Year XXXI, 1989, Number 2, Page 90
Federalism in Britain and Italy: Radicals and the English Liberal Tradition
JOHN PINDER
Italy: federalist pioneers and the liberal tradition.
In 1918, two long articles appeared in the Corriere della Sera, in the form of letters signed by “Junius”.[1] They argued that the dogma of sovereignty was the cause of war and must therefore be destroyed. Instead of the alliance or confederation that was likely to be established as the League of Nations, a federal state was required, with its own army, taxation and administration, exercising its powers in direct relation with the citizens, as in the United States of America. Junius contrasted the pangermanist literature, with its stress on protectionism and the supremacy of the state, with the anglo-saxon liberal tradition. He was a remarkable precursor of the British federalists who were before long to base their proposals on a similar critique of the League.
Junius was in fact Luigi Einaudi, the eminent liberal economist from Piedmont who was to become the first President of the Italian Republic after World War Two. When Einaudi wrote the first of the two articles, Attilio Cabiati, another liberal economist who was one of his close friends,[2] was already working with Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of Fiat, on a book that was also published in 1918, under the title Federazione Europea o Lega delle Nazioni?.[3] In it, they expounded the same idea as Einaudi with greater precision and depth. Whereas Einaudi was less than crystal clear about the extent of the union, they unequivocally proposed a European federation. Its institutions were to include a federal congress, government, and court to ensure the comprise foreign policy, armed forces, finance and trade, with the other powers reserved to the member states.
Agnelli and Cabiati foreshadowed much in the British federalist literature of the next two decades. This is less surprising than it may seem, for the book was inspired by the political culture on which the British were nurtured as a matter of course. It shows impressive knowledge of the literature on politics and economics in the English liberal tradition. In its list of 25 “principal works consulted”, no less than 21 are British. When the authors refer to other schools of thought it is usually to criticise them for glorifying the state and thus sustaining a system that leads to war.[4] They took Bismarck, Treitschke and von Bülow to task for this; and they were likewise critical of the French concept of national unity, leading to the supremacy of the collective will, in contrast with the English concept of liberty which brings “benefits to all alike”.[5]
The two authors follow John Locke in contrasting the liberal principle which establishes the citizens’ rights with the legitimist principle which defends the sovereign’s rights.[6] They cite Acton’s proposition that the best guarantee of liberty is a multinational state.[7] When they emphasise that a league of nations is not enough because independent states are prone to go to war with each other, they cite Sidgwick’s conclusion that a federal government to enforce the rule of law in Europe is required.[8] On the horrors of modem war, and hence the unviability of absolute sovereignty, they refer to an article by H.G. Wells; and they cite Robertson at length to establish the economic advantages to be derived from the division of labour within a federation.[9]
Agnelli and Cabiati found in the history of the nineteenth century the grounds for an Italian liberal and federalist tradition. In contrast with German unification, attained by a war of aggression with the aim of Prussian supremacy, Italian unity had resulted from a war of liberation, and for the Carbonari the aim of throwing off Austrian rule had been not just Italian unity, but political reform.[10] Had the two authors been less absorbed in the English liberal literature, they could have shown how Carlo Cattaneo had then given a precise exposition of the idea of federalism and of its institutional form, enhancing liberty by the limitation of power at each level of government.[11] He had applied the idea of federalism both to the relationship among the peoples that compose a nation and, beyond the nation, to an international federation, explaining that the two forms of unity are not in conflict because both follow from a single principle: liberty.[12] He sought in this way to reconcile the demands of liberty and unity both within Italy and in Europe as a whole, pointing to Switzerland and the USA as models for the United States of Europe.[13]
Mazzini, too, frequently referred to the ideal of European unity, but he never explored it in any depth. The uniting of Italy was, for him, the all-encompassing priority.[14] Mazzinians of this century have followed him in favouring the idea of European unity, but some have remained attached to the nation-state and thus have found it hard to come to terms with the concept of a federal Europe. A case in point was the brilliant young Torinese Piero Gobetti, who saw the nations as “fraternal, but sovereign and armed”,[15] and whose review of the book of Agnelli and Cabiati criticised it on the grounds that the people would “never renounce their history… (nor) seek Nirvana in an artificial unity”.[16]
Attacks from left and right extremes.
Gramsci too attacked Agnelli and Cabiati, but on grounds that had little to do with the contents of the book, which he appeared to have misread.[17] There was, however, no chance of communist approval for federalist proposals since Lenin had pronounced that the class war and the victory of the proletariat through revolution must come first. The communists’ devotion to the collective will and, as they became more stalinist, to the power of the state, also made their ideology incompatible with the liberal principle of limited government on which the federalists’ proposals were based.
Liberals such as Einaudi at that time saw the marxists as the principal enemies of the liberal order, and his review of Agnelli and Cabiati “undervalued the nationalist opposition” to any such plans for safeguarding peace.[18] Soon, however, Mussolini was to show himself a deadly enemy of both liberal and federalist principles. He did not believe in the “utility of permanent peace” and proclaimed the nobility of war.[19] Giovanni Gentile, the leading academic theoretician of fascism, “endowed it with his neo-Hegelian and ethereal brand of ‘actual idealism’.”[20] Even when the reality of war was proving less noble than they had hoped, and some of the fascists were attracted to the idea of European unity, their absolutist view of the state made it hard for them to absorb federalist ideas.[21]
The immediate problem after Mussolini marched on Rome in October 1922 was not, however, the incompatibility of principle between fascism and federalism, but the suppression of freedom by a violent authoritarian regime. The fascists persecuted those who strove for a democratic Italy and murdered the leaders of those political tendencies that were to produce most of the committed federalists. The pioneering works of Agnelli, Cabiati and Einaudi disappeared from view and the development of federalist thought was driven into exile and the underground.
Meanwhile, the focus must shift to Britain, where federalists remained free to develop their ideas.
British federalists and the liberal tradition.
Philip Kerr, later Lord Lothian, was private secretary to Lloyd George as Prime Minister during World War One and afterwards at the Peace Conference. This caused him to reflect deeply about the problem of peace and war; and a spell at the Institute of Politics in Williamstown soon after enabled him to articulate a federalist analysis, based on the premiss that absolute sovereignty leads to war and concluding that the safeguarding of peace requires the establishment of international, and ultimately world, federation.[22] He developed these ideas in a number of publications during the following ten years, culminating in 1935 with Pacifism is not enough (nor patriotism either),[23] which many Italian federalists still regard as one of the fundamental federalist texts.[24]
Lothian’s interest in federalism dated from 1905 when he joined other young contemporaries from Oxford to work in Milner’s “Kindergarten,” seeking to reconcile the Afrikaners in a relatively liberal South African union after the Boer war.[25] One of those contemporaries was Lionel Curtis, who was to generate and share with him a lifelong federalist commitment. The proximate cause of this was their need to think about a constitution uniting the existing four South African colonies, which led them to a close study of The Federalist and of the foundation of the United States.[26] After their plan for a federal constitution had been set aside in favour of a unitary state, they returned to London and founded The Round Table quarterly, which from 1910 on propagated the federal idea, with particular reference to the Commonwealth.
