altiero Spinelli and Eugenio Colorni – wrote in prison in 1942 and published in 1946: «It is necessary to unite all of our forces to fight misery, for the same reasons that in the past gave rise to the fight against smallpox and plague: in order to avoid contagion of the whole social body». The challenge today is the same, and it is a responsibility that national and European public institutions should take on. Leaving it to religious groups or to philanthropists would mean to slip back to the times when charity was the only relief. In many Arab countries, Islamic extremists provide for the Welfare, transforming it in a confessional institution. This is really not the model to emulate: the European states replaced the Church since the thirteenth century, creating secular institutions open to everybody. Also united Europe invests on common bodies because – as Jean Monnet said – «individuals are necessary to obtain the change, but institutions are necessary to safeguard it». And he adds, citing the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel: “Every human’s experience has always a new beginning; only institutions become wiser: they accumulate collective experience, and from this experience and wisdom, individuals submitted to the same rules will see their behaviour, not their nature, transformed”. This is also secular: the will to change behaviours, not humankind’s nature. It is important to remember how the Welfare State was born, because future electoral campaigns will deal with these issues – in Italy as in Europe – and in the defendant dock we’ll find the very medicine  which we decided to take after 1945, in the hope to abolish both war and misery. It is not improbable, for instance, that the Italian rightwing parties – not yet amended – will transform Europe in the villain: the rules that impoverish and humiliate us would stem from Europe, and its ‘external interference’.

Today, providing Europe with a new foundation and by concentrating on the battle against misery means understanding why the Union requires from us both things: the respect of certain common rules, and at the same time the invention of new institutions designed to give more confidence to the ever growing army of people who are unemployed or trapped in temporary jobs. It means understanding that the battle against public debt is not an obsession nor an axe: it is the generational pact that the Union asks us to sign, given the fact that the single states, afraid as they were of electoral results, did not do the job. The Treaty of Maastricht forbids to charge future generations with the debts that the present generation made in order to have some goods without paying the respective taxes, writes Alfonso Iozzo, economist and European federalist, in a paper on the re-invention of the Welfare State¹.

It would be worth reading this paper, which rests on James Meade’s studies, Nobel prize for economics, about the way to guarantee a minimum wage to the whole society. The necessary condition is to extinguish public debt, and to transform it into public credit: a patrimony  to be kept for itself by the provident state; its revenue would be destined to financing the Welfare State – often not only undervalued but also disliked –, rather than to current expenses. Mr Iozzo is convinced, just as the liberal Mr Meade, that the nations’ or Europe’s wealth (the GDP) should be calculated with new rules – Meade called his state Agathotopia, i.e. the good place where to live. The criterion is to be no more the difference between the cost of manufactured goods and the revenue they produced, but the state’s patrimony, the way it is managed: the aim is to know if to future generations will be left a higher or a lower capital than the one we received from past generations. The Maastricht rules use this method, prescribing as a first step the extinction of public debt.

The second step is still to be taken: the transformation of debt into credit, which would protect citizens in times of crisis. Not everybody has the Norwegian oil as patrimony, but Oslo is a model and every state has water, wind, and possibly new energy sources, all of them public goods consumed by individuals. Since sooner or later Norway will run out of oil and gas, it created a pension Fund with the energy revenues, which is safe from market hazard. Only 4% of the Fund can be used annually for public expenditure, leaving to the citizens a capital at their disposal for the future, when the patrimony will be exhausted (through the Fund, every Norwegian is the virtual owner of around 100,000 euro, whilst every Italian has a share of public debt of around 30,000 euro).

After fighting public debts, Europe could think about similar initiatives, pushing states toward the guarantee of a new social security. Even more, it could make everyone understand that wasted water and polluted air should now be included into the costs: they are non-renewable goods, just like Norwegian oil. There is much talking about the need to relaunch economic growth. But it will not be the growth of yesterday, and this truth should be told: because industrialised countries will not have the same growth rate as Asia or South America, and because our growth will be at the forefront only if it will be ecologically sustainable. Here lies the importance of the electoral rounds in different countries of the Union: not only the national ones, but also the 2014 election of the European Parliament. Those who will shout against taxes and against a Europe too grim and severe to be obeyed, promise a fictitious world, a Cockaigne-land where everyday is Sunday, but a fraud. Better to know it beforehand, than too late. Better to rediscover heroism, which we always need.

¹ Alfonso Iozzo, “Meade's Social Dividend: from Debt to Public Patrimony”, The Federalist Debate, Year XXIV, Number 3, November 2011