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07/12/2003 | Presentation by Angiolo Bandinelli: «Reform and counter-reform of Europe» "FROM VENTOTENE TO THE CONVENTION Reform e counter-reform of Europe"

FROM VENTOTENE TO THE CONVENTION Reform e counter-reform of Europe Angiolo Bandinelli Brussels, 7th December 2003 That which happened over the Ecofin affair or what is about to happen in a few days with the Convention – if it is approved, modified, delayed etc – brings into relief very clearly the fifty-year history of the unification of Europe. The “realists”, those who propose concrete “small steps”, functionalism and the primary importance of the economy have always been praised and lauded over and above the “ideologists”, the Spinelli inspired federalists, the utopians etc. To me this interpretation of history seems biased and tendentious. It has anyhow, over time, proven to be a recipe for failure. If it is true that Europe finds itself, yet again, paralysed in a dramatic “institutional winter” no doubt thanks to this “realism”. It is not the first time but this could be the last and definitive time. In one of our previous meetings, here in Brussels, a comparative reading was made between the document with which in 1984 Spinelli re-launched the “federalist” theses and the text of today’s Convention: it was revealed that the two texts were fundamentally very close, even in the kind of language they used, and that therefore the Spinelli federalists were wrong to criticise the Convention and to snub it. It was said that we needed to approve this document. It isn’t fully convincing, but it is concrete and reliable. I pointed out that the two texts needed to be evaluated from different historical perspectives. The Europe of Spinelli’s text was the Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), closed and under the protection of the American umbrella (to be truthful this was more than a little obligatory), which ensured, by means of a patient force of dissuasion rather than pre-emptive war, the “containment” of the Soviet Union. Today Europe has no umbrella. It is berated from all sides, urging that it take on greater responsibilities. It is made the target of persistent attacks; it is Venusian, lacking military courage, irresponsible, and cowardly, incapable of assertion, of not taking initiatives, of not creating a role in an uncertain world, of being without leadership, torn by forces that are more centrifugal than subversive. To turn this representation on its head Europe urgently needs a strong innovative impulse, a radical push that gives it a spirit, a capacity of initiative for it to prove wrong Metternich’s assertion that Europe was merely a geographical expression. As Romano Prodi has said (alas!), “without reform, Europe will disappear from the map.” Some, including those across the Atlantic as well, will rejoice. We, or rather me personally, will not. We of the Radical Party are in any case here, in our two days, to try to promote a strong movement “for the United States of America and of Europe, to reinforce and develop individual rights to freedom and democracy”, to face up the ongoing crisis, which is current not only in Europe. If we want this, the prerequisite is that Europe creates a stable institutional framework, that Europe becomes a real political entity. Otherwise the risk is the creation of satellites of Washington: not of a Europe but of many “Europes”, old and new, nation per nation, east and west. Even this is a possible prospect – why not? But it doesn’t necessarily guarantee the success of certain American theses that are circulating at the moment. Condoleeza Rice (but not just her) wants a “multilateral” world, but categorically excludes a “multi-polar” world; she wants – in the shadow of Fukuyama – a “uni-polar” one. Unfortunately the feared multi-polar world already exists. There is America on one side, but on the other we have China and Russia too. With other, as yet unknown, additions; India and a South America no longer as tied to the Monroe doctrine as before. And then there is Islam, where the West is not able to identify people it can deal with and valid routes to growth and democracy. And possibly another addition to the multi-polar world is the Pope, who has decided to play an autonomous role(a role that is at times a little duplicitous) in the conflict/contrast with a roaring capitalism. And there is another unknown element in Africa, devastated by the misery of Aids, but maybe it will be just because of this that it is destined to become the catalyst of the ethnic (if not political) destabilisation of the century. There are many poles then, only Europe is not present. Maybe it shouldn’t be present. However we have the appearance of the Euro, which seems to have bothered some, and this too has become a pole. The Europe – with neither head nor muscles – that is being delivered to us by the neo-nationalists waiting in ambush behind the Convention, is also the Europe of excessive red tape. The anti-bureaucratic cause has it acolytes on our part too. However in this way we run the slightly tedious risk of creating an alibi for our having abandoned Europe to an obvious and inevitable routine. Europe has not been amongst our “priorities”. I believe that perhaps we have been lulled into the illusion that things would go ahead indefinitely, without the intervention of any great upheavals. Today the upheaval, maybe the earthquake, has arrived and we too find ourselves in difficulty. For the Spinellians there is, or there ought to be, a slight feeling