Curtis, a passionate advocate of Commonwealth federation, published a book on the subject in 1917, which was extensively quoted by Agnelli and Cabiati to underline his advocacy of responsible government and the rule of law.[27] His idea was that the mission of the Commonwealth was to increase the number of citizens fit for responsible government and to extend control of the supreme functions of government to all of them.[28] Later, in the mid-1930s, he was to write his magnum opus, Civitas Dei, in which he envisaged that the process of establishing a world federation would start with the states most experienced in self-government — which, he implied, pointed to the need for Anglo-American leadership.[29]
Lothian was quicker than Curtis to see that the other Commonwealth countries would not federate with Britain and to put his mind, following Versailles, to the idea of wider international federation. In Pacifism is not enough, his critique of the League of Nations and concept of federation were similar to those of Einaudi, Agnelli and Cabiati. Unlike them, however, he aimed his argument, as his title implied, at the pacifist tendency which had become so widespread in Britain by the mid-1930s.
Typical of the naive idealism then prevalent was the suggestion of Gilbert Murray, for many years President of the League of Nations Union, that the governments should secure world peace by acting unanimously to carry out the advice of a council of the world’s wisest men.[30] Lothian argued powerfully that law, to be effective, had to be enforceable, and that, since world federation was as yet unattainable, a nucleus of democracies should federate in order to apply this principle.
Although Lothian had resigned from his post as a Liberal Minister in the National government over an economic issue when Imperial Preference was enshrined in the Ottawa Agreement in 1932, he was far from being an economist, and it fell to another distinguished liberal to expound the basic economic arguments for federation. This was Lionel (later Lord) Robbins, who had been given his chair at the London School of Economics in 1929, when he had just turned thirty. He set out his ideas in two books, again still regarded in Italy as classic federalist texts, based on lectures that Professor Rappard had invited him to give at the Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales at Geneva.[31]
The first book, Economic Planning and International Order, published in 1937, linked the case for the division of labour with the need for the framework of an enforceable legal order. Such a political structure existed within the nation-states, but not between them. The failure to understand this had been the great deficiency of nineteenth century liberalism: the international system it envisaged had been “not liberal, but anarchist”.[32] He went on to stand the marxist argument for “socialism first” on its head, arguing to the contrary that socialist central planning was more likely to cause wars than capitalism, because it raised all conflicts of economic interest to the level of national policy.
That book made the economic case for federation in general, but did not indicate who should federate or when. By the summer of 1939, Robbins was quite clear about both the urgency and the membership of the federation he advocated. In The Economic Causes of War, whose final section, completed in the first days after World War Two began, was entitled “The United States of Europe”, he urged that “unless we destroy the sovereign state, the sovereign state will destroy us”; and he concluded that, since world federation would not be feasible for a long time to come and since, “in our generation at least”, the United States would not be ready to federate with other peoples, it was necessary to create a European federation, to be established after the overthrow of Nazism andto include a democratic postwar Germany.[33]
With their three books, Lothian and Robbins brought to fruition what Einaudi, Agnelli and Cabiati had started: they provided a strong liberal structure for federalist thought. Although both Lothian and Robbins were Liberals with a capital ‘L’, their ideas were usable by liberals with a small ‘l’. They both wrote pamphlets for the Federal Union movement which was established in 1939; and their works have been much studied, cited and reprinted by federalists in Italy to this day.[34]
The influence of Curtis’s books has been less lasting, perhaps because of his concentration on the Empire which was about to pass away. He did, however, persuade the young Winston Churchill to take up the cause of a federal United Kingdom in 1912, which was taken up in turn by Lloyd George and Austen Chamberlain and placed high on the political agenda in 1918, as a means of dealing with the Irish problem.[35] This exposure to the federal idea, which Churchill had seen not just as a way of solving an internal problem but as a step towards a wider Commonwealth federation, may have influenced him when he wrote in 1930 of “federal links” in an article entitled “The United States of Europe”, and when he took up the same theme in his famous speech in Zurich in September 1946, which launched the postwar movement for European unity.[36] But although Conservatives were to play their part in Federal Union, one of its early leaders being a Conservative MP who was the son of a former Prime Minister,[37] their part in developing the ideas and literature between the wars was a minor one. The credit for the most important works belongs to liberals, with significant contributions from socialists.
Reformist and marxist socialists in Britain.
British socialists, other than marxists, were predominantly favourable to the federal idea during this period. H.N. Brailsford, Kingsley Martin, Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf and H.G. Wells were all advocates of federation who influenced the founders of Federal Union.[38] R.H. Tawney placed national sovereignty along with capitalism as one of the two great evils of the age.[39] C.D.H. Cole was broadly in favour.[40] Among those who were to be Labour’s leaders after the war, Bevin called for a United States of Europe and Attlee wrote that “Europe must federate or perish”.[41]
The federal idea was evidently part of the contemporary political culture for reformist socialists in Britain. But most of the evidence is in the form of fairly short references in works for which this was not the principal theme. Among socialists, the exception was Laski, who devoted a considerable part of his writing to the subject from 1917 onwards. In his Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, published in that year, he expressed his opposition to the monistic view of the state, and his preference for “a country where sovereignty is distributed”.[42] In his A Grammar of Politics, first published in 1925, he included a chapter on “Authority as Federal”, in which he wrote that “since society is federal, authority must be federal also”.[43] This principle was to apply beyond as well as within the nation-state. He contrasted the “historical accident of separate states” with the “scientific fact of world interdependence”, and declared that the “absolute and independent sovereign state” was “incompatible with the interests of humanity”.[44]
In the mid-1920s, then, Laski had seemed set to precede Lothian and Robbins in the development of federalist ideas. But instead he was to espouse the marxist belief that “the class-structure of society” must be “destroyed” first. It was capitalism, not the nation-state, that was “rooted in a system which makes power the criterion of right and war the ultimate expression of power”. Given the capitalist class-relations, it was “impossible to realise the ideal of an effective international community”. Liberal ideology must be abandoned as the expression of this doomed economic system, and the marxian theory of the state “holds the field”.[45] Like the Italian marxists, he postponed constructive thought about the international order until capitalism should be overthrown; and British socialists lost their most brilliant federalist pioneer. It was socialists such as Brailsford, Mackay and Wootton, shorter on academic lustre but longer on political judgement, who were to make the subsequent contributions to federalist thinking, working on the assumption that the worst enemy of socialism was war, and the root cause of war was not capitalism but the sovereign nation-state.[46]
The creation of Federal Union.
By 1938, then, a rich literature on federalism was available to anybody who could read English. Since World War One there had been the books of Lothian and Curtis, Laski’s earlier works and the first of the two books by Lionel Robbins, as well as frequent references in other works. This was on top of the earlier literature, some of which had been cited by Einaudi, Agnelli and Cabiati: the writings on federalism by Acton, J. S. Mill and Sidgwick; The Federalist of Hamilton, Jay and Madison; Bryce’s monumental The American Commonwealth; Dicey’s chapter on “Parliamentary Sovereignty and Federalism” in his classic Introduction to the Law of the Constitution; and works by Freeman, Seeley and others on particular federations or on the idea of the United States of Europe.[47] Thus there was no lack of knowledge and thought about federalism. What had been absent until then was the impulse to apply it to a political project in Europe or the wider world.
