In October 1940, Don Luigi Sturzo arrived in New York City. Sturzo (1871–1959) was an Italian Catholic priest, sociologist and politician, known as a leading contributor to Christian Democratic theory and practice and as ‘the intellectual founder of the doctrine of popularism’.Footnote 1 Sturzo came to the United States as an anti-fascist political exile.Footnote 2 He had already left Italy for London sixteen years earlier, in 1924, seeking refuge from fascist persecution. When Italy joined the Second World War, Sturzo, like other Italian exiles in London, was considered an enemy subject. To avoid internment, he moved to the United States and lived in New York and Florida until his return to Italy in September 1946.Footnote 3 In 1952, he was nominated a life senator but never took up any official role in the newly reformed Christian Democratic Party (DC), which would lead the country’s political life in the following decades.
The focus of this study is the international thought of Luigi Sturzo during his exile in the United States. Historians have examined various aspects of this period in Sturzo’s life: his relations with other anti-fascists and exiles, including economist Mario Einaudi and philosopher Jacques Maritain, his influence on American scholars and his attempts to create local Catholic democratic organisations.Footnote 4 Others have dedicated greater attention to Sturzo’s political ideas and activities before and after the war, ignoring his wartime publications.Footnote 5 This study takes a different path by arguing that Sturzo’s wartime English-language publications provide an important lens on his international thought. The war, seen from the United States, became an opportunity to reimagine democracy as the foundation of a future world order and to reconsider Christianity’s role in it. The rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1940s compelled Catholics to reconsider their relationship to democracy beyond the national scale. Sturzo, who ‘had doubtlessly been a convinced democrat since the beginning of the century’, reinforced his support for democracy in exile by proposing ‘an open-ended vision of democratic order based on agonistic interaction and pluralist institutional decentralisation’.Footnote 6 In the 1940s, he extended his lifelong vision of political (and economic) democracy from the domestic to the world scale. Drawing on Catholic universal morality, Sturzo suggested that the fundamental values of politics (such as liberty, equality and democratic participation) were not to be limited to the state but should be extended to international politics. Despite its conceptual indeterminacy and limited institutional articulation, this vision of democracy deserves careful scholarly attention insofar as it expresses an ambitious convergence of politics and morality at the global level.
This study seeks to outline the fundamental elements of Sturzo’s Catholic democratic internationalism by examining published sources, specifically two books that Sturzo published in English during his American sojourn. The first book is Italy and the Coming World (1945), an expanded and reworked version of Italy and the New World Order, which came out in Britain in 1943. It was published at the suggestion of Sturzo’s London-based friend and translator, Barbara Barclay Carter, who wished to promote Italian democratic thinkers in Britain during the war.Footnote 7 The second book is Nationalism and Internationalism, which was published in the United States in 1946. The book was a collection of essays, many previously published in newspapers such as the New York–based Il Mondo or the Italian Il Quotidiano, while other chapters appeared in previous edited volumes.Footnote 8 Unlike Sturzo’s earlier publications on sociology and international law, which made his reputation in the English-speaking world, these were not works of scholarly research aimed at an academic audience. Instead, these two books were written in an accessible, sometimes journalistic style intended for a lay readership. Drawing on historical narrative, papal edicts and political events, Sturzo discussed an eclectic selection of topics, from the history of Christian democratic political thought to trade unions, war strategy and international organisations. While Catholicism was a recurrent theme in the books, in discussions of the Vatican’s political stance or the nascent Christian Democratic movement, they were not works of a proselytist or catechist. Rather, the books sought to demonstrate that Catholicism and democracy were not only compatible but also a desirable match within and beyond state boundaries. Even if he could not provide a clear blueprint for the realisation of his vision, Sturzo eagerly promoted an idea of a Catholic democratic internationalism. The analysis of these works shows that during his American exile he developed distinctive ideas that were not peripheral but rather central to his political thought.
