United States of Europe immediately or back to chaos

Let us say it quite frankly: the European Parliament - the only EEC democratic institution which represents 240 million European citizens - is not for Gorbachev's "Common Home" or for the "Confederation" suggested by Mitterrand, but for the United States of Europe ("European Union"), for a federal sovereign State, for a federal Constitution, for a State based on a system of laws, within which the autonomies, the interdependences, the liberties, the cultures, will be potentiated, democratically organized, as it is or should be in the United States of America, or in the new USSR conceived by the "radicals" headed by Yeltsin, and by the anti-jacobinic and anti-nationalist federalists.

"Common Home", "Confederation" will be able to enact the enlargement and the historical and political projection of the European Federation, of the political and institutional unity of the countries and the citizens who are part ow ill become part of the present EEC. Or else these expressions, "Common Home" and "Confederation" will simply have been the means to prevent the birth of the most modernly democratic and strongest State of the world (from a commercial, productive, scientific, numerical, cultural and political point of view), aimed at accomplishing a world Community of law, of political democracy, of non-violence and peace, of justice and freedom. Or these words will simply have been the occasion to elude the tragical problems of survival of the planet and of human beings, after the tragedy of neo-fascisms and "real socialisms", to which the world of the "real democracies", of the national States and of their leading class has widely contributed.

Already in 1984 the European Parliament had officially adopted and proposed to the other EEC institutions and to the member countries a new Treaty, a sort of Constitution of the European Union. In most of the twelve states, in the 1984 elections and then in the 1989 elections for the European Parliament, the electorate has voted this project and this method. In these days, as the Institutional Commission and the Political Commission of the European Parliament meet in Rome, we will charge the former Prime Minister and presently member of the European Parliament, Emilio Colombo, of preparing a new project for the Constitution of the European Union within two months.

The cost of the political and democratic non-Europe is becoming unsustainable and tragical. Its absence in terms of immediate alternative, already formally constituted and operative, could drive Central and Eastern Europe, now freed of the communist yoke, into chaos and economic, productive, social disaster, forcing it to a sort of national-democratic "Restoration" of a past that was one of the causes of the establishment of fascist and communist dictatorships, as Czechoslovakia especially cannot but dramatically remember.

The Germans of the two Republics have understood this all too well, having introduced the 7 million citizens of the former democratic republic unconditionally into the European Community, with a no-frills policy.

Now I ask you, I ask the great, dearest President Havel, I ask the Czechoslovakian democrats (and the Hungarian and Polish democrats) to adopt the European Parliament's guide-line, and not that of the national states of Western Europe. The "Confederation" will see any other member-state with the exclusion of Germany especially and France and Great Britain secondly as politically and institutionally peripheral and marginal, and economically and productively, culturally and socially subordinate.

It is a fact that the "economic"" and "cultural" unity, if it is not organized by a state based on a system of laws, institutionally democratic and multinational, based on human, civil and political rights of the human being, in every country and at every latitude, will be pure appearance. We will all be in the hands of the military-industrial and the agro-industrial complex, which are incapable of ensuring the world with an order worthy of being called such, which for decades have aimed at the stabilization of the communist dictatorships and of the Soviet empire and on the destabilization of the world, first of all of the non-European and non-"Western" areas, hectically arming the dictators of all the planet, Saddam Hussein, Menghistu and Assad in first place, in convergence with the former policy of Moscow and Prague.

A "democracy in one country" or in "one system of countries" is not feasible, in the long run, as "socialism in one country" hasn't (and luckily!). The problem of "real democracy" which could be related to democracy just as "real socialism" was related to the ideals of social and libertarian humanitarianism, which is causing, in so many parts of Europe, the tragedy of partyism, should not be underestimated, if we want to avoid resuming the tragedy of the policies of Daladier and Chamberlain, Benes and Masarik in a very short time, sooner than year 2000.

If Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland - together or separately - immediately asked to become members of the European Community, as of immediately, pronouncing themselves as from now in favour of the European Union, and strengthening their supporters in the country, the European Parliament, the governments such as the Italian, Belgian, Dutch ones, and strong German, French, Spanish leading groups, the cause would be won, human, civil, political rights to democracy would become the insurmountable basis of the State and of social order.

More than once, together with my colleagues of the radical party and the European federalists of all parties, in this perspective, we received the formal support of the absolute majority of the European parliamentarians. In Italy, generally present in the oppositions, we have contributed in forming vast "European majorities" in Parliament in the course of at least five legislatures and in the three legislatures of the European Parliament directly elected by the European citizens.

Today the confrontation is no longer between europeanists and declared anti-europeanists. The confrontation today is between generic "europeanists", who emphasize questionable feelings and reversible abstractions, who seem to present "Europe" as the "destiny", a sort of Mystical Body or Communion of Saints, a "culture", careful in maintaining the maximum of prerogatives, privileges, traditional power and sub-power, inequalities and injustices, "protected" and "historically" realist democracies, on the one hand; and on the other, those who want to build in a lay and precise manner federalism, European federalism. unquestionable democracy, society and state based on laws, starting from the immediate evolution of the EEC into European Union.

To obtain this, it is necessary to fight, with force, decision, urgency.

There can be no ecological, juridical, economic, social, cultural safety in the minimalist illusion, in the sorrow, unfertile "realist" utopia, in the persistence of the divorce between science, conscience, human feelings and "politics", and power. It seems to us that some of the preannounced demonstrations, in Prague also, are the continuity of old impotences instead of heralding new values.

The hundreds of Czechoslovakian citizens who are they too organizing the radical party, transnational and transpartisan, which counts by now more members in Moscow and Prague than in Milan or Palermo, are the precious testimonial of a possibility, versus an unfortunately dangerous and negative "probability". I can assure all those who are, unfortunately very few, on that road, that the European Parliament, the peoples of Europe who have been able to express themselves democratically, hope that it will be covered rapidly and without delays.