Altiero Spinelli

Altiero Spinelli (31 August 1907 – 23 May 1986) was an Italian communist politician, political theorist and European federalist, referred to as one of the founding fathers of the European Union.

A communist and militant anti-fascist in his youth, Spinelli spent 10 years imprisoned by the Italian fascist regime.

Following his entry into radical journalism, he was arrested in 1927 and spent ten years in prison and a further six in confinement.

During the war, he was interned on the island of Ventotene (in Lazio) along with some eight hundred other political opponents of the regime.

Having grown disillusioned with Stalinism, he broke with the Communist Party of Italy in 1937.

In 1937, he was expelled from the PCd'I for opposing Stalinism, undermining the Bolshevik ideology and supporting Trotskyism.

Interned in Ventotene during World War II, he, along with fellow democratic socialists, drafted the manifesto For a Free and United Europe (most commonly known as the Ventotene Manifesto) in 1941, considered a precursor of the European integration process.

Spinelli had a leading role in the foundation of the European Federalist Movement, and had strong influence on the first few decades of post-World War II European integration.

In June 1941, well before the outcome of the war was safely predictable, Spinelli and fellow prisoner Ernesto Rossi completed the Ventotene Manifesto, eventually entitled Per un'Europa libera e unita ("For a Free and United Europe. A Draft Manifesto"), which argued that, if the fight against the fascist powers were successful, it would be in vain if it merely led to the re-establishment of the old European system of sovereign nation-states in shifting alliances.

This would inevitably lead to war again.

The document called for the establishment of a European federation by the democratic powers after the war.

Because of a need for secrecy and a lack of proper materials at the time, the Manifesto was written on cigarette papers, concealed in the false bottom of a tin box and smuggled to the mainland by Ursula Hirschmann.

It was then circulated through the Italian Resistance, and was later adopted as the programme of the European Federalist Movement (MFE), which Spinelli, Colorni and some 20 others established, as soon as they were able to leave their internment camp.

The founding meeting was held in clandestinity in Milan on the 27/28 August 1943.

The Manifesto was widely circulated in other resistance movements towards the end of the war.

Resistance leaders from several countries met clandestinely in Geneva in 1944, a meeting attended by Spinelli.

The Manifesto put forward proposals for creating a European federation of states, the primary aim of which was to tie European countries so closely together that they would no longer be able to go to war with one another.

As in many European left-wing political circles, this sort of move towards federalist ideas was argued as a reaction to the destructive excesses of nationalism.

The ideological underpinnings for a united Europe can thus be traced to hostility to nationalism.

In the founding meeting of the MFE, he said: "If a post war order is established in which each State retains its complete national sovereignty, the basis for a Third World War would still exist even after the Nazi attempt to establish the domination of the German race in Europe has been frustrated."

The Manifesto criticised the "capitalist imperialism which our own generation has seen expand to the point of forming totalitarian states and to the unleashing of world wars".

It also declared that "the European revolution must be socialist, that is it must have as its goal the emancipation of the working classes and the realization for them of more humane living conditions".

However it opposed "doctrinaire" formulations of transitions to socialism and said "private property must be abolished, limited, corrected, extended: instance by instance, however, not dogmatically according to principle".

After the war, Spinelli, leading the federalist MFE, played a vanguard role in the early episodes of European integration, criticising the small steps approach and the dominance of intergovernmentalism, feeling even that the chance to unite Europe had been missed as sovereign states were re-established without any common bond other than the functionalist OEEC and the largely symbolic Council of Europe.

Even the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was felt to be too sectoral.

The MFE believed governments alone would never relinquish their national power without popular pressure.

They advocated a European constituent assembly to draft a European Constitution.

A critic of the USSR, Spinelli argued that "only when it is faced by a united federal Europe will the USSR be brought to a halt".

This approach eventually had a response from governments when they set up the "ad hoc assembly" of 1952–3.

It was Spinelli who persuaded Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi to insist in the negotiation of the European Defence Community (EDC) treaty on a provision for a parliamentary assembly to draw up plans for placing the EDC, the ECSC and any other development within a global constitutional framework to "replace the present provisional organization" with "a subsequent federal or confederal structure based on the principle of the separation of powers and having, in particular, a two-chamber system of representation".

The Assembly was invited to submit its proposals within six months of its constitutive meeting following the entry into force of the EDC treaty.

In fact, the Foreign Ministers, meeting three months after the signature of the EDC treaty, invited the ECSC Assembly immediately to draft a "treaty constituting a European Political Authority" without waiting for ratification of the EDC Treaty.

Spinelli played a significant role in advising the drafting of the Assembly's proposal for a European "Statute".

However, the failure of France to ratify the EDC treaty meant it was all to no immediate avail.

Some of its ideas, however, were taken up in subsequent events.

Later, he helped to re-launch the integration process in the 1980s.

By the time of his death, he had been a member of the European Commission for six years, and a member of the European Parliament for ten years right up until his death.

The main building of the European Parliament in Brussels is named after him.

The 1987–1988 academic year at the College of Europe and the 2009–2010 academic year of the European College of Parma were named in his honour.

Spinelli was born in Rome, the son of a socialist father, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) at an early age to oppose the regime of Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party.