It was after Munich that three young men, Charles Kimber, Patrick Ransome and Derek Rawnsley, decided to found a federalist movement in Britain, which they called Federal Union.[48] They soon had the active support of Lothian and Curtis, of Wickham Steed, a former Editor of The Times, and of Barbara Wootton, then lecturing at London University and subsequently Leader of the Labour Party in the House of Lords. Then came leading academics such as Beveridge, Robbins, Jennings and Joad, and rising politicians such as Richard Law MP and R.W.G. Mackay. A stream of pamphlets and books followed, many by distinguished authors. The publications in March 1939 of Clarence Streit’s , Union Now[49] had given a strong boost to the idea of a federation of the democracies, including the United States. But with the onset of war in Europe alongside continued American isolation, Federal Union came to focus on the idea of a European federation launched by Britain and France, to be joined by a democratic postwar Germany after Nazism had been overthrown. There was powerful editorial support from The Times, The Guardian and the New Statesman. Membership grew rapidly to ten thousand. The Archbishop of York said that “The whole scheme of Federal Union has made a staggeringly effective appeal to the British mind”.[50]
The enthusiasm was cut short by the fall of France. The climate of opinion in which the British government did not hesitate to offer an indissoluble union to France can be seen as its culmination. But the French government rejected the offer in favour of capitulation and Britain turned towards the United States. The federalist literature and Federal Union’s early success were to be the victims of collective amnesia in Britain. It was in the unpromising ground of Mussolini’s prison camps that the British federalist ideas were to take root and start their strongest growth.
ITALY: FEDERALIST IDEAS IN OPPOSITION AND EXILE
While British federalists developed and propagated their ideas with such striking success in the fertile context of the liberal tradition, the political forces that were to carry forward these ideas with yet more success in postwar Italy were meanwhile squeezed between two deadly opponents of liberal thought: the fascists, who idolised the authoritarian nation-state; and marxists, who rejected discussion of its reform, at least for the duration of the class war. Fear of a communist victory, moreover, was one of the motives that led many among the establishment to support or at least tolerate the fascists, thus further narrowing the scope for developing democratic federalism. Pius XI was among those who expressed his sympathy for the regime; and he doubtless reflected a view widely held among the clergy when he expressed his horror, not only of the socialists, but also of the liberal school, whom he described as “men to whom all laws and regulations… were like fetishes”.[51] Fortunately for the future of Italian democracy, however, there were also politically active catholics who were much more favourable to liberal constitutional principles; and they included Don Sturzo, a Sicilian aristocrat and priest who founded the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano in 1919, and his lieutenant Alcide De Gasperi, a lawyer from Trento who was, as Prime Minister after World War Two, to play a decisive part in the foundation of the European Community.
Catholics: Don Sturzo, De Gasperi.
Don Sturzo was opposed to fascism, and he led the Congress of the PPI in 1923 to condemn the fascist regime.[52] A few months later, Mussolini’s squadristi killed Don Minzoni, a politically active priest. Don Sturzo went into exile soon after, living in London until 1940, then in New York until 1946 when he returned to Italy.
In Don Sturzo’s first speech in exile, in March 1925, he affirmed the duty to oppose the notion that the nation-state is the only God.[53] But this did not lead him directly to federalism. His commitment was, rather, like that of his social reformist friends (who included Sidney Webb), to internationalism in general and the League of Nations in particular.[54] He argued in 1929 for union as against national sovereignty; but he saw no clear distinction between a federation such as the US and an international association such as the Commonwealth.[55] By April 1940, however, he had joined the federal unionists in seeing Britain and France as the “nucleus of a future federation”, which must, he insisted, be based on ethical and political principles that excluded dictatorships of right or left.[56] Don Sturzo was certainly in close touch with leading members of Federal Union: he had worked with Wickham Steed in the late 1930s to promote the British Committee for Civil and Religious Peace in Spain.[57]
Italian Catholics were, as Spinelli observed, less attached than Mazzinian liberals to the nation-state.[58] If sympathetic, as Don Sturzo was, to liberal constitutional principles, and exposed, as he evidently was in London, to the federalist analysis of the international system, they were apt to espouse the federalist cause. After his postwar return to Italy Don Sturzo was to support the Movimento Federalista Europeo and to insist that “we federalists” want solid federations such as the USA or Switzerland, not loose international associations, and must hurry to make them a reality.[59]
The political scene to which Don Sturzo returned was dominated by De Gasperi. After succeeding Don Sturzo as Secretary General of the PPI, then undergoing a short spell in prison followed, from 1929 onwards, by a form of exile in the Vatican, De Gasperi was to be Prime Minister from 1945 to 1953, as leader of the Christian Democrats who have been in government ever since. When the Christian Democratic Party was founded in 1943, as the successor to the PPI, its policy programme, for which De Gasperi had the chief responsibility, called merely for a “more effective international system”, with disarmament, monetary stability and less protection.[60] The federalist influence, already significant among Christian Democrats in North Italy,[61] was however soon to be reinforced by the foundation of the MFE, with, as we shall see, its roots in British federalist thought; and, surely encouraged by the example of his former mentor, Don Sturzo, De Gasperi readily made the transition to the federalist policy which gave strong support to the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community and was to be, with Spinelli’s initiative, seminal in the drafting of the Treaty for a European Political Community, which so nearly gave birth to a European federation.[62]
Reformist socialists.
For over half a century after the Russian revolution, the contribution of Italian socialists to federalist thought and action was undermined by the maximalist dogma that war among nation-states was merely an aspect of the class war: “social transformation” must be completed before thought could be given to a reform of interstate relations. The maximalist hard core was the Communist Party, founded in 1921. But their negative influence was extended by those socialists, led by Pietro Nenni, whose priority was unity with the Communist Party, and who therefore refused to countenance federalist ideas until the late 1950s.
The maximalists were however opposed by the revisionists, who included the socialist leader, Filippo Turati. Turati had, as a young man, been influenced by the federalist strand of risorgimento thought. In 1880 he had supported the idea of a United States of Europe on the pattern of the United States of America; and a decade later he was to praise Cattaneo for his faith in that idea.[63] Although he was to enter a marxist phase in the 1890s, he was always open to other currents of opinion, for example inviting Einaudi and Cabiati to contribute to his review, Critica sociale, during that period. This openness led him, after World War One when so many were becoming stranded on the rock of maximalist dogma, to recognise the need to revise “our outdated ideology” in the light of experience; and an important element in his revision was the recognition that capitalism was not the sole cause of war.[64]
Not long after the leading revisionist, Giacomo Matteotti, was murdered for attacking fascist violence and electoral fraud, Turati escaped to exile in Paris, helped on his way by Carlo Rosselli and Ferruccio Parri, two social-liberals who were to play a significant part in Italian federalism.[65] He was soon to return to his early advocacy of federation: a United States of Europe as the supreme aspiration for the democracies, with like the USA, enough power to keep the peace among the member states; and beyond that a federation of the USA and the USE.[66] At the Fourth Congress of the Socialist International at Vienna in 1931, he went on to explain how the experience of 1914-18 had taught him how much war damages the socialists, who must therefore regard federation as a precondition of socialism, not, as the maximalists insisted, the other way round.[67] He thus anticipated the position taken in Britain by federalist socialists such as Mackay and Wootton, and against Laski’s increasingly marxist analysis. But in the following year Turati was to die; and Nenni led the majority of socialists into collaboration with the Communist Party.
