Overview

Few in Britain have heard of the Italian Leninist and former Stalinist, Altiero Spinelli. Yet
federalists at the heart of the European Union fully recognise the importance of Spinelli's
contribution to the creation of the European Union. His impact on the birth of the European
Super State has been momentous.
Altiero Spinelli, a lifelong Communist, was one of the main strategic thinkers who devised the
sum and substance of the European Union as it is today. His skills went beyond armchair
strategy. Spinelli was a key figure in the early years of creating a federal Europe. Then for nearly
four decades his star was eclipsed by others, notably Jean Monnet and his backers. It was not
until 1980 that Spinelli stepped back into the limelight and rose to the challenge posed by the
then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Spinelli was able to promote his ideas honed
over those many decades and create the impetus which, even after his death in 1984, have
dominated the development of Europe's flegling Super State; first in the Single European Act,
then the Maastricht Treaty and now the Amsterdam Treaty.
How sad it is that over the last thirty-five years of British membership British governments have
not looked behind the facade of the European Union. Soon Spinelli may be able to rest in peace
content that his vision has been realised. And as Hugh Gaitskell foretold, the inhabitants of the
British Isles may no longer be British, only European. It would be the end of a thousand years of
history. In that end Altiero Spinelli will have played a key role, though others of different
nationalities may rightly claim to be the leaders of Britain's destruction as an independent
country. But that is another story.1
Stalinist Spinelli Fights Mussolini
Altiero Spinelli was born in Rome, two years after Lenin's first and abortive coup in St
Petersburg. In his youth he was attracted to the ideas of Lenin and of Trotsky. In 1924, aged only
seventeen, he joined the Communists; his involvement went well beyond an academic interest in
political theory. The Communists were in the thick of resisting Benito Mussolini and his
blackshirted Fascists who had taken power in October 1922. So Spinelli and others like him were
active in resistance years before the outbreak of the Second World War and the growth of
resistance movements throughout Nazi occupied Europe.
Within four years of taking power Mussolini was absolute dictator of Italy. The opposition,
the Anti-Fasciti, was made up of several parties which formed and reformed. Those who resisted
had to do so mainly from abroad, usually in France; and to much less effect from North and
South America. Those at home who were too vocal found themselves in front of Mussolini's
dreaded Special Tribunal and spent years in prison. Resistance was a highly dangerous business:
it certainly proved so for Spinelli.
On 6th April 1928 in a series of crack-downs on the leaders of the Communists, the Partito
Communista Italiano (PCI), Spinelli was arrested and took his turn in front of Mussolini's
Special Tribunal. He was sentenced to jail and spent twelve years in different prisons until he
was eventually sent to the prison island of Ventotene.2
With time to think he broke with Stalinism in 1937. But he was never to move far from his
Stalinist roots. Spinelli's certainty, drive and ambition, partially born of his Communist training,
were later to be critical in creating the European Union.
The prison island of Ventotene became the enforced headquarters of the PCI underground with
Communists outnumbering all the other groups. More arrived after the fall of Paris in June 1940,
when many of those who had been refugees there, some for ten years or more, were shipped back
to Mussolini and to prison. By that time there were about 1,000 prisoners on Ventotene. It was a
revolutionary hothouse.
Spinelli strongly believed that the days of national sovereignty were dead. In Italy, federal ideas
have a long pedigree dating back to the days of the Risorgimento and earlier to Guiseppe
Mazzini3 and Carlo Cattaneo. During the First World War various Italian Socialists advocated
European federation. In 1916 the revolutionary Socialist, Guiseppe Modigliani, wrote in the
journal Avanti! that a United States of Europe would be the inescapable result of economic
progress breaking down national boundaries, and forcing the creation of new institutions which
the Socialists could take over.
On the prison island, Spinelli came under the influence of two men: his fellow prisoner Ernesto
Rossi4 and, through his writings, Rossi's friend, Professor Luigi Einaudi.
