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European Union in the Resistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Altiero Spinelli
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Extract

Even before the end of the first world war, during the inter-war years and right up to the outbreak of the second world war, a vein of political thought ran through Europe, which condemned national sovereignties and set up against them the idea of a European federation.

In reality, the federalist trend of thought in the inter-war years remained marginal to the main political currents, and partook more of the nature of prophecy than of politics. In the 1920s and 1930s politics in Europe were both tense and varied, culminating in the emergence of many political-ideological tyrannies. But in spite of the violent divergences over political problems in those years, politics itself, of the right and of the left, of moderates and radicals, of conservatives and revolutionaries, was based on the profound experience which the peoples had lived through during the first world war, namely of the solidity of the nation state. This experience led to the conviction that only on this rock could anything be built.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1967 , pp. 321 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1967

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References

1 Federalist documents of the European resistance were published for the first time in Europe de demain, ed. La Baconnire, Neuch$ACtel, 1944, edited by Ernesto Rossi, an Italian federalist who was then in Switzerland. Dr W. Lipgens, of the University of Heidelberg, is about to publish a study which will contain a good deal of source material on European federalism during the war.

2 See complete text of the Manifesto in Piccola antologia federalista, Giovani Europa editrice, Rome, 1956, pp. 9–15.

3 See complete text of the Declaration in L'Europe de demain, loc. cit, pp. 71–3.

4 Indeed ever since December 1943, Combat, the clandestine paper edited by Camus in the Resistance, contained (e.g. no. 53, 1943) such passages: ‘France’s place is in the Europe of the Resistance. There is her mission…. Not in the theoretical Europe carved upon green tables by the diplomats of the “Great Powers”, but in this Europe of sorrows, waking at dawn in anguish, in this underground Europe of the maquis and false papers, in this Europe of blood, which has been wounded and gives back blow for blow … The European resistance will remake Europe. A free Europe composed of free citizens, because we have all known slavery. A Europe politically and economically united because we have paid the full price of division. A Europe armed, because we have paid the ransom of weakness.' See text in L'Europe de demain, loc. cit, pp. 94–5

5 Ibid., P. 75.