of guilt. Gianfranco Dell’Alba, reminded me a few days ago that in 1987, in response to Delors and his “Single European Act”, Marco Pannella proposed a “Constituent Assembly” – European Parliament plus national parliaments – to elect the President of the Commission: (“impulsive”, said Dell’Alba, as though returning the ball on a tennis court.). Could one have been more insistent? Have created some form of intuitive around the idea? I am not able to judge. Today we find ourselves complaining about the bureaucracy of Europe, the Europe of the technicians, anti-democratic, ruled by party interests, where the “national” parties and not the “European” parties (or at least the two major groups represented in Brussels) decide strategies and solutions, having reduced their very own members of parliament to a second grade, where their managers have to give priority to getting past the filter of parliamentary bureaucracy. It is the Europe in which, to understand at what point we are, the Parliament elects the President of the Commission choosing between the two candidates proposed by the omnipotent European Counsel. Can we then be so surprised that this Europe, so lacking the fundamental requisites of democracy becomes the cowardly, irresponsible Europe under the thrall of France and Germany, the Europe that just a few days ago renewed (giving life to a special “reinforced cooperation”) the historical axis around which Europe has traditionally moved, in addition provoking an attempted “headlong dash ahead” by the Italian government? Pannella is right to have deplored these events, however this is not enough if things are to be changed. We need, if not to return to, at least to re-think Spinelli and Ventontene. Not as an abstract utopia, but as a momentous political project, of solid foundations – in the manner of the (inventive) choice made by the followers of Hamilton when they transformed the confederation of 13 minor states into a powerful political entity, the USA. But take note! No super-state, but government by the States: one of the most fortuitous institutional intuitions in history. “In the gloomy winter of ’40-’41” wrote Spinelli, “when almost all of continental Europe was subjugated by Hitler, Mussolini’s Italy ran panting behind him, the USSR was digesting the booty it had managed to grasp, the United States were still neutral and Great Britain resisted by herself, becoming, in the eyes of all the democrats in Europe, the ideal homeland, I suggested to Ernesto Rossi that we write together a ‘Manifesto for a free and united Europe’. Six months latter the manifesto was ready”; written, Berlusconi would say, on one of those delightful islands where Fascism sent its adversaries on holiday, and where there were amongst others Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni. Spinelli had been, when he was young, the secretary of the Young Communists in central Italy and at twenty-one he was condemned to 16 years and eight months in prison (he served ten); Ernesto Rossi had actively conspired, organising direct attacks against the Fascists, attacks that were ingeniously creative and a little useless, that however cost him, I believe, an eighteen year sentence, and Eugenio Colorni , an intellectual socialist and philosopher, who died in action in Rome in 1944, fighting the Germans. Spinelli became the black sheep of his communist ex-comrades, who isolated him as a traitor, Rossi drafted essays on the economy of the third way between Capitalism and Communism, etc. Their Manifesto, more quoted from than actually read (a critical edition doesn’t even exist!), put forward an idea by which to escape the drama of national wars in which the continent was caught up. It was based on the unification of the continent within a framework of federal institutions. Spinelli and Rossi took their initial idea from an article written by Luigi Einaudi in the Corriere della Sera in 1918, in which Einaudi criticised the League of Nations, judging it to be incapable of assuring a new international political order, in contrast to a federal system like the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia of 1787. Einaudi sent them a number of federalist writings at the end of the thirties, among which “The Economic Causes of War” by Lionel Robbins, with its critique of the economic and political distortions which nationalism brought about. On his escape from Ventotene, Spinelli founded, in Milan in 1943, the European Federalist Movement. He thought, with justification (it is something that is still of interest to us today) that to fight a struggle at the European level it would be necessary to form a European party. As an exile in Switzerland, he created the first trans-national connections: a, still clandestine, European conference was organised in Paris in 1945. Albert Camus, Emmanuel Mounier, George Orwell, and others were among the participants. In 1946 Spinelli wrote an article, "Dawn or Dusk of Democracy" published in the New York magazine “Social Research” (not a Neo-con magazine!), in which he anticipated the Marshall Plan, the injection of American capital that enabled the European reconstruction. Spinelli wrote: “Yet again the decisive political momentum is to be found in the United States of America, the USA is today the most powerful country in the world, but the worst equipped to conduct the politics of power, that is of internal totalitarianism and of imperial conquest abroad. Their structure, their worldwide economic interests, the desire to maintain their power, their mentality, conspire to