36th RADICAL PARTY CONGRESS

ABSTRACT: Resolution on the European Union and federalism prepared for the 36th Congress of the Radical Party (Rome, Hotel Ergife, 30 April - 3 May)

--------------------

The Congress,

Given the state of European integration in the new international context that has developed since 1989;

Retains it indispensable for Europe to create an immediate Union that is:

- federal

- political and not only economic

- Pane-European, namely open to all those countries that accept its political goal:

since a Union with these features will restore Europe's independence and security; will guarantee its prosperity; will make possible indispensable aid for the ex-Communist countries, their full membership of the Union, a peaceful solution to the ethnic conflicts under the aegis of the federal law; the inclusion of the dynamism of Reunited Germany within a solid European context.

II

For these reasons the structures of the European Community - rather more intergovernmental than supranational, only western and only economic - now appear outdated and anachronistic.

The Maastricht agreements especially seem insufficient and therefore to be condemned, since they do not meet any of the urgent and pressing needs mentioned above, but propose objectives, such as a single monetary system, that cannot be achieved without a solid political Union, which only the German government consistently supported and defended at Maastricht.

III

To achieve this Union the Transnational Radical Party is committed to collaborating with all the European and federalist forces to organize a great mobilization of public opinion, the media and the political forces in the various countries and mount a large-scale campaign to relaunch Political Union, with the aim of:

- protesting against the inertia, delays and refusals of the twelve governments;

- putting pressure on them so that they all, or at least some of them, entrust the European Parliament that will be elected in 1994 - or the European parliamentarians of the states that have accepted - the task of drawing up a Draft of a Pan-European Federal constitution, similar to what was done on 1952 with the so-called "Ad hoc Assembly".

- on the understanding that this project will be directly ratified by the national parliaments, without going through exhausting diplomatic conferences.

Time is working against Europe, and if the Union is not implemented very soon, for our generation, the chance will probably be definitively lost, and many of the most serious national problems - for which a solution is being sought on a national scale - will remain unsolved or badly solved outside a European framework.