As soon as I headed towards home, I mentally said good-bye to all my differently politically-orientated fellows. Their intimate pride relied in knowing that they were coming back to their battle-places in their political organizations, which did exist, were well known, were expecting them and were now prepared to celebrate them for their firm loyalty. My unique pride was completely different in nature, as no political organization was neither waiting for me nor preparing a celebration in my honor, or even awaiting for my presence in their ranks. I had to be the one who had to create a new and different movement for a new and different battle; a battle that only I was to consider – beyond its current non-existence – more important than those in which all my fellows were going to engage in. By then, I had with me only myself, a manifesto, some theses, and three or four friends who were waiting for me to finally know if the action to which I had been referring so much would really start.
Altiero Spinelli
(coming back from Ventotene)
I was in Ventotene, the beautiful island where Altiero Spinelli wrote the famous Manifesto for a Free and United Europe, and I was there to participate for the sixth time in the Federalist seminar. Everything looked fine until the woman beside me got nervous. As soon as she realized who we were, as soon as she heard all those young enthusiasts speaking in favor of the European Union, she cried: Europe is destroying everything! The Euro is destroying our economy! Stop the European Union, do me a favor!
She didn’t look as a fascist or a reactionary, and her three Vietnamese adopted children seemed to me a good argument in favor of her cosmopolitanism. And then she insisted: Europe is devil! May be she was not aware enough of the fact that the Europe of nations used to solve its financial crisis not with 10% of unemployment, but with a 10% of deaths. Maybe she was too busy studying and comparing the History of the first and the second part of the 20th European Century, as well as too young to remember genocide and war. But since many of the young people that were there for the seminar do have a slight chance only to get a decent job in the next years, she surely had a point. Then the seminar started and things got business-as-usual. Everybody, including me, agreed on the need of a new plan for overcoming austerity, reinforcing the federal instruments of economic policy and re-launching the European productive system. Carbon tax, Tobin tax, defense of wages and pensions, reinforcement of the Central Bank prerogatives and of the Eurozone, more investments on research and infrastructure and a greener economy were proposed as recipes for the future. Who could be against them? But the scream of the cosmopolitan mother was still echoing in my ears…
In each and every meeting of the seminar the hidden assumption was more or less the same: European problems are – indeed – European, and can, should and must be resolved at the European level. But, are they? Can they? Can anyone (nations or regions) establish a carbon and a Tobin tax, and change a significant part of its productive system into using alternative energies without damaging its global competitiveness? Can a regional entity adopt a Keynesian stimulus to the demand, without suffering the same kind of “drains” that Keynes described for nations almost eighty years ago?
Are the halt to climate change, the reduction of international conflicts, the management of migrations, the regulation of financial markets, and each and any of the basic troubles Europe faces today resolvable at the European level? And if the answer is NO, if the answer is “All the main problems that Europe is facing are global ones, and they can only be resolved at a global level”, and if despite that we insist in solving them at the European level: can we still consider ourselves federalists? Was not federalism about solving different problems at the different scale they occur?
I asked that, and then I had an answer. First, I was told, we can intervene at the European level, as there are regional institutions able to deliver active policies, but we cannot do the same at a global level. Therefore, the rational choice is intervening at a regional level, avoiding any kind of world utopianism, as there is nothing similar to the EU structure at the global level. Secondly, I was instructed, the rational strategy must be building a truly federal Europe first, and only once the process is fully completed, start thinking about the world. It does sound rational, does it not? Maybe. But, is it federalist?
Let me put it like this: if Spinelli, a Mussolini’s prisoner who had already spent ten years in prison, had thought this way, if he had considered that in those times there were not European but national institutions only, if he had proposed “Let’s build a democratic Italy, and a democratic Germany, and a democratic Spain, and then we start to think about a united and democratic Europe”, would the European Union have ever existed? Was this not the basic dissidence between Spinelli and the many Italian and European political forces that were in favor of the unity of Europe, but wanted to postpone it till the moment in which the democratic rebuilding of European nations happened? How many were the democratic nations in Europe before the start of the unification process? How many the democratic leaders? Were not national democracies in Europe the daughters of the regional integration and not their mothers? Was not the Ventotene Manifesto, and the foundation of the European Federalist Movement, and every act of Spinelli’s life, a denial of the strategy of working through the existing institutions, of the “step-by-step” strategy and of the principle of “first, focus on the smaller and easier things, and only later on the rest”?
Maybe Spinelli was wrong, but we can however consider the current realities and ask some questions about them. Is there any hope of resolving European unemployment without raising the global demand and, in order to do so, without a better global distribution of wealth? Is there any possibility of stopping global warming by switching the European economy into a green one, or this goal supposes a global policy and, therefore, some kind of world democratic institutions able to overcome national self-interests and implement it by legitimate means? Is there any future for the Euro as long as the dollar continues to be the global currency, allowing the United States to swamp the global market with dollars without paying the price of inflation, while the proposal made by the director of the Chinese Bank about creating a world currency based on a basket of the main currencies of the world sleeps in the fridge? What about the increasing inability of the United Nations to manage and reduce international conflicts, the rising uncontrolled movement of people through frontiers, the rising number and dimension of fiscal paradises, the lack of regulation of global financial markets, the increased risk of a catastrophic global pandemic and so on? It seems to me that all these are global troubles and that any policy that a national or regional structure delivers about each of them could be necessary and urgent (nobody denies it) but in the long term, at the end of the day, they are only temporary palliatives.