favour in all places all types of open civilisation, that is those in which the State doesn’t absorb and control all society.” And the real beginning of the federalist struggle for power started exactly when – June 1947- the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, launched his plan, affirming that it would only succeed if managed by Europeans, based on “the agreement of certain number of European countries”. Marshall’s’ project failed, because of the incomprehension of the European states and because of the hostility of the British, of the predecessors of Tony Blair’s (pardon me) in the Labour Party, Bevin, Ernst Bevin. In any case, in May of 1950 Robert Schuman launched a major project of unification. “Europe could not be formed in one go” – he wrote – “nor shall it be built all togethter, but will grow out of concrete acts that will create above all a de facto solidarity.”. The Treaty of Paris of 1951/52 marked the foundation of the CECA – (or ECSC – the European Coal and Steel Community) to coordinate the Franco-German (already the lynch-pins of Europe) co-production of steel and coal, placing it under the control of a High Authority that made binding decisions for the contracting parties. A few days after the signing of the treaty the Korean War broke out. The friction between communist countries and democratic ones, above all America, rose to levels that had never been seen before. America put forward proposals for the rearmament of Germany; at this time the French Prime Minister Plevan launched the European Defence Community (EDC). Spinelli wrote “Democratic Europe must be defended as a whole” and then, “The agreements for the European army must be accompanied by agreement for federal unification (…). The tension between America and Russia has many underlying reasons, but the principal one is European impotence and chaos.” He had the support of De Gasperi, who had appointed himself as the Foreign Minister, while the Dutchman Spaak formed a Committee of Study for the European Constituent Assembly (in which Calamdandrei also participated) and a group of Harvard professors collaborated providing diverse materials. In 1951 the Constituent Assembly was launched. As well as Schuman, De Gasperi, Adenauer, Spaak and Monnet, support was also given by Eisenhower, the then Supreme Commander of the US armed forces, in a speech made in London on the 3rd July 1951 he affirmed the need for a united Europe. Eisenhower met Spinelli and other federalists in Rome at the offices of the Federalist Movement. On the 10th March 1953 a constitutional treaty was voted on in Strasburg. But on the 5th of March Stalin died and on the 27th July the Korean War ended. The situation changed. The Trieste question became an issue with the re-emergence of Italian nationalism, stirred up by communists and neutralists who facilitated the nationalist and neutralist regression of France, (people began to speak of the “Balkanisation of Europe”). Italy began to assume a position of deferment, in France De Gaulle and General Juin became opposed to the treaty. On the 10th of August 1954, the French Communist Party and De Gaulle’s RPF defeated the EDC project in the National Assembly. If the EDC had been launched maybe we would have avoided the taunts of those who have accused Europe of been weak spirited Venusians. The European army would have been a deterrent, I don’t know if it was up to the excessive power of the Soviets on the Elbe, but a it would have been an initial strong defensive barrier. It would also have been – this was the idea of the Italian federalist’s, of Rossi and Spinelli – the founding nucleus of a supranational federal political unit. It was clear to the federalists that an army, a military policy, would not be possible without a single-headed policy. This is more or less that which has been said about a monetary, financial, and economic policy. The European Coal and Steel Community – so dear to the “functionalists” – in reality produced an irreparable break in the principle of national sovereignty. It opened up a breach that has never since healed up. A trouble-free functionalism that has proceeded free of squeals from the federalists has never existed. The conflict between functionalists and federalists has always been purely political. And if the functionalist arguments have appeared to be winning ones, the pressure of the federalists underlies many of the fundamental transitions: in order to ratify of CECA, or the Maastricht Treaty, or the Single Act or, today the Convention, political arguments have always been unleashed, whenever the arguments of the functionalists, of the so called realists, revealed their weaknesses or risked failure. Moreover, Monet himself left the leadership of the High Authority of the CECA, in the aftermath of the collapse of the EDC – to captain the “Committee for the United States of Europe” and to launch the project of the European Economic Community. We can say that the events of a united Europe have been marked by the conflict between three subjects: the political federalists, the functionalists and the anti-federalist politicians, that is, the nationalists often, if not always, allied with the functionalists to block the federalist push. After the EDC crisis an attempt was made to repair the institutional vacuum that had been created. In 1957-58 the Treaty of Rome was signed, this instituted the EEC, the European Economic Community. The Treaty is often displayed as evidence of how well the functionalist methods have worked. In reality up until the mid-Seventies