Sturzo engaged in researching and writing these books at a time of great political turmoil, especially for Italy. On 8 September 1943, Italy announced the armistice with the Allies, leading to a period of chaos that some, including Sturzo, have defined as civil war. Germany occupied northern and central Italy and set up the Italian Social Republic (RSI) with Mussolini as its leader. The Italian government fled to the south and signed a pact of co-belligerence with the Allies. Sturzo watched these events from the United States and sought to contribute to the United Nations’ debate on the shape of the future world order. His writings enhanced the democratic elements in Italy’s history and outlined the contours of democracy as the basis of a new world order, arguing that Catholics should be part of democratic politics on both domestic and international scales.Footnote 9
The political thought of Sturzo developed in the early decades of the twentieth century, when he was part of an unprecedented outburst of Catholic political activism in Europe. Between 1900 and 1940, Catholic social and political reform in Europe – particularly in Italy – underwent a profound evolution shaped by industrialisation, democratisation and the rise of totalitarian ideologies. Building on Rerum Novarum (1891), Catholic activists, intellectuals and clergy developed a rich associational culture that included trade unions, cooperatives, rural credit banks, youth groups and educational societies. These initiatives sought to defend workers and peasants, promote social justice and counter both socialist materialism and laissez-faire liberalism. In Italy, challenging the Catholic ban on participation in politics, the non expedit of 1868, Sturzo also became directly involved in politics as vice-mayor of Caltagirone, a position he held from 1905 to 1920.
The year 1919 marked an important moment for Catholic politics when Pope Benedict XV partially reversed the Vatican’s ban on participation in Italian political life. This permitted Italian Catholics to take part in elections and advance a distinctive Catholic vision of democratic politics. In 1919, Sturzo founded the Partito popolare italiano (PPI), which he defined as ‘a party for Catholics’ rather than a Catholic party.Footnote 10 PPI articulated a programme of democratic reform, political pluralism and social protection inspired by Christian principles. Across Europe, Catholic reformers engaged in parallel efforts: Christian trade unions flourished in Germany and Austria; Christian Democratic currents emerged in Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland; and a transnational Catholic social discourse developed through journals, congresses and episcopal initiatives. In the 1920s, other Christian Democratic parties emerged in Europe – with the important exception of France – and indeed after 1945 Christian democracy became the most successful Western European political movement.Footnote 11 Sturzo was aware of the important international dimension of the Catholic democratic movement and encouraged believers across borders to get actively involved in national democratic politics without imposing a perfect overlap between Catholic faith and any specific political ideology.Footnote 12 Yet at this point, his focus was mostly on Catholic participation in domestic politics and Catholic internationalist cooperation between national movements, without promoting a Catholic-inspired vision of a new world order.Footnote 13 For some, including his biographer Gabriele De Rosa, Sturzo was a ‘utopian’ thinker, offering a radically new vision of the relations between religion and politics in modernity, yet for others, his political view was deeply disillusioned and pragmatic.Footnote 14 In Sturzo’s international thought in the 1940s both approaches were present.
During his long exile, Sturzo was keen to share his democratic vision with the local (anglophone) audience. In London, he led a small circle of progressive and liberal Catholics who sought to engage Britain’s support in the battle against fascism in Europe.Footnote 15 As Paolo Acanfora has shown, his ideas resonated with Catholic democratic thinkers worldwide, inspiring local organisations and fostering transnational networks.Footnote 16 By the time he reached New York, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States were engaged in imagining a new democratic post-war world order.Footnote 17 Many sought to rethink democratic legitimacy beyond the nation-state in response to the crises of war, empire and economic interdependence. The connecting thread of these global imaginaries was a commitment to democracy and pluralism and a rejection of imperialism. Rather than a single blueprint, global democracy emerged as a set of contested projects seeking to reconcile popular sovereignty with new international institutions.