A minority of revisionists nevertheless continued to contribute to the Italian federalist tradition. Claudio Treves, who was close to Turati and had, like him, emigrated to Paris in 1926 was one, whose influence was to be extended into the postwar period when his protégé, Giuseppe Saragat, founded the pro-European Social Democrat Party. Claudio’s two sons, Paolo and Pietro, who went to London, advocated European federation, and worked with Federal Union before returning to Italy after the war.[68]
Federalists were also to be found among socialists who had worked with the social-liberals who, as we shall see, played a key part in launching the Italian federalist movement. Thus Andrea Caffi, who had been active in the social-liberals’ leading organization, Giustizia e Libertà (GL), in Paris in the mid-1930s, and had moved over to the socialists and to Toulouse where the Italian Socialist Party had its head office, was by 1940 propagating his federalist ideas from there, linking, like the proudhonian Alexandre Marc, the ideas of European federation and local autonomy.[69] When the socialists’ office was moved, after the fall of France, to Ignazio Silone’s Centro Estero Socialista in Zürich, Silone incorporated these ideas into the socialist policy programme. Having been a clandestine communist leader in Italy and expelled from the Communist Party not long after emigrating to Switzerland in 1930, Silone had little time for Nenni’s socialist-communist line. He continued to advocate federalism, using the motto Liberare e Federare for the weekly paper of the Centro; and he was to give strong support to the Italian federalist movement, and, from the vantage point of the Italian Senate, to the European Union of Federalists, of which he was elected President in 1948.[70] But his ideas then carried little weight with the Italian Socialist Party.
The most important socialist in the founding of the Italian federalist movement, Eugenio Colorni, had also been involved in Giustizia e Libertà. After the GL organisation inside Italy was broken by the fascist police in 1935, he too moved over to the socialists, soon becoming one of the leaders of the Centro Interno Socialista. Like Turati, he believed that traditional positions must be reviewed and ideologies measured against reality.[71] Like Turati and other revisionists, he was therefore open to federalist ideas. Unlike them, however, he was sent a few months after his arrest in 1938 to confinement in the island of Ventotene, where he was to become a close friend of the founders of the federalist movement. He significantly influenced their thinking and became convinced, in turn, that federation was the primary political goal after the overthrow of fascism. In his preface to their founding document, the Ventotene Manifesto, he affirmed, like Turati, Mackay and Wootton, that federation was the pre-condition for socialism.[72] After escaping from confinement in 1943, he took part in founding the federalist movement and led a group of young reformist socialists in Rome.[73] He was killed by fascist police in May 1944, just before Rome was liberated.
The reformists in the Italian Socialist Party were to remain eclipsed for some years after the war by those who gave priority to links with the Communist Party and the class war ideology. But the seeds which had been sown by Turati, Treves, Silone, Colorni and others were eventually to bear fruit, when Nenni led the socialists in the late 1950s into a pro-European and eventually a federalist stance. Meanwhile, it was the social liberals who were to make the running for Italian federalism.
Liberals and social-liberals.
From Mussolini’s installation in power in 1922 until the fall of fascism in 1943, Einaudi published nothing more on federalism. Indeed, pressure from the fascist police was to cause him to close down the review, La riforma sociale, that he had edited from 1908 onwards.[74] But although his liberty of expression was constrained he kept his integrity, and this enabled him to influence young people, including two who were to play crucial parts in the development of Italian federalism: Ernesto Rossi and Carlo Rosselli, the founder of Giustizia e Libertà, which was to bring together so many of the founding fathers of the Italian federalist movement, and who described Einaudi as one of the élite of the previous generation who had “not forfeited the trust of young people”.[75]
Implicit in Rosselli’s respect for Einaudi was condemnation of so many of the liberals of Einaudi’s generation who had condoned fascism as a lesser evil than communism. This, together with a feeling that the old liberals did not deal with the workers’ problems,[76] drove many of the younger generation towards new groups described as social-liberals. They shared a commitment to a liberal constitution and the liberties that go with it. They were against the dogma of a class war that must be fought and won as a pre-condition of liberty; but they also opposed the dogma that social justice will follow automatically from laisser faire.[77] They valued both justice and liberty — hence the name Giustizia e Libertà. The commitment to the principle of a liberal constitution combined with a determination to find the solutions to contemporary problems made them the most fertile of grounds for the growth of federalist ideas.
Giovanni Amendola, a forerunner of the social-liberals, founded a National Union of Liberal and Democratic Forces in 1924, whose adherents included both Nello Rosselli and Silvio Trentin, later to be social-liberals and federalists.[78] But the fascists saw reformist liberals, like reformist socialists, as dangerous enemies; and they set their thugs to beat up Amendola, as they had done with Matteotti, thus causing his death in 1926. This they followed by assassinating Nello Rosselli with his brother Carlo in 1937 in France, where Carlo had been the principal founder of Giustizia e Libertà in 1929. The Rossellis had strong English and liberal connections. They had British forebears and Carlo was to marry an English wife. He had by 1925 become an assistant to Einaudi at the Bocconi University in Milan. He was, like Cabiati, both active there and teaching at the Istituto Superiore di Commercio in Genova. He was also beginning to demonstrate his talent for bold exploits which was to help make GL the most important democratic anti-fascist organisation.[79] He founded, with Nello, the review Non mollare which was to cause a sensation (and to be precipitately shut down) by exposing the fascists’ responsibility for Matteotti’s murder; one of his collaborators on the review was Rossi, also close to Einaudi and later co-founder of the Italian federalist movement.[80] After helping Turati to escape to France, Rosselli was himself sentenced to confinement, and made in 1929 a spectacular escape to Paris from the island of Lipari, where he had meanwhile written a seminal book entitled Socialismo liberale, advocating a liberal constitution, a mixed economy, social justice and international peace.[81]
Once in Paris, Carlo did not delay in founding GL with the help of Nello, Rossi, and Gaetano Salvemini, by then a grand old man for whom Carlo Rosselli and Rossi were “favourite disciples”.[82] Their journal, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà, edited by Carlo Rosselli and Caffi, contained from its first issue in 1932 a commitment to European federation, to which theme it returned at intervals. Although the federalist analysis did not compare in depth with that soon to be produced by the federal unionists in Britain, there was a specific advocacy of a European federal constitution and a European government disposing of force at the service of European law; and it appears that the proposal for a constituent assembly, later to be powerfully promoted by Spinelli, was put forward for the first time in the Quaderni.[83]
In addition to the Rossellis, Rossi and Caffi, GL was a focus for many of the precursors and founders of the Italian federalist movement. Trentin, who wrote for the Quaderni, was one; he founded in Toulouse the resistance group Libérer et Fédérer, of which Alexandre Marc was a member and which published a journal under the same name — from which Silone derived the motto for his publication in Zürich.[84] Another was Parri, who was to become the leader of GL’s armed resistance during the war and Italy’s first postwar Prime Minister. Colorni participated, as we have seen, in GL before joining the socialists, and met Carlo Rosselli during a visit to Paris in 1937.[85] Among the many other founders of the federalist movement who were active in the GL and its successor, the Partito d’Azione, were Aldo Garosci, Ada Gobetti, Gustavo Malan, Mario Rollier, Manlio Rossi Doria, Leo Valiani and Franco Venturi.