Immediately after the First World War, Professor Einaudi, a liberal economist, wrote articles and
letters to newspapers against national sovereignty. Using the pen name "Junius" in the Corriere
della Sera he criticised the plan for the League of Nations because it left the sovereignty of states
intact. He wanted a Europe based either on the USA or on the English union with Scotland: with
the power to tax, one army, and control over customs, postal communications and the
railways.5 He inspired others who were also writing along similar lines, such as Giovanni Agnelli
(of Fiat) and Attilio Cabiati.6
Between the wars European federation was part of the platform of the Giustizia e Liberta, a party
formed in 1929 and inspired by the firebrand Socialist Emilio Lussu and by Carlo Rosselli. 7 The
"Giellisti", a coalition of Socialists and Liberals, wanted agrarian reform, co-operatives, Socialist
public utilities and progressive income tax. Despite the personal dangers the Giellisti attracted
increasing numbers of supporters to oppose Mussolini. By 1933 the Giellisti had 800 followers
in Rome and around 3,000 in the central and southern provinces.
In May 1931 Mussolini's Special Tribunal sentenced the Giellisti leader in Milan, Professor
Ernesto Rossi, together with his colleague Riccardo Bauer, to twenty years in prison and so
smashed the Milan branch. Rossi had been operating in a cloak and dagger way for some years:
once he had had to flee to France for four months when he was caught smuggling propaganda
across the border into Italy. He too was sent to Ventotene.
A Revolutionary Prison
Ventotene, the "confino" island, is in the Gulf of Gaeta off the Italian coast between Rome and
Naples. When it was a revolutionary prison it was linked to the mainland by a supply boat, which
went back and forth twice a week enabling Professor Einaudi to send federalist reading material
to his friend Rossi. Occasionally underground tracts could be smuggled out.
Among the strongest written influences on Spinelli and his friends, courtesy of Professor
Einaudi, were the American eighteenth century revolutionaries Hamilton, Jay and Madison.
Among the contemporary writers were Sir Walter (later Lord) Layton of The Economist,
American Clarence Streit, Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge and Barbara Wootton (later a
Professor, a Baroness and a deputy speaker in the House of Lords). All four were advocates of
European federation.
In Union Now, published in 1939, Clarence Streit had argued for a federation of Britain and
America as the nucleus of fifteen democratic countries. Its publication caused a considerable stir
at the time.
Unlike the others, Layton believed a federation was right for Europe but not for Britain. From
1922 to 1938 Layton was particularly influential as editor of The Economist and was later its
chairman. In the 1950s when he was deputy leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords,
Layton was to change his views and then held that Britain should be part of a federal Europe.
Years later, in a 1957 speech, Spinelli acknowledged the importance of the Anglo-American
literature he had received on Ventotene. He said he had whiled away some of his time by
translating Professor Harold Robbins' The Economic Causes of War into Italian. He commented
that the British pre-war literature was first class and "even superior to the average Continental
literature... The Italian movement has absorbed much from the British." 8 For a man of his not
inconsiderable ego that was praise indeed.
The leaders of the federalist prisoners were Spinelli, Rossi (who by that time had broken with his
Giellisti colleagues), Eugenio Colorni (head of the Socialist Party until his arrest in 1938), Enrico
Giussani, Dino Roberto and Giorgio Braccialarghe. They all helped to write a crucial work,
the Manifesto for a Free and United Europe, but the dominant hand was that of Spinelli.
In July 1941 Rossi managed to smuggle the tract to the mainland. Rossi's wife, Ada, took the
final version, written on cigarette-papers and hidden in the false bottom of a tin box, back with
her on the supply boat. For cigarette-papers it is a lengthy document. Later, widely known as
the Ventotene Manifesto, it had an extraordinary impact, inspiring those who drafted the policies
of the re-emerging Italian parties. After the war it became the basic document of the European
Federalist Movement.
In the Ventotene Manifesto Spinelli argued that a Federal Union of Europe had to be the top
priority for post-war Italy. The workers of both capitalist and Communist countries had to be
liberated. Not surprisingly, given Spinelli's background, it reads like a Communist tract:
"A free and united Europe ... will immediately revive in full the historical process of the struggle
against social inequalities and privileges. All the old conservative structures which hindered this
process will have collapsed or will be in a state of collapse... In order to respond to our needs,
the European revolution must be socialist..."