In 1940, Sturzo was interested in contributing to these debates, but his most immediate obstacle upon arrival in the United States was financial: without economic means, he depended on the support of local Catholic acquaintances for his subsistence. He initially lodged with a Catholic family in New York City, before relocating (ostensibly for reasons of health) to hospital accommodation in Jacksonville, Florida, a move he suspected was encouraged by the ecclesiastical establishment in the United States in order to distance him from the political centre because of his outspoken anti-fascist positions.Footnote 18
Despite his fragile health and chronic financial insecurity, Sturzo remained resolute in devoting his energies to writing about the future of democracy within and beyond the state. He contributed to the war efforts through his engagement with the political establishment: the Office for Strategic Services, a US wartime intelligence agency, sought and received his advice. Yet his major engagement was as an intellectual in the public sphere. A prolific writer, he did not limit his publications to outlets of Christian orientation, such as Blackfriars, Commonweal or Thought, but also approached The Review of Politics, the Atlantic Monthly and the Italo-American publication Il Mondo. In these writings, he sought to ‘explain Italy to the Americans’, as Francesco Traniello has suggested, but also to outline a vision of a new post-war world order.Footnote 19 He was dismayed to discover that most American Catholics and the Catholic establishment supported fascism rather than democracy and preferred appeasement over intervention in the war.Footnote 20 Indeed, if Mussolini accused him of ‘black bolshevism’, American Catholics associated his plan for social reform with Marxism, which they considered the real threat to liberty and faith.Footnote 21 Nonetheless, as Martin Wight suggested in 1946, Sturzo was celebrated as ‘the only liberal Catholic political scientist with an international reputation in the English-speaking world’.Footnote 22 Rather than liberalism or Marxism, it seems that social-democratic thought provides a more precise intellectual and ideological framing for his ideas.
The international thought of Luigi Sturzo can be analysed in the context of the intellectual history of Christian Democracy, which has recently received growing scholarly attention.Footnote 23 This strand of literature has recognised that while the Vatican remained an indispensable point of moral and political reference for proponents of the Christian Democratic ideology, the ecclesiastic institutions did not always provide clear guidelines for thinking about democracy. Historians of Catholic democracy have acknowledged Sturzo – and sometimes celebrated him uncritically – as a key democratic thinker.Footnote 24 By mid-century, the importance of his Catholic democratic stance grew when the Church avoided a clear position for or against the European totalitarian regimes: in 1933, the Vatican condemned both Nazism and Communism as hostile to Catholicism, but did not revoke its 1929 Lateran treaty with the Italian Kingdom under Mussolini’s leadership.Footnote 25 Many Italian, German and French Catholics similarly avoided criticising their governments’ anti-democratic policies, yet Sturzo was among the critical minority who supported democracy and became the target of Fascist or Nazi persecution that forced them into exile.Footnote 26
Alongside the growing historiography on Catholic democracy, religious international and internationalist thought provides another important context to understand Sturzo’s ideas. Since the nineteenth century, religious internationalists promoted cooperation across borders, using both practical and theoretical arguments.Footnote 27 Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim networks provided an important locus for the exchange and evolution of ideas about political and cultural cooperation beyond the state. Furthermore, for religious internationalists, the universality of faith provided an important moral foundation for political international order.Footnote 28 Thus, for example, the British Catholic internationalist Gilbert Murray, who considered religion a useful framework to advance cooperation around the world, wrote the foreword to Sturzo’s 1943 book on Italy and the New World Order.Footnote 29
The idea of an international community based on law has long interested Sturzo.Footnote 30 During the 1920s, he wrote a study in international law and war, considering the advantages and flaws of the League of Nations.Footnote 31 In the United States, he felt an urge to participate in the American debate on world order and found a new inspiration for conceptualising the democratic world order, which Europe had failed to realise.Footnote 32 He felt that his conceptual knowledge and personal experience of fascism gave him a responsibility to warn fellow believers against allying with fascist and totalitarian regimes and to campaign for democracy on an international scale.Footnote 33
Sturzo was not a systematic thinker, but rather an intellectually agile and historically grounded one. He believed in a Catholic democratic tradition that rejected both liberal economic individualism and socialist materialism, while affirming equal and free popular participation in government as a central political value. His political vision wanted to offer an alternative to liberalism, communism, fascism and nationalism, based on Catholic internationalism, democratic representation, pluralism and egalitarianism. Drawing on papal encyclicals and on Catholic thinkers such as Montalembert, Rosmini and Ozanam, Sturzo articulated a vision of Christian democracy rooted in social responsibility and moral community.Footnote 34 Unlike many of his predecessors, however, he emphasised in the 1940s the international dimension of Christian democracy, arguing that its principles had to be applied beyond the nation-state in response to the political and moral crises of the post-war world.
