The story should be a noble subject, to be treated with the regard that reserves the reserves for fragile and precious objects. Giorgia Meloni, on the other hand, handled it in Parliament like a pneumatic hammer: coarse, noisy, without too many concerns for the truth and the context. The Manifesto of Ventotene – exhibited by the organizers in the pro Europe meeting last Saturday and attached to the newspaper Republic – , “It constitutes one of the most significant expressions of the Europeanist dream that has animated all the resistance to fascism and Nazism in the various European countries and that advocated a free and united Europe”, as explained by the historian Agostino Giovagnoli. And it is in this key that must be read. For this reason, the repudiation of the poster of the manifesto is unacceptable, not only because, as Antonio Carioti wrote on Corriere della Serahis sovereign interpretation “is the result of a deit reading” but also because the manager of an institution such as the government cannot deny one of the documents that led to the European Union, of which the Italian State is a founding member.
The Manifesto of Ventotene must be contextualized, therefore it should not be taken as a poured gold but not even disconnected as Giorgia Meloni did. The dramatic and shocking context is that of the fascist Italy of June 1941, in the middle of the world war, which had sent to the confinement on the island of Ventotene Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni. The three anti -fascist militants (returning from the hard experience of the prison) had sketched a first expression of a project at that visionary time, that of a federalist and anti -fascist Europe. Meloni speaks of the “desired dictatorship” of the proletariat of the document, but in reality already in the post -war spinelli, who founded together with Rossi the European federalist movement, had adjusted the shot and denied the revolutionary impetors speaking of the “European transverse European movement” of the different anti -fascist forces, such as justice and freedom, also underlining the class forcing of that card, which the legend wanted to be written on a package cigarettes.
Spinelli had been a communist in his youth but had come out of it condemning the Stalinian terror (and then returned to Berlinguer’s PCI, indeed in the contiguous independent left). Rossi and Colorni were members of the socialist movement justice and freedom, founded by the Rosselli brothers. It is true, it is a secular construction in its essence, which even suffers from naive Rosseauian thrusts, such as the proposal to limit, if not abolish, private property, prevent private monopolies and cancel the arrangement between the state and the church as a product of the fascist culture (“the arrangement with which in Italy the Vatican has concluded the alliance with fascism – it will certainly be read to affirm the character. layman of the state, and to unequivocally fix the supremacy of the state on civil life “). But some of the strong ideas contained in the document influenced and inspired the European integration process, bringing, as mentioned, to the birth of the institutions that today make up the union. Of course that of the manifesto is not the only political elaboration that contributed to the birth of the Union. Alcide De Gasperi, for example, imagined the European community in the light of the social doctrine of the Church, as well as Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer made it a construction of Christian-social inspiration. Their tireless work imbued with political passion led, April 18, 1951, to the foundation of the Czech, the first brick of the European Union, the European Coal and steel community. This is not a purely commercial agreement. That agreement was stipulated precisely to put an end to the bloody wars that since the time of the Franco-German conflict of Sedan of 1870 and throughout the last century they revolved around those resources, so important for manufacturing weapons and war material. Resources that were present in Terre disputed such as the Ruhr basin, or of the Lorena, or of the Saar or even Silesia and Donbass (as mocking and cruel geopolitics).
The manifesto, on the other hand, remains secular, more radical in its postulates, but equally imbued with irenic and conciliatory purposes that have allowed us to live in peace for 80 years. The reading that resisted the test of time is that of a political project capable of giving Europe a common structure, of preventing the repetition of the tragedies of the twentieth century. Nobody can ever doubt that that card is a founding document of the ideals of that union that Giorgia Meloni is called to serve and that those men (among other things the third extensor, Eugenio Colorni, died 35 year old a few days before the Liberazioen of Rome, slaughtered by the Koch gang) remain essential pre -cursors of Europe. In short, to paraphrase the title of the premier’s biography: “I am Giorgia, and I upset the Manifesto of Ventotene”.