Spinelli's approach to the abolition of private property was flexible. He deplored the "doctrinaire
principle that the private ownership of the material means of production must, as a general rule,
be abolished" as in Stalin's Russia where "the entire population was subject to a restricted cell of
bureaucrats who ran the economy..."
Instead "the forces of progress must be extolled and extended .... at the same time.... the barriers
which guided these forces ... must be strengthened and perfected. Private property must be
abolished, limited, corrected or extended: instance by instance, not dogmatically according to
principle."
Pursuing Lenin's approach, Spinelli was sure that the defeat of Germany would be followed by a
period of chaos when his revolution could take hold, when "the fallen governments lie broken,
during which the popular masses anxiously await a new message and are, meanwhile, like
molten matter, burning, susceptible of being poured into new moulds, capable of welcoming the
guidance of serious internationalists..."
He went on "The collapse of the majority of the states of the continent under the German steam-
roller has already placed the destinies of the European populations on common ground: either all
together they will submit to Hitler's dominion, or all together they will enter a revolutionary
crisis after his fall." Circumstances, he wrote, were "now favourable to our ideal."
Spinelli thought that ending the nation states of Europe would have other benefits. For one, the
German problem would be solved. "The multiple problems which poison international life on the
continent have proved to be insoluble: tracing boundaries through areas inhabited by mixed
populations, defence of minorities, seaports for landlocked countries, the Balkan question, the
Irish problem, and so on. All matters which should find easy solutions in the European
federation."
All the main functions of a state were to be centralised with just a little freedom left for the old
nation states. The new Europe would "have at its disposal a European armed service instead of
national armies; to break decisively economic autarchies, the backbone of totalitarian regimes;...
sufficient means to see that its deliberations for the maintenance of common order are executed
in the single federal states, while each state will retain the autonomy it needs for a plastic
articulation and development of political life according to the particular characteristics of its
people."
In a second paper, The United States of Europe, Spinelli recommended,
"set[ting] up a few simple federal institutions, which must be solid, irrevocable [a word we have
heard many times since] and easily understood. It will not be necessary to trouble much with
individual national problems. The federation would provide the necessary internal order to
which progressive forces would naturally adjust and from which they would derive their future
character."
Spinelli's third paper stressed that a European federation, unlike the bureaucracy of Stalin's
USSR, would have the fundamental principles of "federation, socialisation of monopolies and
redistribution of wealth." He emphasised the need for an educational system to train men of
initiative and to choose the right men now. That was more important than the new institutions.
After the war the College of Bruges was founded to do just that.
Fellow prisoner, Professor Rossi, was afraid that, if they waited until the war was over for
Spinelli's "European consciousness" to appear of its own accord, they would miss the boat. In the
Risorgimento, small elites had successfully unified Italy. So Rossi thought they should pressurise
the victorious countries using the Risorgimento's technique to achieve a united Europe.
In Montevideo in August 1942, Italian refugees from Mussolini organised a Pan-American
Congress to endorse European Federation. The idea was to put pressure on the Mazzini Society
of the USA (a broad-based propaganda organisation to stir up anti-Fascist feeling) and on the
American State Department to accept the concept of European federalism as the ultimate post-
war goal. The refugees' efforts failed because the State Department took the view that the
Society's views were not part of the Italian mainstream in Italy itself.
Spinelli was also sceptical of the Mazzini's Society's aims, which he though were too vague to be
of any practical significance. He believed that the USA would become a supporter of European
Federation: therefore European Federation would be a key part of the post-war world. Spinelli
was right.
Escape, to Plan for Peace
In August 1943, a month after Mussolini was overthrown, Spinelli and Rossi were released from
prison. Even as the Allies were advancing in the wake of their successful landings in Sicily, the
ex-prisoners were already travelling north to Milan. There Professor Silvio Trentin, a Giellisti
law scholar from Venetia, had a cover operation - a bookshop - waiting for them.
Since 1925 Professor Trentin had been in exile in Paris with the Italian Socialist party. When the
Germans marched into Paris, he fled south to Toulouse. Using a bookshop as cover, he became
the focal point for Italian and Spanish Republican exiles. So, in a repeat operation behind the
facade of Trentin's Milanese bookshop, Spinelli and friends started to reorganize.