Meanwhile another social-liberal group was founded by Guido Calogero, Professor of Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa, whose first manifesto, drawn up in the late 1930s and distributed clandestinely in 1940, called for disarmament, European federation, juridical bodies and means of enforcing international law.[86] Their policy as a whole was close to that of GL, and during the period 1940-43 the two groups and some others merged to form the Partito d’Azione, whose members, in addition to providing, in Parri, the first postwar Prime Minister, produced much of the best in federalist thought and action.[87] Most important of all were Rossi and Spinelli, who were to meet each other, along with Colorni, in confinement on Ventotene in 1939.[88]
THE VENTOTENE MANIFESTO
Altiero Spinelli reacted to fascism by becoming a leading young communist militant, was given a ten years prison sentence in 1927 and remained in confinement until the liberation in 1943. From 1929 onwards, however, he began to have doubts about the marxist faith for which he had gone to jail. As he was later to recall his motives, they included the need for “absolute liberty” of thought and for the right to subject everything to critical appraisal.[89] As he read his way through the literature of philosophy, historiography and economics, his marxism was undermined by his preference for Kant against Hegel and for great liberals such as Benedetto Croce and Alfred Marshall.[90] By 1937 he was expelled from the Communist Party. But his intellectual odyssey was not directed towards an academic destination. Thought, in his view, had to lead to action; “Spinelli”, a fellow refugee from communism was to say, “has the stuff of a founder of movements”; and the movement he was to found was the answer that he was seeking to the problem of the collapse of Europe that was gathering pace as fascism dragged the continent into war.[91]
The intellectual content of that answer was profoundly influenced by Rossi and by the thinking of British federalists. Rossi had, on returning to Italy after helping to found GL in Paris, been sentenced in 1930 to twenty years imprisonment. He was one of the leading lights of GL,[92] seen as a “legendary hero” who, after his arrival on Ventotene, became for Spinelli “un maestro della mente’’.[93] He appears to have exerted a fundamental liberal influence on the thinking of Spinelli, still in the process of developing his ideas after his escape from communist dogma, and through Spinelli on the Italian federalist movement.
All Rossi’s “chosen affinities” were, according to Spinelli, with the eighteenth century enlightenment, especially that of Britain and France, of which he “loved the limpid expression, the precise reasoning, the cult of rationality”.[94] His “cultural formation” was that of “a rationalist, economist, liberal, brought to see in England the inspiration in the final instance of all the European movement towards the open market economy, towards liberty, parliamentary democracy, social reform”.[95] The latter point was a surprise to Spinelli, who was not among those ex-marxists who flee to the opposite pole of laisser faire liberalism and who had expected Rossi to be a conservative in economic and social matters. Instead Spinelli found him to be working on “innovative ideas” regarding the insertion of some collectivist elements into the market economy; and this in turn convinced Spinelli of the need for the framework of a market, not a centrally planned, economy.[96]
While the ideas of mixed economy and welfare state distinguished GL from the old liberals, Rossi’s commitment to the liberal constitution and the market economy was at one with that of his master, Einaudi. Rossi had always remained in close touch with Einaudi — he is among the ten individuals most cited in Einaudi’s biography. He kept up a correspondence with Einaudi from prison;[97] and it is not surprising that he and Spinelli, in their search for solutions to the problems of war, interstate relations and the League of Nations, should have found Einaudi’s “Junius” letters of 1918 in a volume of his collected works.[98] Rossi wrote and asked Einaudi for more on the subject; and Einaudi sent him some works by British federalist authors.[99] These certainly included the two books by Robbins, mentioned earlier, which are the most-cited sources in the two essays that Spinelli composed following the Ventotene Manifesto which Spinelli and Rossi wrote together after they had digested this literature; and a book by von Hayek, then teaching like Robbins at the London School of Economics and active in the Federal Union Research Institute, was cited twice. Spinelli, indeed, translated Robbins’s Economic Causes of War for publication by Einaudi’s publishing house.[100] Federal Union had also by then published pamphlets by Beveridge, Brailsford and Lothian, which may have reached Ventotene via Einaudi; and Spinelli was to extend his reading of British and American federalist works during his stay in Switzerland in 1943-44, adding Layton, Wootton, Streit, Hamilton, Jay and Madison to the list.[101] He was to recall in striking terms the effect that the English federalist writings had on him in Ventotene: “…their analysis of the political and economic perversion that nationalism leads to, and their reasoned presentation of the federal alternative, have remained to this day impressed on my memory as a revelation. Since I was trying to obtain clarity and precision in thinking, my attention was not drawn by the foggy and contorted ideological federalism of a Proudhon or a Mazzini, but by the clean, precise thinking of these English federalists in whose writings I found a fairly good method for analysing the chaotic state of affairs into which Europe was plunging and for drawing up alternatives”.[102]
When Spinelli and Rossi wrote the Ventotene Manifesto in 1941, its roots in British federalist thought and in the English liberal tradition from Locke onwards were very evident.[103] The first sentence affirmed “that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but that every man must be an autonomous centre of life”.[104] The Manifesto then observes that the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state leads to servitude rather than liberty for the citizens. The division of Europe into separate nation-states is diagnosed as the fundamental problem and European federation, with institutions and powers similar to those foreseen by Einaudi and by Federal Union, as the solution.[105] While both authors took responsibility for the whole text, the hand of Rossi is to be seen in the section on “Postwar tasks. The reform of society”, with his advocacy of the mixed economy and welfare state.[106] It was Spinelli’s former immersion in the Communist Party, on the other hand, that was reflected in the drawing of a sharp line between reactionaries and progressives — not, to be sure, between two sides in a class war but between those for whom the conquest of national power is the essential aim of politics and those who see the creation of a federal state as the essential task — and in the establishment of a dedicated group to accomplish the federalists task.[107] Spinelli was later to admit that the section on the “dedicated group” was expressed in terms that were “too crudely leninist”.[108] But the sharp distinction between those who were for a European federation and those who were not was to determine his political action for the rest of his life.
The Manifesto was distributed in duplicated form on the Italian mainland from 1941 onwards and was printed for clandestine publication by Colorni, together with Colorni’s introduction and the two other essays by Spinelli in January 1944.[109] It is seen as the foundation text for the Movimento Federalista Europeo, launched in August 1943, and a principal source for the European Union of Federalists, established four years later.
Spinelli was to continue promoting its basic idea up to and beyond the adoption in February 1984 by the European Parliament, thanks mainly to his initiative and effort, of its Draft Treaty establishing the European Union, which would develop the Community institutions into a federal legislature, executive and court, and extend its powers to cover money and tax as well as trade, if only tentatively to security; and the Italian federalists continue with this work. An apt comment on the contribution of the British federalist writings to this explosion of intellectual and political activity was the Latin tag cited by Spinelli: “habent sua fata libelli” (little books have their own destiny).[110]
THE COMMON ROOTS OF BRITISH AND ITALIAN
FEDERALISM
FEDERALISM
It is remarkable how swiftly and powerfully the spark crossed, as the interwar period ended and war began, from a northern to a southern pole of federalism. The aim of this essay has been to seek the reason why.
The rich body of federalist literature written in Britain between 1935 and 1940 by authors such as Beveridge, Curtis, Jennings, Lothian, Mackay, Robbins, Wheare and Wootton, and the associated political action by Federal Union, could only have flourished with its roots in a political culture that was fertile for such a growth. This, we have seen, included the liberal constitutional tradition, inherited from such great nineteenth century figures as Acton and Mill, with their normative writings on multinational federation, and Bryce and Dicey, with their scholarly evaluation of the federal system in the United States. These in turn stemmed from the achievements of the American federalists, particularly Hamilton, Jay and Madison, whose political philosophy was rooted in Locke, Hume and Montesquieu: on the liberal principle of limiting the power of the sovereign, by means of the rule of law, civil rights and representative government; and on the principle of dividing sovereignty among different levels of government, which they derived from the liberal principle of limiting sovereignty.
