ABSTRACT: The project of an economic European union without political powers and without significant institutional reforms is a deceptive plan. Moreover, reducing European electoral organisms to purely representative organs does certainly not provide the world with a praise-worthy demonstration of democracy.

(For the United States of Europe, edited by Roberto Cicciomessere, Gianfranco Dell'Alba, Gianfranco Spadaccia - Supplement of Notizie Radicali n.68 of the 5th of April 1988).

Europe is not a romantic dream, it is an urgent political need. It is not the wish to recover a power lost and transferred, at the end of the second world war, to the two superpowers U.S. and USSR, that urges us to solicit the United States of Europe and that makes us painfully aware of Europe's absence from the negotiations table where Gorbachev and Reagan meet. It is the awareness that none of the great problems of our age can be politically tackled and effectively handled at the level and in the context of the present national states: the question is that of controlling the impact and the consequences of new technologies, or of facing the causes of the great issues of our age which could endanger the balance of the planet and the very possibilities of its survival (relationships between North and South of the world, the progression of the desert in Africa and the destruction of the forests in Europe and in the Americas, the gap in the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect, the growing pollution of air and

water, the new forms of crime and the swelling of mega cities have explosive effects, comparable to those of the atomic bomb, if considered in perspective).

What is worrying us is not the lack of power, but the lack of responsibility - as a consequence of their impotence - of the European states as regards the possibility of tackling and handling the great problems of our epoch. Europe is the second great industrial pole of the North of the world, and as such already represents, thanks to the treaties of Rome, which have given rise to the European Economic Community and the European Community for nuclear energy, a common market of continental dimensions. This economic power continues to be accompanied by a poor inter-governmental coordination, and an absence of political responsibility. The agreement reached by the 12 governments of the Community with the so called Single Act confirmed this conception: a purely economic unity with no political powers and no European democratic controls. This is a deceptive plan, because a unitarian European economy and the complete fulfilment of a single market cannot be achieved without a common currency, a Central bank and a c

ommunity Government. But if this model were impossible to carry out, we would provide the whole world with an example of selfish fragmentation and international irresponsibility, which could only aggravate the further weakening of the already weak structure of the United Nations, and all the phenomena of division and disjunction which in the Third World represent the tragical result of colonialism. Not only, but we could not complain, if in the absence of European responsibility the two superpowers took decisions for us as well, considering, as they do, the European States not only of the East but also of the West more and more like satellite states of their respective empires. Europe,for those who are democrats and believe democracy to be the most effective ruling system invented by mankind up to now, it is also an urgent democratic necessity.

Since the signing of the treaties of Rome, and more and more so if the process envisaged by the so called Single Act will go on, National states have progressively deprived themselves of certain tasks and of a consistent part of their powers, which have been passed on to the organs of the Community, that is, to the executive Commission as far as the powers of initiative and executive functions are concerned, and especially to the Council of Ministers as regards decisional and legislative powers. But in fact this phenomenon has produced effects only on the national government-parliament relationship. While the national parliaments have lost real power of control and impulse - with the significant exception of Denmark and, partly, of Great Britain - the governments instead have increased their influence, granting greater powers to the Council of the Community, abolishing as such the principle of majority vote, which would have allowed for a minimum of supranationality. All this has damaged the Commission, the

decisional capacity of which is presently very weak. This phenomenon has also meant that an increasing series of legislative and control powers have

been withdrawn from national parliaments, without however transferring them to the European Parliament, which the governments of the 12 member states maintain void of effective powers, in spite of the fact that it is directly elected by the peoples of Europe.

We are building a 'technocratic' edifice, void of parliamentary controls, and therefore basically non-democratic. Europe, which has produced the best and the worst of modern civilization, and among the best things there are the parliamentary ruling systems and democratic Parliaments, from this point of view as well runs the risk of conveying a negative model to the rest of the world which is dominated by intolerance, authoritarianism, single party regimes and military dictatorships.