The Nobel Peace Prize award to the EU, in a moment in which one of the most serious crises of its history is in progress, has a double meaning. On the...

The Nobel Peace Prize award to the EU, in a moment in which one of the most serious crises of its history is in progress, has a double meaning. On the one hand, it represents the recognition that the most important achievement of European unification is peace. On the other, it underlines that, owing to the unaccomplished character of the construction of the European Union, that precious good can be lost, and therefore the time has come to bring the project to conclusion. The implicit warning in the prize communiqué is that it is necessary to give to the European institutions the powers that would allow them to defeat the disintegration forces and overcome the democratic deficit.   After centuries of war, Europe has never before experienced such a long period of peace as the one following the end of the Second World War. Today it is acknowledged that this is the fruit of European unification. “War is as old as mankind, but peace is a recent invention”, wrote Henry Sumner Maine. War has always been considered as a normal event in political life, the instrument for resolving conflicts impossible to settle through diplomatic means. The European Union is the most important political innovation of our time: it is the most successful attempt to build a new form of statehood at the international level.   National governments have betrayed the revolutionary nature of that project, have made its realization slow and hesitant, so that it still remains unaccomplished. For the governments, peace and European unity are a necessity: the necessity for trying to solve together the problems that the States are no longer able to face separately. For the great majority of the population – that have never seen with their own eyes a war in Europe – peace is simply taken for granted. Only for the federalists European unity is a project. Only the federalists, who have been actively engaged in building peace, are fully aware of the value of that achievement and of the institutional innovation that made it possible.   The relations among the EU States are the most regulated in the world. Its political institutions impose limits to their sovereignty, and these are potentially the model of a constitutionalization process of international relations. That process started with the Franco-German reconciliation and the Schuman declaration of 1950, and with the foundation, the following year, of the first European Community (the European Coal and Steel Community). With that act, France and Germany, which had been divided by national hatred and had fought the three bloodiest wars that history recalls, renounced to deal with the problem of the European order in hegemonic terms and initiated the construction of common institutions as necessary for maintaining peace. The Union enlargement to peoples that had suffered from fascist (Spain, Portugal and Greece) and communist dictatorships (Central and Eastern European Countries) is a grand pacification process between States whose regimes were representing the legacy of divisions that Europe had known respectively in the era of world wars and in that of the cold war. Today the enlargement concerns the Balkan region, that at the end of the last century has known the horrors of civil war. However, Europe's pacification without a democratic and federal government did not bring to its citizens the benefits of a large economic, borderless space and of the first form of international democracy, of which the European Parliament is the laboratory.   The Europe that would have deserved the Peace Prize is the one that does not exist yet. It is the one outlined by Spinelli seventy years ago in the Ventotene Manifesto, where one can read that Europe would fall again in its old mistakes if it will not bring to completion the construction of a federal union. The Europe we have in front of us is the one that has still been unable to bury its tragic past. The one that has dug an ever deeper ditch between its institutions and its citizens. What is the meaning of the return of fascist political movements, of nationalism and racism, of an economic crisis even more devastating than that of 1929, which has produced 25 million jobless people and has progressively dismantled the welfare State to fill up the big hole of sovereign debts? What Europe is that which is continuously splitting to defend national interests and is unable to speak with one voice to the world?   The answer to such questions is written in the Ventotene Manifesto. The national States must cede the control of the economy and security to a European government. The Federation is the new form of political organization that allows to realize Europe's unity in an irreversible way without wiping out the independence of nations, to extend democracy beyond national boundaries, to bring to all the peoples of the continent security and well-being, to propose to the world a model of solidarity among nations as an alternative to violence and national selfishness.   The cost of non-Europe has become unbearable for the citizens, the workers, the young and the women. In order to reconcile the citizens with the European project, it is necessary that Europe goes beyond the austerity policies and promotes a plan of sustainable development, and, simultaneously, starts dealing with the reform of European institutions, crucially needed to overcome its deficit of democratic legitimation. It is necessary to initiate the construction of a European Federation from the euro-zone countries, and fix the schedule and the stages of such a process, that shall lead up to convene a constituent Assembly/Convention within 2013, tasked with the drafting of a Constitution. The Constitution shall be ratified by a referendum to be held together with the European elections of 2014 in the countries that have participated in the drafting of the Constitution.