Nothing better could be said about the character of Altiero Spinelli and nothing else could be added. We should merely add that he was a hero of politics because he was, to use the word in its most sober sense, a hero of reason. His stature as a great European was no longer questioned in the last years of his life when he was more often described as one of the "founding fathers" of a United Europe. But to judge his work we need to go into greater and more precise detail. I believe that time, which sifts out enduring values and the meaning of events, will judge him for what he really was: one of the major politicians of our time, a real innovator. Certainly no-one else has ever founded his political project purely on reason, as he did. Even though he was Italian, Spinelli did not consider Italy as a reality to be accepted before seeing whether it held up to reason. Likewise, though converted to democracy after his Leninist experience in early youth, he did not consider the great ideologies of our political tradition (liberalism, democracy, and socialism) as the exclusive framework for thought, or as mental limits with which to bound his political vision.

The approach he adopted meant he could see a fundamental contradiction pulling political action, as it was and generally still is conceived, further and further away from reality. Briefly, the contradiction is this: despite the increasingly unitary character of historical events, which is creating an increasingly united world, the entire political process, badly administered by both the political class, scientists and intellectuals, is still almost exclusively aimed at making changes within one's own nation, as if that were enough to resolve the great, dramatic problems of continental and world proportions. Even peace, in this outlook, is thought of as achievable through a pure and simple sum of national policies. On the contrary, Spinelli took the opposite approach. When at the end of the Second World War, a decision had to be made about the direction in which to move towards the future, the parties chose the national option making the restructuring of the nations their overriding objective. Spinelli was practically alone in choosing the European option and made his prime objective the construction of Europe, to be achieved, not through the channels of foreign affairs, but by a democratic struggle based on supranational and constitutional criteria. He was naturally capable of the superior realism of a man who knows how to innovate, because he did not delegate the task of action to others or some mythical entity. He saw reality unveiled because he had freed himself from the self-deception which resides in traditional ideologies and national thinking. He had fought fascism and had been in prison for it. He did not make a pact with anyone, he was ready to fight alone, and he laid down his challenge. On the basis of experience, we can state the following. First, there has been no national recovery, but instead an attempt by governments to build Europe. Secondly, this attempt which is awkward and uncertain, precisely because it relies on foreign policy using intergovernmental method i.e. ties between governments based on foreign affairs, has left Western Europe half-way between unity and division. Thirdly, Spinelli using the constitutional method, which everyone considered utopian twice succeeded in bringing Europe to the threshold of unity: an early form of federal government (in 1951, with De Gasperi he tried to put the European army, then being constructed, under democratic European political power; in 1984, as a member of the European Parliament he tried again with the draft Treaty for European Union). But that was not all. By giving life to a political struggle based no longer on established (national) powers or designed to manage and strengthen these powers, but based instead only on reason and designed to create supranational powers, Spinelli started a decisive political experiment.

What Spinelli thought up then is, in fact, the only way to extend democratic control from the national sphere to the international sphere, still dominated by raison d']tat and thus by the reason of weapons which for as long as they exist will always be an alternative to democracy. It is, therefore, the only road that can be followed to entrust the political task to reason, and raise political expertise to the level of scientific and technical expertise, as the world situation demands. It is, in fact, the only way to resolve the dramatic problems of our time, and put mankind on the road to real civilization: organized peace with a world government and equality among all peoples, according to the everlasting teachings of Kant. What matters, then, is to know that this road cannot be followed without, as Spinelli did with the Ventotene Manifesto, refuting national borders as the boundaries of political struggle, beyond which there is as yet no active political thought nor development of political will.

The facts have made it possible to ascertain that the transcending national boundaries is a possible choice. Many federalists, after Spinelli, have made this choice. I would like to demonstrate through my personal recollections, that this choice really does lie within everybody's reach when they engage themselves in politics, provided they do not neglect the reason lying in mankind. These are my recollections. I met Spinelli in 1953. I had been a member of the European Federalist Movement ever since I learned of its existence (in 1945), but I considered it an organization which was more cultural than political. In the first instance, political struggle means participating in the fight for power in one's own nation, and, despite hating Italy, this is what I did as a left-wing liberal. But I was forced to abandon, one by one, all the positions on which I had settled because every time I was forced to accept that they were completely useless. In this way, I found myself first outside the Italian Liberal party, which was not able to opt for the Republic in the referendum on Italy's constitution, and then outside all preconstituted patterns of party politics in an attempt to achieve unification of the democratic left and the complete democratization of Italy's Communist Party. In other words, I was struggling for an Italy in which there was an alternative to government in the full sense of the term, and in which people no longer voted - as they almost all did at the time - for either Russia or America. This was the Italy with which I thought it would be possible to construct Europe, in which I fully recognized myself.

But this prospect did not make any progress. So I began to realize that there was a structural defect in this design, shared at the time by many anti-Fascists in Italy and which came up time and again. It was not possible, to democratize Italy fully, to tackle organizational aspects (the transformation and unification of left-wing parties). What was necessary was to strive for a great political design, one which would provoke a profound change in ideas and positions, and which would also, as a result, bring about precisely the much-needed renewal of parties. But then I realized that the great design that Italy needed was European unification. Europe as a starting point, and not, as it is usually seen as a point of arrival for renewal. But an extremely difficult problem arose with this reversal of the priorities, namely a political struggle not designed to obtain national power, but the creation of European power. No-one had apparently thought of this, though in actual fact one person had: Spinelli. And he had given a following to his thinking, the European Federalist Movement, which suddenly seemed to me to be the only political organization with a strategic value. I wrote to him, I went to see him, I began my action in the European Federalist Movement, and I still wonder to this day what I would have done if he had not introduced this new approach into historical reality. This is the fact that should be stressed when we wish to establish the meaning of his work. He was able to create a new type of political behaviour and demonstrated its feasibility: for this reason he can be followed. In this respect, we need to bear in mind that he managed to reach this point because his thinking was up to the task. What this thinking was he tells us himself in an autobiographical passage which relates to the years of internment in Ventotene: "When asked by Rossi who as a Professor of Economics had been authorized to correspond with him a long time before, Einaudi sent him two or three little books on English federalist literature which flourished at the end of the thrities thanks to Lord Lothian's efforts. Apart from Lionel Robbins' book The Economic Causes of War, which I translated and which was published by Einaudi, the publishers. I do not remember either the titles or the authors of the other books. But their analysis of the political and economic perversion to which nationalism leads, and their reasoned presentation of the federalist alternative, have remained in my mind to this very day as a revelation. Since I was looking for clarity and precision in my thinking, my attention was not attracted by the hazy and contorted ideological federalism of Proudhon and Mazzini, but by the clean and precise thinking of these British federalists, in whose writings I found a rather good method for analyzing the situation into which Europe was falling, and to draw up alternative prospects". This is what has to be done and that all can do, now that Spinelli has opened up the road. Everybody can learn about this thinking, and adopt it as their own criterion for historical knowledge and political action. And with this thinking to guide them everybody can adopt the position described in the Ventotene Manifesto with these words: "The dividing line between progressive and reactionary parties no longer coincides with the formal line of more or less democracy, or the pursuit of more or less socialism, but the division falls along a very new and substantial line: those who conceive the essential purpose and goal of the struggle as being the ancient one, the conquest of national political power and those who see the main purpose as the creation of a solid international State". This is the road for Europe. This is the road for peace.

Mario Albertini

[back to Grande Place Europe home page]