The global federal solution and the constitutional integrative method proposed by Altiero Spinelli have never really been attempted in the EU, even if this or that aspect of the integration process - and in particular the single currency - belong more to the federal model than to the community one and the European system has developed by inserting pieces belonging to the federal model into the community machinery. They are the European Parliament, the European Central Bank or the Court of Justice when it acts as if it were a Federal Constitutional Court to protect the priority of Community law over the law of each individual State.
Like the specter of communism of Karl Marx (Spinelli used to say), however, the federal model has wandered around and is still wandering around Europe when it appears necessary to endow the inter-state dimension with a political authority that escapes the (in-)decision capacity of the state dimensions.
By denying the model of constitutional gradualism, the economic and financial crisis that has hit the Union since 2008 and the more recent challenge of migratory flows from war-torn and hungry countries have insinuated disruptive elements into the community mechanism and no longer integrative which made the risks of the reversibility of the process of unification of the continent appear for the first time. The presence of these disruptive elements has progressively weakened the positive force e Eurosceptics have thus increased which have created openly Euro-hostile political movements in all member countries, without exception, which have become the majority in Poland and Hungary.
In Italy, the elections of 24-25 February 2013, with the loss of nine million votes of the two major centre-right and centre-left coalitions, brought into parliament a new political class that was basically Eurosceptic if not Euro-hostile. With the rare exception of those who periodically contribute words to the mirage of the "United States of Europe" without however specifying the contents of the project, the method for carrying it out and the agenda so that it does not remain an undetermined objective over time, the majority of the Italian political forces seems to have signed up for the future "buff of the nation".
The unifying element of this virtual party lies in theintolerance to European rules – which were approved at the time by a large part of Parliament starting with the unfortunate golden rule of balanced budgets – together with the prevailing opinion on the dis-value added of the single currency, ignorance of the Community decision mechanisms, the sidereal distance between Italian politics and our representatives in the European institutions, the regions' chronic inability to spend and the high level of infringements of "European laws".
It can therefore come as no surprise that in these years it is radically changed the relationship between Italians and Europe: "We loved each other so much", one could say, taking up the title of a well-known Italian film, if one takes into account that the latest Eurobarometer sets our level of trust in the European Union at 38% and our opinion at 62%. of those who believe that Italy's voice does not count in Europe, even if the majority of Italians then ask for more Europe and that is the Euro and not the lira, the European Army and government and common policies instead of national ones.
THEItalian pro-European associations, heir of Altiero Spinelli but educated in the school of ideological federalism of Mario Albertini, today appears disbanded, divided and unable to curb the populist impulses marked by a widespread Euroscepticism that pass through the political world and the big information press in Italy, because its weakness is linked to wavering positions ranging from the uncritical and sometimes satisfied acceptance of the new economic and monetary governance - considered as a step towards federal Europe according to the model Monnet's functionalist – to the request for an improbable creation, in politically determined times, of a federal state among the countries of the Eurozone.
Altiero Spinelli had written in 1955: “Evidently, it is not enough for a (federal) order to have intrinsic merits. In order for it to be realized, it is necessary to see whether around it, in its permanent support, we can expect the arraying, in modern civilization, of imposing vital forces, not destined to dissolve quickly; such that, in order to assert themselves, they feel they need that regulation and are therefore willing to act to keep it in force. It would be useless to build a building that no one was then interested in preserving, even if, due to some favorable circumstances, sufficient forces were found to build it".
Every day more and more reality shows, dramatically, that there can be no alternative to the political unity of Europe in the perspective of reinforcing the secular secession with the Orient and the Mediterranean. To build this alternative we urgently need a "truth operation" conducted by a vast movement of opinion far beyond the pro-European associations, an alliance of innovators that arises from the world of economy and work, culture and research , youth organizations and the voluntary sector involving all those who experience the usefulness of European integration and pay the consequences of the costs of non-Europe.
