Ventotene Manifesto

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The Ventotene Manifesto (actually Per un'Europa libera e unita. Progetto d'un manifesto; German For a free and united Europe. Project of a manifesto ) is a programmatic work written in 1941 by three Italian anti-fascists from different political camps; Altiero Spinelli (communist, then turned to the undogmatic left), Ernesto Rossi (liberal, but previously nationally oriented) and Eugenio Colorni (socialist-social reformist), in which they drafted the ideal of a European federalism . The manifesto describes the sovereignty of the nation states as the cause of the Second World War and therefore calls for the establishment of a European federal state by a revolutionary movement in order to preserve peace and freedom . At the same time, the manifesto is shaped by socialist and communist economic ideas. It is one of the most important early drafts of European integration .

Origin and meaning

The Ventotene Manifesto was written on the Italian island of Ventotene by the anti-fascists Altiero Spinelli , Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni in their captivity. All three were imprisoned together from around 1939 on the island of Ventotene in the Gulf of Gaeta (between Rome and Naples) and there they grappled with the concepts of European federalism, as it had been through the Paneuropean Union and the British since the 1920s Federal Union had been drafted.

The main author of the manifesto was Altiero Spinelli, who formulated the text and secretly wrote it down on cigarette paper . Eugenio Colorni, who was released in 1941, was able to work on the content until then. Ursula Hirschmann , Eugenio Colorni's wife, managed to get the manifesto, which had previously been divided into four sections, hidden in the belly of a roasted chicken from prison. The sections were copied and issued as leaflets in Rome . The initials AS for (Altiero Spinelli), ER for Ernesto Rossi were given as authors . With a foreword by Colorni, the manifesto as a whole was subsequently reproduced and published in January 1944 under the title “Problems of the European Union” together with two other essays by Spinelli (“The United States of Europe and the Different Political Directions” and “Marxist Politics and federalist politics ”, written 1942/43) circulated in Rome. Colorni was shot in Rome in 1944, a few days before the end of the dictatorship.

From August 27 to 28, 1943, after the liberation of Italy by the Allied troops and the release of Spinelli and Rossi, a meeting of Italian anti-fascists was held in Milan, organized by Altiero Spinelli. The Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE) was founded here, programmatically based on the manifesto. The manifesto also influenced the Hertensteiner program drawn up by European federalists from various countries in 1946 , which, however, was formulated much less radically in some points.

content

The manifesto originally consisted of four parts, which were regrouped into three parts in the 1944 edition of Colorni. While the first and second part (“The Crisis of Modern Civilization” and “Tasks of the Post-War Era: European Unification”) and the second half of the third part (“Tasks of the Post-War Era: Social Reform”) are mainly by Altiero Spinelli the first half of the third part essentially written by Ernesto Rossi.

Contemporary reception

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen quoted an excerpt from the manifesto in the plenary session of the European Parliament on April 16, 2020, calling for unity and transformation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Frank: Lighthouses of Freedom - In 1941, three anti-fascists wrote the «Manifesto of Ventotene» on a prison island. [...] In: Tages-Anzeiger . No. 120/127 . Zurich May 25, 2019, p. 14 .
  2. ↑ Speech by President von der Leyen at the European Parliament Plenary on the EU coordinated action to combat the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences. European Commission, April 16, 2020, accessed April 16, 2020 .