there was a powerful centripetal politico-institutional development, by means of initiatives and conflicts on juridical-institutional or directly political grounds, which profoundly modified the appearance and the structure of the Community. Many of these came about thanks to a new institutional entity the Court of Justice – this is a reminder of how complicated the European machine is. I’ll give just one example from the many possible. In 1964 the Court of Justice introduced the principle of primacy, which held that community law overruled national law. The Court of Justice had developed such a creative interpretation of The Treaty that it could be compared to an authority such as the National Constitutional Court. A legislator might have said that the Community was becoming “ever more like a federal state, or at least a pre-federal state.” on the American model, on the other hand a political analyst would have replied: “The two models are becoming increasingly different.” this is understandable, From a legal or legislative point of view the Community was growing with a strong supranational element of, from the political, decisional and procedural point of view it was displaying quite the opposite tendency, in favour of an inter-governmental approach. That is, when Community rights and Community policy became ever more binding for the contracting parties, the national states started to take control of the Community’s decisional procedure. In 1965 France opposed the application of the qualified majority voting which had been agreed in Treaty of Rome after a transitional period. The crisis was resolved (I think) by the so called Luxemburg compromise in 1985 for which each member state was deemed to have the right of veto over any proposal for Community legislation. This was the first sign of the rapid collapse of any supranational element. Since then the EEC has grown, it has become enriched with various appendages, but the attempts to “federalize it” have failed. Indeed at a certain point it got bogged down over the question of the transition from a customs union to a proper internal market. In the meantime the oil crisis intervened and the loss of economic power in respect to the USA and Japan became clear to everyone, hence the initiation and elaboration of a number a projects. In 1984 Spinelli put forward his treaty but Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission from 1985 and an exponent of functionalism, countered him with his “Single European Act” (approved in 1987). The act planned to fully deal with (by 1993) not just the problem of the free circulation of goods but also of capital, services and people. It also set out the modalities for cooperation between member states in matters of foreign affairs formalizing steps drawn out in over previous years. Delors summarised his ideals thus; “the European economic model must be based on three principles: competition that stimulates, cooperation that strengthens and solidarity that unites us.” There always remained the Christian youth unions promotes of the idea of “individualism” fashionable at the time. The differences between that which he managed to have approved and the Spinellian project were fundamental: in Spinelli’s project, approved by the parliament but neglected almost immediately, the Council would become a kind of US Senate and the Parliament would be the House of Representatives, while the commission became an “Executive”. Delors immediately noted that no, the Commission was not an “Executive”, not even in the foreseeable future. Even so Delors himself was appointed by the 12 member states to preside over a committee that would delineate a transition to Economic and Monetary Union. From Delor’s intense work, and in his conviction that currency unification would eventually lead to the unification of the rest, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty developed . Dell’Alba has told me that Pannella criticised Delors because he didn’t take any risk when he could have, that is during the fertile years just before the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). For all its “successes”, Maastricht heralded a "à la Carte" Union. If it hadn’t have been created, a philosophy, which is today rearing its head, of “opting out” would have prevailed (a philosophy dear to a liberal-nationalist like Dahrendorf). In reality a process of disunion, if not of breaking up of the European construction, would have started. It was with Maastricht that the gulf between Brussels and its citizens was brought into relief. In the absence of a “European Party” the national parties, the national bureaucracies, the growing nationalism, the end of fear of Soviet take over, etc provoked wide spread anti-European reactions. It any case the Euro was introduced. We haven’t time to go into the details of what happened next, the various treaties and agreements that took place. What we feel it right to point out, as an overview of the situation, is that these inter-governmental initiatives made the Union’s bureaucratic procedures extremely complex, without however reinforcing to the decision-making process; indeed, the decision-making bodies where Commission and Parliament could meet and reach agreements were gradually emptied. This was the process that led to Ecofin and maybe will finish in the failure of the Convention. Whether this has been the fault of the Commission itself, or of the national Governments or the Italian rotating Presidency, I cannot make out. I would however say that everybody worked hard to achieve the