ABSTRACT: Europe has accumulated an enormous structural delay with regard to the "the industrial-military power that governs the world". For this reason it is urgently necessary to take up the "challenge" of the European Parliament for the creation of a European Political Union. The Italian government, which is committed to supporting the requests of the European Parliament, must support the need at the Milan summit of calling an Inter-governmental Conference for drawing up the Treaty of Union to be submitted for ratification by the individual nations. This conference must be called even if not all the countries of the community give their consent.

(IL TEMPO, May 29, 1985)

Europe is in crisis with sterile "nationalistic" illusions that on a world-wide level are producing political aberrations and unprecedented inhuman tragedies. This decadent and paralysed Europe, with its powerless governments and soulless national or international administrations, its lobbies and financial or ideological multinational institutions, once again finds itself confronting the federalist "Utopia" of Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli, and of Eugenio Colorni, who challenged from Ventotene the national-statists of right and left in the name of a federalist democracy with necessarily new frontiers.

From that time on, for decades, we chose in the name of realism the "easy" road of "imperial" guarantees rather than the more arduous but lasting one of European federal structures created by Europeans for Europeans.

We are now at the point of "redde rationem". The same Western "empire" is the "vacuum" of Europe rather than animated and protected Europe.

We have accumulated such a structural and infra-structural delay, such a technological and scientific gap, so marginal a culture and civil and political subservience towards what President Eisenhower - in the name, I think of all free Westerners - denounced as "the industrial-military power that governs the world - to make the mind anguished and incredulous before what yet is the unavoidable way of understanding it.

And yet history, in great part that of nameless men, is offering us a new possibility of different choices. But it may also be the last possibility, even for those who do not cultivate apocalyptic finalities that time often takes on the task of disproving.

This is an occasion that must not be missed. The challenge of Ventotene - after forty years - is today the challenge of the European Parliament which legitimately launches it in the name of 300 million citizens on behalf of a political and popular Europe that exists and asks to be heard and understood without deceits and distractions of any kind.

The challenge today is precise, punctual, political, projected and programmatic: it is made concrete in the treaty establishing the European Union, developed, adopted and confirmed by the European Parliament through the vote of the great majority of its members under the urging and the leadership of Altiero Spinelli according to the logic of the federalist struggle itself which has lasted - for good reason - for forty years.

This project is not ideologically "federalist": it is the fruit of a compromise won among all the political forces represented in the single European body endowed with democratic legitimacy. A compromise that cannot and thus should not be submitted to the "judgement" of national chanceries, but honoured by national parliaments and governments, the which can reject them or set in motion the constitutional procedures for ratification that will put them into effect.

If the heads of state and the governments of the ten countries of the [European] Community - plus those of Spain and Portugal - meeting in Milan June 28-29 for the European Council have the capacity to take up the challenge of reasonableness and hope, they will have to then convene an Inter-governmental Conference, asking it to propose eventual modifications of "its"

project to the European Parliament and will come to terms with the Parliament itself on the definitive text of the treaty to be submitted for ratification by the individual nations.

The Italian government has already thrice committed itself to defending the European Parliament project and to obtaining a consensus with the other countries of the Community and to starting the ratification procedure.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, before the coming meetings in Stresa (Foreign Council informal meeting on June 8-9) and in Milan (European Council on June 28-29) will have to furnish proofs of their facts and capacities, and to let at least the Parliament know if they are committed to ensuring:

a) that the Conference of Governments for European Union be called in order to work out with the European Parliament the projected treaty to be submitted to the individual nations for ratification;

b) that the Conference of Governments be called even if not all the nations of the Community do not give their consent in Milan;

c) that the Conference has priority over the assumption of specific commitments such as the unhindered movement of people, goods, services and capital and the launching of the Eureka project for new technologies, inasmuch as these commitments can only be respected within a renewed Community.

This last point may seem excessively "rigid", but without this weapon effectively brandished and possibly used, the conservative blackmail of immobility and paralysis will win out for the nth time.

The historical situation demands these goals and makes imprudent any uncertainty or hesitation. I hope that our diplomacy will want to make this understood by our "politics".

If it does not come to life in Milan, Europe will return to the road of decadence and defeat.