ABSTRACT: In order to seriously address the various obstacles to a process of real European integration, it is necessary to organize - as Altiero Spinelli had understood - a new political formation, truly transnational and transparty, whose characteristic should be that of not acting as an opponent of the various national parties on their territories.

(For the United States of Europe, edited by Roberto Cicciomessere, Gianfranco Dell'Alba, Gianfranco Spadaccia - Supplement to Radical News N. 68 of 5 April 1988)

The quasi-total majority of European political forces - with the exception of the English Labour party, a small Danish formation, the French communists and Gaullists, the Greek Pasok and the German Grünen - agree on the need to achieve a European Union, i.e. a European political integration, with the creation of balanced and separated powers. The draft Union Treaty, in fact, was approved by a large majority by the European Parliament during the previous legislature with the unfavorable vote and the abstention only of the above mentioned political groups.

Similarly, the European public opinion is largely in favour of the European Union, as proven by the six-monthly polls carried out by Eurobarometer.

On the other hand, there is almost total disagreement on the time requirements and on the conditions for the achievement of the European Union. Unfortunately, therefore, it is all too easy to say that at the state of the interests and of the political wills of the parties of the countries of the Community, unless unforeseeable political events take place, not only the European Union will not be achieved in the following twenty years, but even the modest project for the complete integration of the single market, which should be achieved, according to the Luxembourg Single Act, by 1992, will fail in all likelihood.

This contradiction between enunciation and effective federalist commitment of the parties of the European parties can partly be explained on the basis of the incompatibility between the corporative or national interests represented by the political groups and by the project to transfer the powers to the new European institutions. The risk, of not being able to use, for electoral purposes, part of the means of social and economic control which are in the hands of the national parties, dampens every Europeanist enthusiasm. We need only think of the consequences on the centres of national political power caused by the opening of public procurements to the European competition, or the community coordination of state subventions to the various economic sectors.

Another anti-Europeanist element is determined not only by the interests of those economic groups that are "parasitical" with regard to the national State, but also by the big European multinationals which on the one hand advocate the liberalization of the European market and of the exchanges, and on the other prefer to have a weak and controllable Commission and Council rather than strong community institutions capable of carrying out an effective control and intervention on the economy, possibly also determined to establish very strict anti-trust regulations.

Obviously, those social corporations that thrive on the inefficiencies and on State welfare are tepid toward every prospect of overcoming the national State.

During the last years of his life, Altiero Spinelli (1) realized all this and more; throughout his life, he believed that the process of integration was made compulsory by historical mechanisms, and that it was sufficient to operate within the existing institutions and political parties to advance the project of the Union. On the other hand, he had ruled out the idea - expressed by some - according to which only a political and party force, specially established on the project of the Union, could achieve the objectives of the Manifesto of Ventotene, i.e. European political integration, during the generation of World War II. Only in the appeal launched in 1986 to the radical congress participants, urging them to mobilize, as they had for divorce and abortion, on the political project of the Union, Spinelli seemed to realize that the defeat "of egoisms and national bureaucracies" could not be brought about by those same parties which were part of these resistances, but by a new aggregation, established ad hoc

for this project.

In the light of the various Europeanist experiences which have mostly failed, today we can therefore say that the hopes for the construction of the European Union are entirely entrusted to the birth of a party which should be capable of containing in itself those various political traits which, at present, no European political force manages to handle simultaneously.

This party should first of all believe that for the achievement of its political objectives the construction of the United States of Europe is essential and vital. Europeanism, in other words, not in the sense of a possible options along with others, but as a reason of its essence and political survival. Moreover, it should be completely free from local and national economic and social pressures.

It could have a consistent representation in the countries of the Community, and should be able to represent, in theory at least, those federalist components of the various European families which lack the force to emerge. In other words, as it is inappropriately said of the Greens, it should be truly transversal with regard to all parties. Therefore, it should not represent a risk in terms of competition on the electoral and national scale for the existing European parties, as it gives up a priori on participating in local and national elections.

Translator's notes

(1) SPINELLI ALTIERO. ( Rome 1907 - 1982). Italian politician. During fascism, from 1929 to 1942, he was imprisoned as leader of the Italian Communist Youth. In 1942 co-author, with Ernesto Rossi, of the "Manifesto of Ventotene", which states that only a federal Europe can remove the return of fratricide wars in the European continent and give it back an international role. At the end of the war he founded, with Rossi, Eugenio Colorni and others, the European federalist Movement. After the crisis of the European Defence Community (1956), he became member of the European Commission, and followed the evolution of the Community structures. In 1979 he was elected member of the European Parliament on the ticket of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), becoming the directive mind in the realization of the draft treaty adopted by that parliament in 1984 and known as the "Spinelli Project".