(Radical, member of the European Parliament for the Green group)

"GREEN METAPHOR", Rome, July-August 1990

The past months have offered us sensations, thoughts, enthusiasms and hopes which were unimaginable until yesterday. The hundreds of thousands of people who defeated the authoritarian and illiberal regimes of Central and Eastern Europe in the name of freedom and democracy, have succeeded in recovering, for all of us, the great utopias of peace between the peoples and social justice.

Today we have the important responsibility of imagining and building a policy for Europe and of Europe, in a context in which the events we witnessed highlight the major contradictions and the major challenges of our times: environment and development, North and South, the quest for peace in a world in which the centres of war,violence and alienation become every day more explosive, democracy as the necessary place to mend contrasts, compare differences, conceive something new.

It is evident that Europe, especially Western Europe, can and must play a role in this sense, This will however occur only if we Westerners will be capable of grasping the potential of change inherent in the events that, from the East, have swept through the life of our developed and consumerist Europe, burdened by latent contrasts and national claims, selfish and scarcely solidarist, a Europe which is inadequate to give rapid and effective political answers to the challenge of redefining itself from the Atlantic to the Urals, imagining new values, new institutional patterns, a new security system, rediscovering its culture, conceiving a common development model, building justice and peace between men and between mankind and nature.

It is therefore obvious that for all those who have been working in these years on conceiving an ecological reconversion, a reallotment of the resources and of the investment priorities and a change in the ways of living and consuming, according to socially and ecologically compatible criteria, this challenge cannot be missed.

Two are the fields in which to develop this policy: the environmental field and the political-institutional field.

The scarce information concerning the environmental situation of the East is worrying, not only becasue of the very high pollution rates, for the inadequate or unapplied legislations, for the technological backwardness, but also for the absence of certain and scientific data and for the marginality of the environmental issue both in the public opinion and in the government authorities. To all this we must add an inconsiderate rush toward the Western economic system, which is condidered a target to be reached, and not an experience to depart from to conceive an autonomous way (or a common European way) toward a new development model, capable of respecting the limits of environmental compatibility and the principles of social equality.

The recent results of the first free elections in the East of Europe seem to be a confirmation of this idyllic view of the West. The need to provide answers to the primary needs, which are not guaranteed by a centralized economy, the yearning toward an economic wealth, identified with the Western life style, have caused an acceptance and an emphatization of our production system as the only one capable of guaranteeing those targets. This trend, which has no doubts influenced the electoral results, interacts with a West that is eager for new markets, for labour force and for productive structures that are free from the restraints of environmental and social safeguard, which are considered too onerous.

In order to oppose this tendency, whose foreseeable results would be incompatible, from an environmental point of view, with the whole of Europe, it is necessary to create an exchange of scientific knowledge with the forces and the people that are working on these problems in the East, an exchange of instruments, of legislations, enabling, first of all, the creation of a common knowledge and therefore of a unitarian political project as regards all the institutions and all the organs in which the future political, economic and social configuration of Europe is being discussed. An environmental policy as the guiding line for the redefinition of the pattern of living, producing and consuming, for social guarantees, for human and political rights; a policy based on institutional changes for a reunification of Europe beyond recurring national interests, beyond the borders that still exist and beyond the resumption of ethnic strife.

It seems to me that this is an immediate need, because if it is true that the European Community is inadequate to provide political answers to the challenge at stake, incapable as it is of conceiving its own political and democratic reality in a short term, it is equally certain that the existing Europe, the Europe of business, tradesmen, multinationals, oligopolies, financial empires, is already giving those answers in terms of new profits, new business, the occupation of new markets, in the absence of a political control, and of any restraint as regards an adequate social and environmental safeguard.

In this context, the transformations occurred in the East, which could play a positive role in the process of a European political integration, run the risk of turning into disruptive impulses of the federalist political project. It is therefore obvious that the second problem which I had mentioned becomes a central problem: either we relaunch the European federalist and anti-state-centred project, capable of federating peoples and ethnic groups, and we accelerate it, or the challenge of a Europe centre of a supra-national government, capable of making its contribution to the major challenges of the year 2000, is already lost. To give a tangible content to this project means to link the immediate needs of the people with an institutional and democratic perspective, it means to help the people to recognize in a federate Europe an answer, not only in economic terms, but also in social and democratic terms.

It must be said that this institutional project, whose principles are already laid down in the 1984 treaty, even it does not succeed in becoming a reality, is a challenge especially for the West: this acceleration drive coming from the East can, in fact, lead toward a democratization of the Community, inducing the single governments to give back to the people, through the Parliament, those powers which had been seized in the present institutional pattern, and to lay the premises of a Community capable of imagining ever more extensive levels of exertion of power, open to new adhesions, willing to rethink itself in an extended and different context, or, on the other hand, it can increase a concentration of national strife caused by the new potential productive possibilities opened up in the East, with a further enhancement of the powers of the Council (that is, of the governments), hindering any democratic evolution. All this is already happening, and will develop in a short period of time: the institutional c

hanges are already in progress, they will be formalized in the inter-governmental Conference: at that stage, all will have been decided. Not only the decisions concerning the Community, but also those concerning the future development of Europe.

I therefore believe that it our duty to understand to what extent the need for Europe which is emerging from the peoples, the regions, the ethnic groups of our continent, is an occasion that should not be wasted to resume and renew, with courage and enthusiasm, the heritage and the federalist project of Altiero Spinelli (*), conscious of how much power of attraction this project can have for a united Europe, which alternative there could be to the blocks system or to the return of past nationalisms or ethnic illusions, and what barrier it represents for the risks of instability that exist in the European situation, of how much it is necessary to propose and support an ecological reconversion of our ways of producing, consuming and living.

There is work to be done for everyone.

(*) Altiero Spinelli: Imprisoned under the fascist regime (from 1929 to 1942) for his anti-fascist activities. In 1942, together with Ernesto Rossi, one of the founders of the Radical Party, he wrote the federalist manifesto of Ventotene, which stated that only a federal Europe would be capable of truly averting the danger of a return of fratricidal wars on the European continent. At the end of the war, Spinelli was among the founders of the European Federalist Movement. He then became a member of the European Commission. In 1979 he was elected member of the European Parliament, where he conceived the project of a treaty that was later adopted by the European Parliament in 1984, treaty known as the "Spinelli Project".