Within a few days of their arrival in Milan they secretly held the first meeting of what would
become the influential Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE). Between fifteen and twenty
former prisoners from the island of Ventotene met in the home of Mario Alberto Rollier. Rossi
and Spinelli were the joint secretaries of the new movement. They produced a six point
declaration based on the Ventotene Manifesto.
The MFE group expected that there would be bloody revolution as the war came to an end, just
as had happened at the end of the First World War when the Russian revolution spread to parts of
Germany. They hoped to be able to take advantage of the upheaval to create a federal Europe in
which all the citizens of Europe would control the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.
Milan became the publishing centre for the few federalists left in Italy. Labouring under great
difficulty, the MFE produced eight clandestine issues of its newspaper L'Unita Europea. It was
first edited by Colorni, then by Rollier, and stencilled copies were circulated. Four of the issues
included reprinted articles by Sir Walter Layton, Lord Beveridge and Barbara Wootton. They
also reported on Allied policy for post-war planning, analysed Italian foreign policy and
discussed federalism.
The MFE was deliberately a movement, not a party. Guglielmo wrote in L'Unita Europea,
"federalism in its present period of germination ... merits the title of a political movement not a
party" and thus "allows its members a certain breadth and variety of views in regard to social
ideologies and government programmes... It aims to create an organization of its own, capable of
spreading the federalist idea and of acting resolutely in a revolutionary sense in the context of
today's underground political life. Tomorrow, when politics become legal again, it intends to lose
no opportunity of operating on the level of political parties."
The influence of the MFE was to be astounding: all the post-war Italian parties, except the
Communist PCI, included federalism in their programmes.
On 8th September 1943, the Germans seized the Po valley and life in the occupied North became
more hazardous. Thousands of Italians fled across the border to Switzerland and joined the few
already sheltering there.
Unlike some of their colleagues, Spinelli, Rossi, Giussani and Usellini believed that working for
a federal Europe was more important than remaining in Italy to fight the Nazis. Rossi had an
excuse because he had been disabled in the Great War. Spinelli had none.
Spinelli was briefly in touch with the chief Special Operations Executive representative in
Switzerland, Jock McCaffery. Nevertheless, from the autumn of 1943 Spinelli concentrated not
on defeating the Germans, in which he had never had much interest, but rather on creating a
United States of Europe in the post-war world. He continued to do so until he died over forty
years later.
The Swiss contingent sent back many articles to Colorni and his secret printer in Milan.
Enrichetta Ritter braved the dangers of crossing the frontier into German-held Italy. Under the
pen name 'Thelos', Rossi wrote a pamphlet called L'Europe de Demain, and Colorni managed to
print a staggering 10,000 copies. In May 1944 they were smuggled into occupied France. The
following year the pamphlet was reprinted by the Geneva Centre d'Action together with other
federalist articles.
Geneva was not only safe but from there it was also possible for Spinelli and friends to contact
other national groups operating within resistance movements round Europe. They quickly
identified them and worked hard to co-ordinate their activities and programmes.
Help also came from an unexpected quarter, the Dutch Secretary-General of the World Council
of Churches in Geneva, the Rev. Dr Willem Visser 't Hooft.
In Secret
The Italians needed a safe house from which to conduct their illegal activities. Within a few
weeks of their arrival in Switzerland, 't Hooft was introduced to them by Jean-Marie Soutou,
who had represented the French underground newspaper Temoignage Chretien in Geneva since
the spring of 1943 and was an agent of the Mouvements Unis de Resistance.
With the constant problem that Swiss neutrality had to be respected, and the fear of the dire
results if it was not, Spinelli's meetings had to be held in secret. They were reported in the press
in vague terms as international meetings of resistance leaders 'somewhere in occupied Europe',
which was stretching the truth somewhat - some were, some not. Because travel in occupied
Europe was hazardous the meetings took some months to set up. Not all those invited could
come.