This liberal philosophy also embraced the empirical method, measuring ideas and ideologies against their performance in the world and adjusting them when they proved inadequate. The federalists found that national sovereignty was associated with war and economic autarky, so they adjusted their idea of sovereignty to provide for its sharing under a federal constitution.
The federalists were also rooted in a radical tradition of action against social ills, of which they saw international anarchy as the greatest.
Most of the Italians who so eagerly adopted the federal idea were rooted in the same philosophy. Einaudi was steeped in the liberal tradition, constitutional as well as economic. C. Rosselli and Rossi had been his disciples. Rosselli brought together in GL many of the radical social-liberals who were to help found the federalist movement. Rossi conveyed the liberal philosophy and the British federalist ideas to Spinelli, who established them in the federalist movement, together with his own ideas on how federation should be achieved. The approaches to liberal and federalist principles varied widely across the political spectrum. But the coherence of the hard core of federalists, themselves profoundly influenced by British liberal and federalist ideas, enabled them to exert a pervasive influence on Italian attitudes to federalism.
Both British and Italian federalists had virtù: liberal constitutional principles and zeal to reform the international system in the light at them. But their fortuna was diverse.
In the interwar period, Italian fascism suppressed liberal principles and exalted the nation-state. Federalism could develop only clandestinely or in exile, whereas in Britain federalists were free to write and work. They felt a strong sense of their responsibility to urge Britain, as a liberal and democratic great power, to act in order to establish a durable peace; and under the pressure of impending war they made a great effort to develop federalist thought (books, pamphlets, conferences), action (Federal Union) and policy (European federation based initially on Britain and France).
After the war, however, Britain, its confidence in the British nation-state restored and that in its Continental neighbours for the time being low, turned its back on the idea of European federation which was spreading like wildfire on the Continent. The Italians, on the contrary, had lost confidence in the nation-state. Liberal democracy prevailed. Continental neighbours were moving to establish the European Community to replace the prewar European anarchy. Spinelli, having “the stuff of a founder of movements”, found the circumstances in which Italian federalism could become a political force to be reckoned with: a powerful influence for developing the Community into a European Union then a European federation.
Britain remains the loser from this change of roles. Now that fortuna has changed again, is it too much to expect that reflection on this history will prompt efforts to restore virtù?
[1]LuigiEinaudi (Junius), “La Società delle Nazioni è un ideale possibile?”, in Corriere della Sera, 5 January 1918, and “Il dogma della sovranità e l’idea della Società delle Nazioni”, in Corriere della Sera, 28 December 1918; reprinted in Luigi Einaudi, Lettere politiche, Bari, Laterza, 1920; most recently reprinted in Luigi Einaudi, La guerra e l’unità europea, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1986.
[2]Riccardo Faucci, Einaudi, Turin, UTET, 1986, pp. 12-15 and passim.
[3]Giovanni Agnelli and Attilio Cabiati, Federazione Europea o Lega delle Nazioni?, Turin, Bocca, 1918. The book was reproduced in the late 1970s (undated) under the same title and in the same form, but with a preface by Senator Giovanni Agnelli and an introduction by Sergio Pistone (publisher Edizione E.T.L., Turin). A French edition was published in Paris in 1919, entitled Fédération européenne ou ligue des nations?.
[4]Agnelli and Cabiati have been identified as pioneers in the critique of raison d’état theorists, by Dino Cofrancesco, “Il contributo della resistenza italiana al dibattito teorico sull’unificazione europea”, in Sergio Pistone (ed.), L’idea dell’unificazione europea dalla prima alla seconda guerra mondiale, Turin, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 1975, pp. 151-2. This critique has been developed as an element in federalist analysis by Pistone, in for example his introduction to Sergio Pistone (ed.), Politica di potenza e imperialismo, Milan, Franco Angeli Editore, 1973.
[9]The article by Wells, cited on pp. 99-103 of Agnelli and Cabiatil ibid., was from the Rassegna Italo-Britannica. The citation from Robertson, on pp. 103-6, was from a paper published by Cobden Club.
[10]G. Agnelli and A. Cabiati, ibid., pp. 20-5.
[11]See Lucio Levi, Federalismo e integrazione europea, Palermo, Palumbo, 1978, pp. 21-2. Levi’s references to Cattaneo’s works are from C. Cattaneo, (anthology edited by N. Bobbio), Stati Uniti d’ltalia, Turin, Chiantore, 1945, pp. 31, 138, 160-1, 185. See also L. Levi, Il federalismo, Milan, Franco Angeli Editore, 1987, pp. 55-7.
[12]See Edmondo Paolini, L’idea di Europa, Florence, La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1979, pp. 31-3.
[13]See Sergio Pistone, L’Italia e l’unità europea, Turin, Loescher Editore, 1982, pp. 48-52.
[14]Over a score of references are given in Claudio Pavone, “Il federalismo europeo”, in Libri e riviste, Rome, numbers XII, XIII, XIV, of February, March, April 1951. See also E. Paolini, op. cit. (n. 12, supra), pp. 33-5.
[15]Sergio Pistone, Introduction to the reprint of G. Agnelli and A. Cabiati, op. cit. (n. 3, supra), p. XIX.
[16]Piero Gobetti, “La Società delle Nazioni”, in Energie nuove, 1-15 January 1919, pp. 65-7, cited in S. Pistone, ibid., pp. XIX, XX (see also his note 22, p.XXIII).
[17]Antonio Gramsci, “Un soviet locale”, in Avanti! (edizione torinese), 5 February 1919, cited in S. Pistone, ibid., pp. XX, XXIV.
[18]R. Faucci, op. cit. (n. 2, supra), pp. 172-3. Einaudi’s review is also discussed in S. Pistone, ibid., pp. XII, XXI-II.
[19]Cited from Benito Mussolini’s La dottrina del fascismo, ch. 2 in E. Paolini, op. cit. (n. 12 supra), p. 51.
[20]Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 88.
[21]Examples from articles by Alberto De Stefani and Camillo Pellizzi are to be found in Walter Lipgens (ed.), Documents on the History of European Integration, vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939-1945, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 1985, pp. 187-93; see particularly pp. 189, 193.
[22]Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian) and Lionel Curtis, The Prevention of War, New Haven, Yale University Press for the Institute of Politics, Williamstown, 1923; and Philip Kerr, “World Problems of Today”, in the Earl of Birkenhead, General Tasker H. Bliss and Philip Henry Kerr, Approaches to World Problems, New Haven, Yale University Press for the Institute of Politics, Williamstown, 1924.
[23]The Marquess of Lothian, Pacifism is not enough (nor patriotism either), London, Oxford University Press, 1935 (second and third editions, July, October 1941).
[24]Translations from Lothian’s principal works have been published in Mario Albertini (ed.), Il federalismo e lo stato federale: Antologia e definizione, Milan, Giuffré, 1963; M. Albertini (ed.), Il federalismo: Antologia e definizione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1979; S. Pistone (ed.), Politica di potenza e imperialismo, Milano, Franco Angeli Editore, 1973; and Lord Lothian, Il pacifismo non basta, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1986. See also Giulio Guderzo (ed.), Lord Lothian. Una vita per la pace, Florence, La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1986, particularly the contributions by Andrea Bosco, Giulio Guderzo and Luigi Vittorio Majocchi.