result we are so dissatisfied with. I think, however, that it is unjust to become frustrated at the Commission. I am no fan of the President, but the real problem is that the Commission is a symbol of Europe’s juridical-institutional impotence. It would be wrong to ask for an increase in the President’s powers, in an attempt to strengthen Europe as a unit. It would be a gross misunderstanding of the institutional meaning of the roles of its governing bodies. The Commission, with its President, is a body that is formally voted in by the Parliament, but this is done on the basis of a compromise between national forces, controlled by the national governments. There is no sovereignty conferred on it, and it does not possess the wherewithal and prerogatives of a true Government. So the real problem involves the need for a constitutional and institutional step forward. This is what we expected from the Convention overseen by Giscard d'Estaing, Giuliano Amato and Fini, but I think we can say with some certainty that the problem outlined above was not resolved, merely tied-up in a scarcely-manageable package in which the Counsel’s and the Commission’s powers were knotted together almost anyhow. Marco Pannella defined the Convention (and I hope I have his meaning right) “ a re-trimming project re-organising power and institutions in the “European Territory”, resembling a tangled mess rather than a wise alchemy that could work over time, over decades. It is hard to see how and if it would function, if it could be manoeuvred, starting from the question of the majority vote,” and so on in this vein. Pannella compares the “classicism” of the Lawful State – as proposed by Montesquieu – which simplifies in order that ordinary people can understand what is going on, with the Party-led power system, which does not tolerate this classical approach. The Convention, in other words, is saying: “Here I am, loud and clear – the hotch potch of a hugely inflated legal and normative production in every field (the famous three pillars) from law to social matters, etc., recreating and broadening those policies and structures which are typical of the historical concepts most rooted (and superseded) in continental Europe, namely in France and in the Germany of the SPD social-democratic model - even though these political tendencies had already collided with the nouvelle vague of free-tradism and globalism. Of our number, Benedetto Della Vedova in particular is irritated by the ghosts of old social-democracy, which poisoned the Nice Treaty of two years ago. But his criticism brings him to the conclusion that, as things stand, government of the economy alone would represent a further hindrance. I have to say that in my opinion exactly the opposite is true. Giving politics, i.e. a government, the ultimate power to decide means casting the web of technocratic bureaucracy and the old social concepts into crisis – the very structure by which they are trying – unsuccessfully - to close the credibility gap vis-à-vis the ordinary people of Europe. There are those who insist that the States have to be left free to make their own economic choices. No single government! Generally speaking, I feel that it is not possible to continue with a currency having an entirely supra-national management (European Bank), with a national responsibility for internal economics with Europe-wide guidelines and employment policies entirely under national responsibility: how could such a system avoid collapsing? As a died-in-the-wool liberal, I am fixated – among other things – on the idea that freedom has to be wrested from the State and given to the individual. And what I mean, in truth, is American-style freedom. I am not a soothsayer by any manner of means, and I cannot even predict what the results emanating from the Intergovernmental Conference, to be held in a few days’ time, will be. The facts are, objectively speaking, alarmingly crude. The Ecofin affair, the plunging into crisis of the Stability Pact (during the Conference), both of these matters are still unresolved. I cannot provide a technical judgement on the basis of what went on. The clash between Prodi and Berlusconi (or Tremonti and Solbes) shows no signs of subsiding. Oh, and by pure chance this happens to be a political disagreement, not a technical-functional one. *** Leaving aside the negative judgement passed on the Italian presidency, to say - as Prodi did – that the Pact is, or was, stupid, and then not immediately to set in motion a vigorous political action aimed at modifying or redrawing it, is a sort of condemnation both of him and of the Commission he leads. Having said this, it is obvious that Chirac, and Tremonti too (for whom Europe is a stagnant Technocratic body stuck to its “power by rules”), not to forget Schroeder and Blair, are – when it comes down to it – luddites, at least in our opinion. They use the rightful discussion of the elements of the Pact not for redesigning the Commission’s role, but for reducing its power and re-instituting a vapid, lily-livered groupette of mini-powers. This is the hub of the problem. Everyone can see it, though from different sides of the barricades. Some people pretend they can’t see it, preferring to declaim that Europe must act to halt liberalisation, de-bureaucratisation and so on, but they rely on spontaneous shifting of contents: the institutions will be led by the nose. Or they cry out against the Franco-German front, and in their hatred of it reject the most federalist of proposals. They fear that by granting “governmental” powers