Between March and June 1944 five meetings were held in 't Hooft's house. No full record of
those attending was kept, but there were about fifteen people. The Italians were represented by
Spinelli, Rossi and Professor Egidio Reale of the Italian Republican Party. Representing France
were Jean-Marie Soutou, Laloy, the official representative in Geneva of the French National
Committee in Algiers, and Francois Bondy, born in Austro-Hungary later a Swiss national, who
maintained contact with French Socialist resistance groups. From Germany came Hanna
Bertholet of the Militant Socialist International (ISK), linked with the German trade unions and
in touch with German resistance groups, and Hilda Monte 9, also a member of the ISK from
Germany with links to the remnants of German resistance. 'T Hooft represented the Dutch
resistance. The names of a Yugoslav from Tito's movement, a Pole, a Czech, a Norwegian and a
Dane are not known.
There was some debate about whether to allow any Germans to be present, but a majority
allowed Hilda Monte and Hanna Bertholet to slip into the room. Hilda Monte was later shot at
the border when she tried illegally to cross back to Switzerland from Germany.
Nearly all those present were motivated by the same basic premise: namely that the
internationalist concepts of the League of Nations should form the foundation for any federal
Europe. The French and the Italians wanted to go much further than the others and curtail
national sovereignty. That was to be the forerunner of many later battles.
The participants signed the International Federalists' Declaration, which was edited by the
Italians and based on the Ventotene Manifesto. They wanted "...to go beyond the dogma of the
absolute sovereignty of the state and unite in a single federal organisation. The lack of unity and
cohesion that still exists between the different parts of the world will not allow us to achieve
immediately an organisation that unites all civilisations under a single federal government. At the
end of the war one will therefore have to be content with setting up a universal organisation of a
less ambitious kind, but one able to develop in the direction of federal unity."
The writers believed that the destruction from two world wars was due to the existence of thirty
sovereign states; "this anarchy must be remedied by the creation of a Federal Union between the
European peoples." It was not, of course, the case that thirty states caused either World War: in
both cases it was German ambitions. Repeating the Ventotene Manifesto the writers thought:
"only a federal Union will allow the German people to participate in the life of Europe without
being a danger for the rest."
"The Federal Union must not prejudice the right of each ... member country to solve its own
special problems according to its own ethnic and cultural characteristics. But ... states must
irrevocably surrender to the Federation those aspects of their sovereignty that deal with the
defence, relations with states outside the Federal Union and international trade and
communications."
They called for a government responsible to the people, one army responsible to the supra-
government excluding all other armies, and a supreme tribunal. Finally they wanted a permanent
headquarters from which to build the Federal Union.
Secretly, the Declaration was sent from Switzerland to all occupied countries in Europe and to
Britain. Reaction was mixed.
In Britain the Socialist Vanguard Group10 was enthusiastic. Sir Walter Layton, whose influence
on the Italians had been so marked, told the audience at the annual conference of the
Geographical Association in January 1945 that there should be a world organisation combined
with regions. He advocated Spinelli's declaration which had been sent to him from Switzerland
for "a central government for Europe responsible not to the various state governments but to the
people."
Some French were positive: in Lyons in June 1944, the CFFE (Comité Francais pour la
Fédération Européenne) newly created by some of the resistance movements, agreed a similar
declaration.
Only four of the Dutch resistance groups replied: they had more pressing engagements. One said,
"this may seem surprising in Switzerland, but it is understandable to anyone who knows and
experiences conditions here. The resistance groups are fully occupied with their own task, with
day-to-day cares and the constant risk to their lives - executions of late have risen to over 500 a
month - and cannot be expected to find time or opportunity to consider such international
questions with the necessary calm and deliberation."
Campaigning Begins
After the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, the resistance movements in all countries
became increasingly concerned with the last battles against the Nazi occupiers; and then with
their own national positions as the end of the war approached.
In the late summer of 1944 Spinelli left Switzerland to return to Italy, and immediately became a
leader of the Action Party Secretariat for Upper Italy, which took over from the Giellisti. In
December the Action Party proposed that the principle of the transfer of sovereign rights to a
"democratic European federation" should be embodied in the Constitution of the Italian
Republic:
The Italian State considers its own absolute sovereignty to be provisional and is prepared to
transfer those sovereign functions which are of supranational concern to a future democratic
federation of Europe in which Italians would enjoy all the rights and assume all the obligations
of federal citizens.11
In 1947 this supranational clause was made part of the new constitution of the Italian Republic.