Sturzo’s Democratic Theory
Democracy, as a form of government and a political philosophy, was a long-lasting concern for Sturzo. As Maria Chiara Mattesini has shown, he considered democracy to be the inalienable right of people to govern themselves in full autonomy.Footnote 35 Even though Wight defined him as a ‘liberal Catholic’, Sturzo himself would have probably preferred ‘Christian democrat’, or Catholic democrat. Yet, as Flavio Felice argued, for Sturzo democracy and liberty were two sides of the same coin.Footnote 36 The experience of totalitarian dictatorship emphasised his political commitment to democracy as the precondition for political liberty. Democracy provided the fertile ground for the development of freedom and equality, and popular self-government must promote collective and individual liberty. Democracy, however, was not the source of rights and liberty, which emanated from natural law. Democracy was the ideal regime for Catholics because it recognised the rights and dignity of the human person, which preceded the political order. These rights were grounded, for him, in the moral concept of the human person.Footnote 37 Interestingly, Sturzo did not directly discuss these issues in the English edition of Nationalism and Internationalism (though the book contained a historical account of Christian democracy from the nineteenth century to 1945). They are discussed in more detail in the appendix to the Italian version of the book, which elaborates on theoretical and conceptual issues.Footnote 38 Here, Sturzo is categorical: ‘whatever is the material extension of the people as “collective political will”, in its sphere there must be liberty’.Footnote 39 Without liberty, he stated explicitly, there is no real popular government and no democracy. Citing Cicero, Sturzo emphasised the importance of civil and political liberties for popular participation in government. Liberty entails a set of rights, such as equality before the law, right to life, right to property, habeas corpus and so on, that belong to all men and women in a democracy. Additionally, Sturzo considered democracy a process. Even if political rights were not always granted to the entire people (for example, women’s right to vote) at the point of departure, it is assumed that rights would be extended over time.
Sturzo was convinced that liberty was the foundation of democracy, but his ideas were at odds with laissez-faire economics, legalism and individualism, which he saw as key elements of mid-century liberalism. In his vision of democracy, the state had a legitimate right to intervene in the economy for the collective good and for ‘social justice’, rather than for the interests of the privileged elites. Yet, as Quinn Slobodian and others have shown, mid-century liberals were not necessarily defenders of democracy on a domestic or global scale; the freedom of the market was prioritised over the liberty of individuals or communities.Footnote 40 Thus, it is evident that Sturzo could be called a ‘liberal’ only in a qualified sense, while his credentials as a democrat seem more robust.
Like other anti-totalitarian Catholic thinkers in the United States, such as Maritain, Sturzo was critical of the anti-democratic stance of American Catholics.Footnote 41 Sturzo was not content with political democracy as self-government and political rights, but also advocated economic democratisation on a world scale. He proposed a participatory democratic rule based on collective consciousness and equal rights. Importantly, his vision included a socio-economic reform to improve the material conditions of the poor and thus facilitate their participation in democratic politics. Sturzo proposed distributionist measures to transfer land and capital from the wealthy elite to the poor and underprivileged, who would be able to put it to good use (in his view). At the same time, he underlined his commitment to the Catholic principle of private property and envisaged a system of compensation rather than confiscation. The absence of privilege and the equality of rights to all citizens, including the working classes, further distanced his view of democracy from mainstream mid-century liberal approaches.Footnote 42
Democracy was based on socio-economic capabilities and on popular participation, but it was also a certain political ‘spirit’. This element was harder for him to define. As he argued in 1943, while Switzerland did not have universal suffrage, it ‘did not mean that the (sic) public life cannot be democratic’, because the Swiss had a certain democratic spirit that characterised their political outlook.Footnote 43 The spirit of democracy, for Sturzo, did not belong to liberals alone, but also to Catholics like himself. Challenging the view that Catholics were ‘reactionaries and obscurantists’, Sturzo listed the main points of the Italian Christian Democratic programme of 1900, including ‘universal suffrage for men and women, the legal recognition of workers’ unions, progressive income tax, proportional representation, agrarian reform, and freedom of the school’.Footnote 44 Thus, parliamentary representation, political and economic equality, social mobility and cultural and political liberty were key elements of his democratic vision. Democracy, for him, followed Abraham Lincoln’s dictum, which he associated also with the ideas of Leo XIII: ‘a regime of the people, by the people, for the people’.Footnote 45 Thus, despite the counter-reaction of conservatives, Sturzo argued that ‘the idea of a democracy founded on Christian principles (it was the idea prevailing in America) was perfectly orthodox’.