[25]See J.R.M. Butler, Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr) 1882-1940, London, Macmillan, 1968, for example p. 28.
[26]Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, The Federalist or The New Constitution, first published 1787-8. L. Curtis and Lord Lothian were also influenced by F.S. Oliver, who wrote Alexander Hamilton: An Essay on American Union, London, Macmillan, 1906.
[27]G. Agnelli and A. Cabiati, op. cit. (n. 3, supra), pp. 64, 111-6. The book by Lionel Curtis was The Commonwealth of Nations, London, Macmillan, 1917.
[28]L. Curtis, ibid., pp. 702-3.
[29]Lionel Curtis, Civitas Dei, London, George Allen and Unwin, revised edition 1950, pp. 655, 714-5, 744 (first edition 1934-7).
[30]Gilbert Murray, The Ordeal of this Generation: The War, The League and the Future, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1929, pp. 190-2, 197.
[31]Rappard was later to help Einaudi after his escape from Italy to Switzerland in 1943. See R. Faucci, op. cit. (n. 2, supra), pp. 316-8.
[32]Lionel Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order, London, Macmillan, 1937, pp. 240-1. This passage was cited with strong approval by von Hayek in “The Economic Conditions of Inter-State Federalism”, in New Commonwealth Quarterly, September 1939, reprinted in F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949, pp. 255-72.
[33]Lionel Robbins, The Economic Causes of War, London, Jonathan Cape, 1939, pp. 104-9; the citations are from pp. 105-6.
[34]Their pamphlets were Lord Lothian, The Ending of Armageddon, Federal Union, London, 1939, and Lionel Robbins, Economic Aspects of Federation, Federal Tracts No 2, London, Macmillan, 1941, reprinted in Patrick Ransome (ed.), Studies in Federal Planning, London Macmillan, 1943. Italian translations of Lothian’s writings are cited in n. 24, supra. For Robbins, they include Lionel Robbins, Le cause economiche della guerra, Turin, Einaudi, 1944; L. Robbins, “Aspetti economici della federazione,” in La Federazione europea, Florence, La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1948; L. Robbins, L’economia pianificata e l’ordine internazionale, Milan, Rizzoli, 1948; L. Robbins, La base economica dei conflitti di classe, Florence, La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1952; extracts in M.Albertini, op. cit. (n. 24, supra), and in S. Pistone, op. cit. (n. 24, supra);and L. Robbins, Il federalismo e l’ordine economico internazionale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1985.
[35]See Michael Burgess, “Empire, Ireland and Europe: A Century of British Federal Ideas,” in M. Burgess (ed.), Federalism and Federation in Western Europe, London, Croom Helm, 1986, pp. 137-8.
[36]Winston Churchill, “The United States of Europe”, in Saturday Evening Post, New York, 15 February 1930, reprinted (in English) in Roberto Ducci and Bino Olivi (eds), L’Europa incompiuta, Padova, CEDAM, 1970, see particularly pp. 36-7.
[37]Richard Law, MP, the son of Bonar Law.
[38]See Sir Charles Kimber, “Federal Union,” in The Federalist, Pavia, Year XXVI, Number 3, December 1984, p. 204.
[39]In the conclusion of R.H. Tawney, Equality, London, George Alien and Unwin, second edition 1938, cited in R. W. G. Mackay, Federal Europe, London, Michael Joseph, 1940, p. 139.
[40]See for example his War Aims, New Statesman pamphlet, 1939.
[41]Ernest Bevin, speech to Trades Union Congress, 1927.; C.R. Attlee, Labour’s Peace Aims, London, Peace Book Co., 1940, reprinted in C.R. Attlee, Arthur Greenwood and others, Labour’s Aims in War and Peace, London, Lincolns-Prager, 1940.
[42]Harold J. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, New Haven, Yale University Press, and London, Oxford University Press, 1917, p. 273.
[43]Harold J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1948 (first edition 1925), p. 271.
[46]See for example extracts from Barbara Wootton, Socialism and Federation, Federal Tracts No 6, London, Macmillan, 1941, and from R.W.G. Mackay, op. cit. (n. 39, supra), in Walter Lipgens (ed.), Documents on the History of European Integration, vol. 2: Plans for European Union in Great Britain and in Exile 1939-1945, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 1986, pp. 138-42.
[47]Lord Acton, History of Freedom and other Essays; J.S. Mill, “Of Federal Representative Governments,” in Considerations on Representative Government, 1861; H. Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics; Hamilton, Jay and Madison, The Federalist, op. cit. (n. 26, supra); James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 1888; A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 1885; E.A. Freeman, A History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy, 1893 (revised second edition); J.R. Seeley, “United States of Europe”, in Macmillan Magazine, vol. 21, 1871, pp. 441-4;W.T. Stead, The United States of Europe, London, 1899.
[48]The foundation and early period of Federal Union are described in Kimber, op. cit. (n. 38, supra), and in John Pinder, “Federal Union 1939-41,” in W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 46, supra), pp. 26-34.
[49]Clarence K. Streit, Union Now: a Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic, London, Jonathan Cape, and New York, Harper, 1939.
[51]See Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira, Storia del fascismo: l’Italia dal 1919 al 1945, Rome, 1952, pp. 341,371, cited in C.F. Delzell, op. cit. (n. 2, supra), pp. 97, 100.
[52]See C.F. Delzell, ibid., p. 6.
[53]See C.F. Delzell, ibid., p. 48.
[54]Don Sturzo and the PPI had supported the League of Nations, since its foundation. See Eugenio Guccione, “Il federalismo europeo in Luigi Sturzo”, in Archivio Storico Siciliano, Serie IV, Vol. IV, 1978, pp. 445-93.
[55]L. Sturzo, The International Community and the Right of War, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1929, pp. 228 ff and p. 277. The failure to distinguish between a federal and a Commonwealth structure was not unusual in Britain at that time, see for example Arnold Toynbee, World Order or Downfall?, London, BBC, 1930, pp. 34,36.
[56]L. Sturzo, “Problemi dell’Europa futura,” in Il Mondo, New York, April 1940, extracts reproduced (in English) in W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 46, supra), pp. 497-9. It is interesting that Toynbee’s thought had undergone the same evolution: see his “First Thoughts on a Peace Settlement”, unpublished memorandum, 26 July 1939, London, Royal Institute of International Affairs Archives 9/18f, p. 7.
[57]C.F. Delzell, op. cit. (n. 20, supra), p. 162.
[58]Altiero Spinelli, “The Growth of the European Movement since World War II”, in C. Grove Haines (ed.), European Integration, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, and London, Oxford University Press, 1937, pp. 44-5.
[59]See E. Guccione, op. cit. (n. 54, supra), and Don Sturzo in Il Popolo, 29 April 1948, reprinted in L. Sturzo, Politica di questi anni, vol. I, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1954, pp. 421-424.
[60]C.F. Delzell, op. cit. (n. 20, supra), p. 217; Sergio Pistone (ed.), L’idea dell’unificazione europea dalla prima alla seconda guerra mondiale, Turin, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 1975, p. 93; W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 21, supra), pp. 503-5.
[61]W. Lipgens, ibid., pp. 505-6; S. Pistone, ibid., p. 94, 134-5.