Most of those who voted for it did not understand what they were doing: in the understated
words of one historian it "proved quite useful." It was an outstanding success for Spinelli, who
was to remain a leading campaigner for the United States of Europe for the next forty years.
Professor Ernesto Rossi worked for the MFE and for the Action Party and, until his death in
Rome in 1967, wrote extensively and strove to establish the United States of Europe.
Colorni, who had converted to federalism on Ventotene and became the first clandestine editor
of L'Unita Europea, was active in rebuilding the Socialist Party in Rome. In August 1943, the
new underground Socialist groups were merged into one with a programme which, thanks to
Colorni, combined internationalist principles with the idea of European federation. Colorni
published the Ventotene Manifesto and promoted it widely. In May 1944 he was murdered by
the Fasciti.
Professor Einaudi, whose smuggled works had inspired Spinelli on Ventotene, returned from his
Swiss exile and in 1946 and 1947 was a member of the Constituent Assembly. He was a member
of the first Cabinet of De Gaspari, a fellow federalist and a Christian Democrat. After the peace
treaty was ratified on 29th July 1947, Einaudi said, "the next goal is the United States of
Europe".12 From 1948 to 1955 his influence was paramount: he was President of the Italian
Republic.
Federalism Takes-off
Immediately after the war Spinelli led the Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE) which he and
his former fellow prisoners had begun in the Milanese bookshop in 1943. Because he was in
prison during his twenties and most of his thirties he was even more single-minded than most
wartime resistance members. By 1947 the MFE claimed 15,000 members, mainly in the North
where Spinelli was operating. The MFE persuaded all the Italian parties, except the Communist
PCI, to include federalism in their programmes.
The MFE did not achieve much more until after June 1948, when its most powerful leader,
Spinelli, and his friend Rossi returned to international politics. Until then Spinelli concentrated
on pushing for a republican constitution: he rightly saw no chance of any kind of European
federation in the first three years after the war.
In the first years of peace many pressure groups for European federalism were formed; but all
were tiny except for the revolutionary European Union of Federalists (UEF). By mid-1947 that
had 150,000 members, mainly in France and Italy.
Its leader was the Dutchman, Hendrik Brugmans, who had studied at the Sorbonne and during
the war worked briefly for the Je Maintiendra resistance movement. Brugmans wanted to make
Europe a third force between "totalitarian socialism" and "anarchic capitalism", between the
USSR and the USA. He supported "the great Russian revolution". Europe, he thought, would
gain from large scale socialist planning. The UEF's intellectual roots went straight back to the
French revolution via the Paris Commune of 1871.
There was a battle royal between the French and Italians for control of the UEF. The Italian
leaders, Spinelli and Rossi, wanted a superstate, as they had argued from their prison island,
Ventotene, and later in the war from Switzerland, certainly not small communities.
The French diplomatically paid lip service to this approach, but really wanted an international
organisation to reflect what they called "pre-existing social realities"; i.e. representatives from
every walk and class of life based on the philosophy of Proudhon and the 1871 Paris Commune.
The first battle was at the UEF Montreux conference in August 1947. The French won. The
second battle was in Rome in November 1948. With Spinelli and Rossi once again fully
operational, the French lost to the Italians. With that they lost not only the argument, but also
control of the UEF movement.
The UEF was to be an influential pressure group, part of the background clamour, but neither it
nor Spinelli were responsible for the first serious successes in the struggle to create a United
States of Europe. Those successes lie elsewhere.13
As the nascent United States of Europe took off in the 1950s and 1960s so Spinelli's influence
was to be eclipsed by Jean Monnet. The two men were at loggerheads - both had big egos and
there was no room for two. Unfortunately for Spinelli, Monnet had the all-important American
links plus the advantage of being a Frenchman and part of the critical Franco-German axis.
Monnet deliberately ruled out individual membership of his Action Committee for the United
States of Europe in order to keep Spinelli on the sidelines. But behind the scenes Spinelli was a
constant critic of the slow pace of 'Europe'. Nearly every European proposal has had Spinelli's
hand in it: quite literally, because Spinelli's amendments are scrawled on drafts over many years
pushing for a superstate.