to the French-German tandem things will no longer be as they are today, including the stupidity of attitudes to the Iraq question, the Turkish human rights matter, the dramatic situation regarding Israel. And then, they see before their very eyes the ghost of anti-Semitism, the sinking of France and Germany back into the days of Dreyfus and the holocaust – all part of a dark history which a stagnant Europe is bringing back to life. As a Radical, I believe in the institutions and their ability to lend dynamism to situations, to govern the facts of matters, to sensitise public opinion to great debates. Thus, in the same way that I say that two-party politics and a first-past-the-post voting system would change the Italy’s internal political balance, I feel that a constitutionalisation of federalism would force everybody into behaving in a different way. At worst a federal system such as the American one would give a name to the people responsible for government, whether successful or failed. It is also to be stated with some force that Great Britain has a deep responsibility for the stall in European progress. For centuries Britain has been Europe’s controller, but always from the outside. It never takes on responsibilities except for vetoing. It is never a force for democratic growth, only a brake on it. This would be termed “filibustering” in English. It can be said that Britain has always had this role, except in the past it exercised its power in the name of its Imperial Sovereignty, whereas now it operates on behalf of a third party. It is not a cross-Atlantic trait d’union, however, but is rather responsible for greater idealistic confusion and political impotence. It is also weighed down by public opinion and a press which is in no sense better than its continental counterpart. Minister Martino expresses the hope that the EU will send troops to Iraq. It is quite shocking that a liberal politician, who should be focusing attention on the institutions and their functioning, can be so vague when dealing with a question of such huge importance. Who exactly should send troops? The new hard core of “strengthened co-operation” between the British, the French and the Germans, signed in Naples but viewed with mistrust by Rumsfeld (but we will wait and see what Powell says on Thursday to the European partners), will operate within Nato, but how exactly? Or should the EU intervene with an autonomous European Army? In the end will it be only the odd trio of Italy, Spain and Poland which will be strengthened? Martino cannot tell us. Is it not clear how many options are open, or closed off, in the present situation of chaos? This convention was called so that we could discuss some points, define some matters and try to supply some answers to three questions: Is a Europe-wide Radical party possible and useful? What is the meaning of a project for “The United States of Europe and America”? What lies in the future for the organisation of Democracy and of democracies? Let us first take a look at the dates by which we have to model our possible moves on the subject, keeping those three questions in mind. In a few days’ time the Intergovernmental Conference under Italian presidency will conclude its business. Opinions are very much divided. Berlusconi appears to be optimistic, intimating that he has substantial proposals to make to Aznar, the Poles and so on. Others see a storm gathering on the horizon. And what should we ourselves do? What should the Radical Eurodeputies be doing? What position should they take if the Convention reaches Parliament? Will there be any reaction in Italy? For example, if the Convention does not pass, can some other initiative be launched? In what direction? Also to be considered is the preamble relating to Christian roots. Maurizio Turco has expressed our dissent on this matter. What else can be done? Immediately after this, there are the European elections of this summer. People have been talking about a European Radical Party. On this question we shall be listening to Dell’Alba’s speech, which will pose problems and questions. Then there is the broad question of the relationship between Europe and the United States. I have said what I think about this: without a politically efficient Europe, any relationship of this type would certainly be doomed to failure. Capezzone will express his thoughts, straight after me. But I would like to go further. Our present priorities, as committed Radicals, are concentrated around the theme of the worldwide organisation of Democracy and of democracies. This theme cannot avoid touching upon the European question. I personally am convinced that a World Organisation of Democracies which did not number Europe among its members, but did include, say, Italy or Romania, would not have enough authority to confront the ongoing democratic crises. It would be on the very threshold of failure from the outset. AS YOU CAN SEE, IN THIS CONCLUSION, AT MOST I MAP OUT PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS, AND OFFER NO SOLUTIONS. I BELIEVE THAT IN ORDER TO GET A GLIMPSE OF THE POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS WE WILL HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE SPEECHES AND CONTRIBUTIONS SCHEDULED FOR THIS AFTERNOON. With this résumé outlining the historical perspective, I hope to have given a useful contribution to our meeting.

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Bruxelles, 7 dicembre 2003. Conegno Radicale Europeo. Relazione di Angiolo Bandinelli: «Riforma e controriforma dell'Europa»