[62]See Mario Albertini, “La fondazione dello stato europeo,” in Luigi Vittorio Majocchi and Francesco Rossolillo, Il Parlamento europeo, Naples, Guida Editori, 1979, pp. 163-216. See also Giulio Andreotti, De Gasperi e il suo tempo, Milan, Mondadori, 1956, pp. 313-4; Andreotti, who was one of De Gasperi’s closest collaborators, has continued to promote the European federal idea as Foreign Minister in the 1980s, in particular supporting the European Parliament and its European Union Draft Treaty.
[63]Pier Carlo Masini, “Introduzione,” in Filippo Turati, Per gli Stati Uniti d’Europa (Lettere, discorsi e scritti raccolti da P. Carlo Masini), Rome, Editore Armando Armando, 1980, p. 14; F. Turati, “La decadenza di un uomo illustre”, in Critica sociale, 30 November 1891, reproduced in F. Turati, pp. 35-7.
[64]P.C. Masini, ibid., pp. 14, 16; Turati, speech in Parliament on 29 April 1919, reproduced in F. Turati, ibid., pp. 53-60; and Turati’s speech to the Rome Congress of the PSU, 3 October 1922, cited in P.C. Masini, ibid., p. 19.
[66]Interview in Le Quotidien, Paris, 15 December 1929, see F. Turati, op. cit. (n. 63, supra), pp. 74-9, and S. Pistone, op. cit. (n. 60, supra), pp. 61-3.
[67]F. Turati, ibid., pp. 80-8.
[68]C.F. Delzell, op. cit. (n. 20, supra), pp. 9, 22 and passim; W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n.46, supra), pp. 517-9; F.L. Josephy, document on the history of Federal Union 1938-48, typescript in Josephy/Federal Union archive at London School of Economics, pp. 13, 27, 41.
[69]C.F. Delzell, ibid., pp. 78-9, 136; W. Lipgens, ibid., pp. 499-51.
[70]W. Lipgens, ibid., pp. 521-3; S. Pistone, op. cit. (n. 60, supra), pp. 122-3; Altiero Spinelli, Come ho tentato di diventare saggio: la goccia e la roccia (posthumously edited by Edmondo Paolini), Bologna, Il Mulino, 1987, p. 63.
[71]Leo Solari, Eugenio Colorni: leri e oggi, Venise, Marsilio Editori, 1980, pp. 46, 189-90.
[72]Eugenio Colorni, “Prefazione” (unsigned), in A.S. and E.R., Problemi della Federazione Europea, Rome, Edizioni del Movimento Italiano per la Federazione Europea, 1944, reprinted at Bologna, Centro Stampa del Movimento Federalista Europeo, 1972. The Preface is on pp. 3-8 of the reprint. It has also been reprinted, among, others, in L. Solari, ibid., pp. 129-34 and in Altiero Spinelli, Il progetto europeo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1985, pp. 195-9.
[73]L. Solari, ibid., pp. 63-8.
[77]Massimo Salvadori, Breve storia della Resistenza italiana, Florence, Vallecchi, 1974, p. 44.
[80]C.F. Delzell, op. cit. (n. 20, supra), pp. 30-2.
[83]C.F. Delzell, ibid., p. 79; S. Pistone, ibid., pp. 64-8.
[84]Charles F. Delzell, “The European Federalist Movement in Italy: First Phase, 1918-47”, in Journal of Modern History, Chicago, 1960, pp. 241-50; W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 21, supra), p. 290; W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 46, supra), p. 494; L. Solari, op. cit. (n. 71, supra), p.82.
[85]L. Solari, ibid., p. 190.
[87]See S. Pistone, op. cit. (n. 60, supra), pp. 89-91. For a list of sources on the relationship between the political culture of the Partito d’Azione and the development of federalist thought and action in Italy, see L. Levi and S. Pistone (eds), Trent’anni di vita del Movimento Federalista Europeo, Milan, Franco Angeli Editore, 1973, p. 42.
[88]Altiero Spinelli, Come ho tentato di diventare saggio: Io, Ulisse, Bologna, Il Mulino, pp. 296, 301.
[93]A. Spinelli, op. cit. (n. 88, supra), p. 301.
[95]A. Spinelli, op. cit. (n. 70, supra), p. 40.
[96]A. Spinelli, op. cit. (n. 88, supra), p. 306.
[97]R. Faucci, op. cit. (n. 2, supra), p. 318; A. Spinelli, ibid., p. 307.
[99]A. Spinelli, op. cit. (n. 88, supra), p. 307.
[100]A. Spinelli, loc. cit., and op. cit. (n. 72, supra), pp. 201-3. The two books by Robbins were those cited in n. 32 and n. 33, supra; Spinelli’s translation was, Le cause economiche della guerra, cited in n. 34, supra. The book by von Hayek was Collectivist Economic Planning, London, Routledge, 1935; for his participation in the Federal Union Research Institute see W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 46, supra), pp. 27, 31-3, 113,129-34. The two essays, by A. Spinelli were “Gli Stati Uniti d’Europa e le varie tendenze politiche” and “Politica marxista e politica federalista”, first printed, together with the “Progetto d’un manifesto”; (Ventotene Manifesto) and the Preface by Colorni (n. 72, supra), in A. S. and E. R., Problemi della Federazione Europea; the essays have been reprinted in the edition published in Bologna in 1972 (n. 72) and in Il progetto europeo (n. 72); and extracts translated into English can be found in W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 21, supra), pp. 484-92.
[101]See “Intervista con Altiero Spinelli,” in Il progetto europeo, cit. (n. 72, supra), pp. 201-13. The Federal Union pamphlets available by mid-1940 included Sir William Beveridge, Peace by Federation?; H.N. Brailsford, The Federal Idea; Lord Lothian, The Ending of Armageddon.
[102]A. Spinelli, op. cit. (n. 88, supra), pp. 307-8; the English translation of this passage comes from The Federalist, Year XXVI, No 2, October 1984, p. 158.
[103]The Ventotene Manifesto was distributed in duplicated form on the Italian mainland from 1941 onwards. The first printed edition appeared, together with Colorni’s Preface (n. 72, supra) and Spinelli’s two essays (n. 100), in Problemi della Federazione Europea (n.72), in Rome in January 1944, published clandestinely by E. Colorni. Reprints are to be found in the 1972 Bologna edition of the original publication (n. 72), in A. Spinelli, Il progetto europeo (n. 72), and (extracts in English) in W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 21, supra), pp. 473-89. For a note on the original sources, see A. Spinelli, Il progetto europeo, pp. 13-4.
[104]A.S and E.R. Problemi della Federazione Europea (Bologna 1972 edition cited in n. l00, supra), p. 9; A. Spinelli, Il progetto europeo, cit., p.17; W. Lipgens, op. cit., p. 473.
[105]A.S and E.R. Problemi della Federazione Europea, cit., pp. 10, 21, 27; A. Spinelli, Il progetto europeo, cit., pp. 18, 28-9, 34; W. Lipgens, ibid., pp. 474, 478-9, 481.
[106]See A. Spinelli, Il progetto europeo, cit., pp. 203-4; A. Spinelli, op. cit. (n. 88, supra), p. 301.
[107]A.S. and E.R. Problemi della Federazione Europea (Bologna edition cited in n. 100, supra), pp. 22-3, 28-30; A. Spinelli, Il progetto europeo, cit., pp. 30, 35-6; W. Lipgens, op. cit. (n. 21, supra), pp. 479, 482-3.
[108]A. Spinelli, op. cit. (n. 88, supra), p. 312.
[109]See n. 103, supra.