Spinelli Defeats Thatcher
As Monnet's health declined and his influence began to fade, perhaps coincidentally Spinelli
started to return to centre stage. Between 1970 and 1976 Spinelli was the European
Commissioner responsible for industrial policy and then a member of the Italian Parliament
representing the Communist PCI party. At the same time he was a Member of the European
Parliament and was well known there as a Communist. He liked to think of himself as an
independent one. Three years later he was duly elected to the European Parliament in the first
elections. Spinelli was powerful, forceful but not subtle.
After Monnet's death in 1979 Spinelli was really back in the limelight. It was Mrs Thatcher, the
British Prime Minister, who inadvertently triggered the events which renewed his attempts to
move ever more closely towards a United States of Europe.
In 1980, Mrs Thatcher, had the temerity to challenge the Community and demand 'our money
back'. The leaders of the other eight countries still had much to learn about Mrs Thatcher's
tenacity and determination. They thought they could frustrate her and preserve Britain's enforced
largesse. They failed, she won; though she had to fight again four years later, and won again. But
in 1980 her victory left the Community in a state of what the federalists called 'a suspended
crisis'.
The United States of Europe had already been seriously knocked off course twice before, once
by General de Gaulle and his Europe des Patries, and then again by the oil shocks and recession
of the 1970s. Just as Roy Jenkins, the President of the European Commission, seemed to be
getting the European Monetary System off the ground, the ERM was in place, everyone had
joined except for Britain, and EMU was surely just round the corner, then the European train hit
the buffers.
Into the breech created by Mrs Thatcher stepped Spinelli; by then 73 years old and one of the
few of the original "European" planners still alive.
In July 1980 just after Mrs Thatcher had asked "for our money back", Spinelli and eight others
founded the Crocodile Club. They named it after the restaurant where they met in Strasbourg.
Spinelli and his Crocodile Movement aimed to make the European Parliament take on the job of
drafting a new treaty for European Union - the next step beyond the Treaty of Rome. By that
time the Treaty was already twenty-five years old. Like Jean Monnet, Spinelli believed that there
was a need for a new treaty to push back the boundaries of the nation states even more. A year
later he persuaded the European Parliament to adopt his proposal, and naturally enough he was
the rapporteur for the new project.
His proposals were based on an alliance between the Commission and the Parliament. Both
wanted to increase their own power at the expense of the Council of Ministers and the nation
states. They are natural allies. Spinelli wanted a Union which, as he said, "will have the sole
power to act by its own decisions" and "the end of inter-governmental co-operation". He had
been campaigning for that for forty years. Impatient with the long delay since 1945, Spinelli
wanted to create one state in a single leap. The inter-governmental European Council would
become part of the union; the European parliament would stop being consultative and became a
formal legislature; majority voting would replace unanimity - even agreement on the new treaty
would be by majority voting - so Britain for one could be outvoted and still find herself signed
up to it.
The Commission would become the only executive body; the powers of the Court of Justice
would be strengthened, the Union's control would be extended to foreign policy and defence. No
wonder Mrs Thatcher later said "No! no! no!"
Spinelli's way of keeping the national governments quiet was to be the principle of subsidiarity.
All decisions would be made at the lowest appropriate level of government. He said subsidiarity
would help the "transition to a higher level of union".
Yet Spinelli proposed subsidiarity only as a clever device, he never intended it to be a guiding
principle of the European Union. Subsidiarity is part of the 1948 German constitution and
German Basic Law states unambiguously in article 31 that "Federal law shall override Land
law". Therefore sovereignty lies with the Federal Government. 14 It is the Federal Government
which decides what issues shall be settled lower down by the Länder.
The nation states have all to some extent fallen for Spinelli's device. But the British Government
under Prime Minister John Major, took it to be an enshrining principle of the Maastricht Treaty.
Judges from the European Court have confirmed that it is only a means to an end. Subsidiarity is
a political trick. The end is a single State.
At a seminar just before the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, European jurists, including the
former president of the Court of Justice, affirmed that subsidiarity is "political in essence", not
judicial.15 That is to say it is nothing to do with the Court. The Treaty says that subsidiarity only
applies to areas which do not fall within the "exclusive competence" of the Community.