Finally: how could regional policies applied to global issues be the main task, the priority, if not the exclusive goal, of any federalist strategy? Are not European parties the most proper organizations to deliver them at the European level? Is not precisely the existence of European parties and EU institutions the living proof of the success of the past work done by Spinelli and the European federalist organizations, as well as the irrefutable evidence about the need to look ahead for new federal goals? Should not a truly federalist strategy leave European policies to European parties, EU institutions and other non-federalist organizations? Should not they prioritize the building of institutions at the global level in which they are – at the same time – more decisive and least existent?
Whatever we think about all this, we must agree on this simple fact: the two branches of the federalist movement – the European and the World ones – will not be remembered because of their interventions in existing institutions, but because of their decisive contribution to the creation of new ones: the European Union and the European Parliament (which overcame the European Economic Community) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), the truly seed of a global system of Justice. Both of them were the fruit of decades of hard efforts made by federalists, and extraordinary achievements, and a great contribution to the international community. Who could possibly doubt it? But the time has come to recognize that they are also children who have already escaped from the hands of their founding fathers and have their own life has come. Some advices here and it is OK. But when the lives of the fathers continue to rotate around their children nothing good can ever occur. A world federalism focused on the managing of the ICC, as well as a European federalism focused on the European Union’s policies, constitute an alteration of the federalist practice, which is and always was about the development of new institutions able to cope with the new scale of the problems caused by the globalization of social processes. They are also the best recipe for us federalists to become a sect of old nostalgic people, proud of a glorious past but unable to face and to cope with new challenges. If this is not wrong, the reform of the UN and the international financial institutions (World Bank and IMF), and the creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly as the embryo of a future World Parliament must be the priority for a true federalist strategy, as well as regional campaigns focused on institution- building, such as the transformation of the parliamentary assembly we call “European Parliament” into a true parliament and the development of a Latin-American Criminal Court against Transnational Organized Crime, among others.
Without a global perspective, all sort of regional federalisms – such as the European one – are doomed to turn into an expression of nationalism on an enlarged scale. Unless they believe in some ethnic or cultural superiority of Europeans over Americans (which should be even worse), the European Federalists, who are so critical about the role played by the United States of America and propose the United States of Europe as the solution of every global trouble, are in flagrant contradiction. Seven decades after the Ventotene Manifesto, the elementary truth is that its most famous paragraph, which starts by marking the emergence of a new “dividing line” between “progressive and reactionary forces”, and finishes by defining the latter by their decision of giving priority to “international unity” over any other consideration, must be applied to the European unity itself. The Ventotene Manifesto defined the unity of Europe not as the ultimate goal but as the first and necessary step towards a world federation. And the time for taking it seriously has come. Of course, a world federation here and now is a utopia, but the time for putting its constitution in the international agenda is now. Before global crises kill the dream of a European Federation or democracy inside the national states of the world..., or the world…
How do we know that this time has come? How could we know that the time to change the successful “Europe-first” strategy, that was rational at the end of the Second World War and constituted the base of the most amazing progressive process in the hiistory of human kind, has arrived? Well, the fact that any basic problem of Europe is only a local expression of a global one that cannot be resolved at the regional level is the proof. But, unfortunately, the European Union has been so successful in evolving its internal structure according to the new situations created by its own evolution, as it has been a complete disaster in the “external” front. No matter how insufficient are the European “internal” institutions, there is no possible comparison with the complete lack of a common European Union foreign policy, with the failure of the European support to the processes of regional integration in other continents, with the disagreement among national members of the EU on the UN Security Council reform, with the absence of any European strategy on the UN reform, and with the inexhaustible incapacity of the European Union to have a voice in every international conflict. This has converted the EU into a mere witness of what the real powers decide over the world, which, of course, includes Europe. The transformation of the European Union into a federation is becoming, therefore, a necessary but defensive goal; not the roof but the floor of any truly federalist strategy, supposing, but not admitting, that a European Federation could be achieved without a strong change in the global political structure. Thinking that the internal dynamic of Europe, a continent in which just 6% of the world population live, will prevail over the global winds of History, is the kind of naïve mirages that lead us to terrible catastrophes. A fully developed European Federation in a tyrannical and anarchic world ruled by big national powers, global financial markets and intergovernmental undemocratic organizations such as the UN Security Council, the G20 and the IMF is, here and now, a utopian project, and the difficulties that the European Union is facing at this very moment are the best example of that. Are these words against European federalist organizations? Is this a vindication of the World Federalist Movement? Not at all, as the WFM has also fallen into the same trap as the European federalist organizations: being seduced by the temptation of focusing on the management of the institution to which they “gave birth” – the International Criminal Court –, instead of moving toward the construction of new institutions that the accelerating globalization of social processes requires.
Federalism is one thing. European nationalism is another. The dream of a democratic, wealthy, pacific and fair Europe within an undemocratic, poor, warlike and unfair world is getting as unrealistic and reactionary as the dream of democratic nations within the frame of WWII was at Spinelli’s times. Europe, which has been as successful in building internal institutions, as unsuccessful in the development of a common foreign policy, in the support to the constitution of other regional integrations, in the federal and democratic reform of the United Nations and so on, must be a leading force for a global change. Otherwise, European policies will continue to fail, regional separatism and national populism will continue to gain ground, and cosmopolitan mothers and other European citizens will continue to shout against Altiero Spinelli’s dream.
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