Prior to the tragic loss of life in the Umbrian earthquake this Wednesday, Italy was in the news for an all-together different reason on Monday.
Italian premier, Matteo Renzi, had invited Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande to join him for a short conference to discuss the future of the EU in the aftermath of Brexit and in advance of the EU Council meeting of the 27 remaining member states to consider the same issue, to be held at Bratislava on 18th September.
To call a spade a spade, this mini-summit was a pathetic, silly stunt designed to make Renzi appear statesman-like in the eyes of Italians. He arranged the meeting in the wake of recent appalling electoral setbacks for his party in municipal elections and in advance of a forthcoming “make-or-break” referendum on institutional reform in Italy which could end Renzi’s career.
In case you missed it, the “mini-summit” was arranged to take place on the tiny island of Ventotene, but had to be conducted largely on an Italian aircraft carrier moored off-shore, the Guiseppe Garibaldi, for logistical and security reasons. It was all over in a matter of hours.
What did it achieve? Absolutely nothing. What was the outcome? The usual quotient of risible Euro-blather.
However, the event does serve a purpose. It draws attention to the tendentious vacuity that characterises so much of the EU’s affairs. It crystallised just how pretentious the Euro elite has become. It marked yet again the dis-connect between the EU as it imagines itself and the EU as it exists in the eyes of the member-states’ citizens.
Ventotene – the name looks like a cross between an asthma inhaler and a window cleaning product – is in fact a tiny island in the Tyrrhenian Sea which has been used since Roman times as a place of banishment. Off its shore lies an Alcatraz-like prison, to which the Bourbons and Mussolini dispatched political opponents.
Among Mussolini’s detainees from 1939 to 1943 was a young Italian communist called Altiero Spinelli, who fell out of love with Stalin (but not with Marxism) while imprisoned there, and co-wrote a paper on the future of Europe, now called “The Ventotene Manifesto”, venerated by the EU’s federalist high-priesthood but unknown to the great mass of the EU laity.
It called for the establishment of a “solid, federal European state”, with its own army, and with “sufficient means to maintain common order” in the federated states of which each would only enjoy the autonomy needed for a “plastic articulation” of the federal state’s political life in accordance with local conditions.
The document asserted that the new federal Europe would be a socialist state, but rejected orthodox Soviet communism for a more flexible revolutionary approach based on what would later be termed “Euro-communism”. A German statement this week appeared to distance Germany from many of the Manifesto’s more dubious aspirations.
On his release, Spinelli and others founded a European Federalist Movement. Much later, he was made an EC Commissioner and then elected as an independent MEP on an Italian Communist Party (PCI) list, and set about achieving the European federalist project by mobilising federalists in the European Parliament and institutions.
A life-long Marxist, he died in 1986 and was buried on Ventotene, his grave becoming a place of pilgrimage for hard-line federalists. He has been dubbed the “Godfather of European federalism”.
As part of his public response to Brexit, Renzi arranged for himself, Merkel and Hollande to lay wreaths on Spinelli’s grave last Monday. The trio then adjourned to a photo call and a short speeches session with the media on the Guiseppe Garibaldi.
But it soon became clear that they had no joint message to “re-set” the European project.
Renzi, who had famously told the world in June 2014 that the Italian presidency of the EU that year would be used to push for a United States of Europe, thereby adding petrol to the flames of the pending Brexit referendum in the UK, uses his federalist rhetoric to deflect Italian attention from Italy’s political and economic crises.
Renzi achieved no progress towards a U.S .E. in his presidency, but he and his allies did nothing in 2014 and 2015 to prevent (and arguably created the conditions that brought about) Brexit. Donald Tusk, the Polish EU Council President, appealed in vain to the federalists to halt their federalist, integrationist rhetoric because they were alienating the citizens of the member states. But they ignored him, prattling on about an EU army (demanded by Juncker on the 12th March) and further political integration.
“Europe after Brexit will relaunch the powerful ideals of unity and peace, freedom and dreams”, intoned the vacuous Renzi on Monday.
“We won’t make decisions on behalf of the other member states but we will commit ourselves to lead”, declaimed Hollande arrogantly, oblivious of the fact that he is no longer in a condition to lead anyone, is unelectable, and is serving out the miserable remains of a discredited mandate.
Merkel, on the other hand, emphasised the practical – she had nothing to say on European integration or the federalist agenda, but stressed that she was going on a tour of all the member states before Bratislava.
Despite Renzi’s vacuous rhetoric, the trio failed to see that the Ventotene spectacle was offensive to many, many people in the EU member states who do not look to Renzi, Hollande and Merkel as the “leadership of the EU”, and who, in the great majority reject the idea of an armed, federal, socialist super-state that Spinelli envisaged in his Manifesto.
In precisely the same arrogant spirit, the German foreign minister had convened an emergency meeting of the original six founder members of the EEC as a response to the Brexit vote. Europe does not need a self-selecting, self-approbating hegemony of founder states to assess the implications of Brexit for the future of Europe. How do these people think that their arrogant stunts are viewed in the minds of those governments who are not invited and of the citizens who elect them?
From an Irish perspective, there are a few points to be made.
Firstly, the great majority of Irish voters, when surveyed, continue to reject the federalist agenda and oppose further political and economic integration. In this we are not alone; we belong to the majority viewpoint across the EU.
Secondly, recent talk of an EU army is already excluded for us by the terms of our Constitution which was specifically amended to prevent the Irish state from participating in EU defence.
Thirdly, although it may be difficult for some people to accept it now, the departure of the UK from the EU makes opposition to the federalist agenda a necessity for Ireland in the future. Our relationship with the North and with Britain depends on our not being completely integrated into a federal EU super-state.
Fourthly, a federalist Europe offers us nothing. Becoming a North Dakota in a federal Europe is not in our interest. Having the EU remain as it is, a partnership at state and intergovernmental level, is in our interest.
Lastly, for all the federalist blather we endure, it is notable that the “enhanced cooperation” provisions of the EU Treaties which allow for voluntary integration among willing member states remain unused. There is a good reason for that. Any dynamic that exists for federalism in Paris, Berlin and Rome is in reality based on an appetite for domination of others and aggrandisement of self.
That tells us a lot and should serve as a warning.