Conveniently that excludes subsidiarity from the whole of the Single Market framework - just
about the only aspect of "Europe" in which Britain has been genuinely interested, though that too
is not what the British think it is. The Single Market is about uniformity, monopoly and
protectionism, not about free trade. Just as Spinelli intended, subsidiarity can be useful in public
relations. Most political speeches refer to it. Subsidiarity has made centralisation more palatable.
Victory in Sight
In 1984 the European Parliament voted to recommend a version of Spinelli's Draft Treaty for
Union in 1984 to a superstate in one leap. Only two countries however, Belgium and his own
country of Italy, called for the treaty to be ratified. Spinelli was disappointed, but that was not the
end of it. His attempt inspired a new committee under the Irish Senator, James Dooge. Dooge's
1985 report called for "a qualitative leap" to "a genuine political entity... i.e. a European Union."
Most of the Dooge Committee's proposals appeared either in the Single European Act or the
Maastricht Treaty and they included much -- but not yet all -- of what Spinelli had been battling
for. For example, in the Single European Act - which according to the British Government is all
about free trade and a single market - the nation states moved a step closer to a single foreign
policy. The existing inter-governmental meetings to co-ordinate and discuss foreign policy and
defence now had Treaty status. Technically, foreign policy was still outside the Community, but
for the first time the Commission was to be "fully associated" with it and the member states
agreed to "ensure that common principles and objectives are gradually developed and defined".16
The British Government thought this was a good and harmless idea: it did not involve
coercion.17 It was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. Throughout the development of the
European superstate the first stage of assimilating elements of national government has been to
begin with co-operation and then by degrees to work towards compulsion. The federalists have
played the same trick time and time again; and each time the British Government has fallen for
it.
Unfortunately, Mrs Thatcher did not appear to understand the underlying purpose of the Single
European Act. She wrote "At Brussels [in January 1985] I also launched an initiative on
deregulation designed to provide impetus to the Community's development as a free trade and
free enterprise area. It was intended to fit in with our own economic policy..."18
Her view of the Community was mistaken. Yet it is typical of the way the Community is seen
from London, where even now few understand the driving force behind 'Europe'. Most still think
only in terms of free trade and practical, commercial results. They do not see the full
implications of the European Union.

Notes
1. See Lindsay Jenkins' book, Britain Held Hostage: The Coming Euro-Dictatorship,
Orange State Press, 2nd edn. 1998.
2. Spinelli was sentenced to 10 years in prison; then 6 on the confino islands Ponza &
Ventotene.
3. Mazzini: 1805 - 1872, Italian patriot who wanted a unified Italy. Published a
journal, Young Italy. Exiled to London in 1837 and returned as dictator of the short-
lived Roma Republic in 1848 (fore-runner of Italian Union) which was put down by
French forces.
4. Rossi: 1897 - 1967, founder and moving spirit of GL. Italian Government Minister for
Reconstruction, 1945.
5. Luigi Einaudi: "La Societa delle Nazione e un ideale possiblie?" Corriere della
Serra 5/1/1918.
6. Giovanni Agnelli and Attilo Cabiati Federazione, Europea o Lega dell Nazione?, Turin,
1918.
7. Rosselli: one of two brothers, fellow students of Rossi, he was assassinated in France
in 1937.
8. C. Grove Haines, (ed.) European Integration, 1957.
9. Monte had gone into exile at 19, studied in London and worked for the BBC.
10. Set up by exiled Socialists after April 1942, the British Labour Party tried, but failed,
to control it.
11. Charles Delzell, European Federalist Movement in Italy: First Phase 1918 - 47.
12. Walter Lipgens (ed.) Documents on the History of European Integration (Berlin) Vol.
3, p. 167.
13. Lindsay Jenkins, Britain Held Hostage: The Coming Euro-Dictatorship.
14. Politics and Government in the Federal Republic of Germany: Basic Documents,
1984.
15. Brigadier Cowgill's The Maastricht Treaty in Perspective.
16. Single European Act, Article 30.2(c).
17. Nicholas Ridley, My Style of Government.
18. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years.