Europe as a Peacebuilding Model: the Ventotene Manifesto

“The absolute sovereignty of national States has given each of them the desire to dominate, since each one feels threatened by the strength of others, and considers, as its living space, an increasingly vast territory wherein it will have the right to free movement and can rely on itself without any other help. This desire to dominate cannot be placated except by the predominance of the strongest State over all others”

“The collapse of the majority of the States on the continent under German steamroller has already placed the destinies of the European populations on common ground: either all together they will submit to Hitler's dominion, or after his fall, all together they will enter a revolutionary crisis, and they will not find themselves adamantly distinct in solid, States structures. The general spirit today is already far more disposed than it was in the past towards a federal reorganisation of Europe. The hard experience of the last decades has opened the eyes even of those who refused to see, and has matured many circumstances favourable to our ideal.”

The Ventotene Manifesto (attached to this entry) was written by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, while prisoners on the Italian island on Ventotene in 1941. The Manifesto encouraged a federation of European states, which was meant to keep the countries of Europe close, thus preventing war. Spinelli and Rossi identified the supremacy of the sovereign state as the root of the rise of militaristic authoritarianism in Europe. Creating a union of states, thus avoiding an inevitably violent competition for predominance, was in their view the key solution to preventing further destruction in the continent. The Ventotene Manifesto is therefore a key text in the development of an idea of Europe as a tool for building peace.