The central place of democracy in Sturzo’s political thought can be explained by his interpretation of the common good as the end of political order. Sturzo argued that
we should give the word ‘politics’ its highest significance: participating in governing a country towards the common good. As such, the end of all political activity is the advantage of the state, considered as the common good. In this sense, politics should be part of the moral order, because looking for the common good with the appropriate means is surely a moral goal.Footnote 46
He endowed the common good with a deeper meaning than mere utilitarian benefit: it became, for him, the appropriate aim for a moral person. The pursuit of the moral good of the political community is a crucial part of the process of socialisation that makes an individual a ‘person’, according to Sturzo’s personalist view.Footnote 47 He broke the divide between the particular life ambitions of the person and the universal order of the political community. Negating the moral aspects of politics necessarily means robbing the individual of the opportunity to become a person, an active part of a universal community. In his popularist framework, the democratic common good meant embracing social and progressive objectives that take into consideration the interests of the working classes.Footnote 48
The notion of the ‘common good’ underlines the centrality of the popular classes to Sturzo’s democratic political thought. He used the term ‘popolo’ or ‘people’ to address not only society as a whole but also the ‘most disadvantaged’ part of it: ‘Accordingly, for him, a truly popular form of government must necessarily involve concrete measures to benefit what were often referred to at the time as the popular classes.’Footnote 49 Additionally, a substantive democracy meant that the people were not only objects of government but also political subjects. Sturzo used the term ‘masses’ in a critical way, referring to how individuals lose autonomy and become passive, manipulable and easily absorbed into collectivist movements.Footnote 50 Instead, he advanced a personalist view that considered the socially rooted individual as the actively participating protagonist of democratic politics. Popular participation through the party system was an essential part of his idea of democracy, a system in which people had multiple identitarian attachments and preferences. The Christian Democratic ideology, which Sturzo developed with other Italian thinkers such as Giuseppe Toniolo and Antonio Rosmini, should embody a substantive and moral voice in politics, one of a plurality of voices seeking to win the support of the people within the institutional structure of democracy, whether on the national or the international levels. This did not imply that Catholicism had lost, for Sturzo, its moral primacy, but rather that in the post-war global democratic order, its political primacy could not be given but should be earned.
During the 1940s, like many Catholics involved in the battle against totalitarianism, Sturzo positioned democracy as the best alternative to fascism. Thus, in the United States, he became increasingly frustrated with Catholic leaders unwilling to oppose and resist the authoritarian regimes in Europe.Footnote 51 If in 1936, he oversaw the foundation of the People and Freedom group in London, an organisation that sought to round up Catholic support for the democratic battle against totalitarianism in Europe, he later admitted that no similar group could be founded in the United States:
American political life differs widely from that of Europe. This writer has attempted to introduce People and Freedom groups here, but he has to recognise that the implementation of social ideas in the political field is very difficult, though Christian Democracy interests some intellectual and political quarters.Footnote 52
Alongside Catholics who favoured fascism, he encountered liberals who doubted that democracy could be exported internationally and suggested that some people were not ready for democratic rule, including, for example, ‘the Italians [who] required discipline, perhaps with the stick, in any case with a strong, enlightened, authority, paternal [.] that made itself feared’.Footnote 53 In response, Sturzo examined the emerging system of representative parliamentarism, which demonstrated, to his eyes, that by 1910, in Italy, ‘democracy was a living fact’.Footnote 54
Sturzo’s interpretation of democracy gave significant attention to party politics, intending to undermine the idea of the absolute power of the state from moral and social perspectives. In the 1940s, he came to associate democracy with a parliamentary regime, with a form of pluralism de facto (although he had misgivings about using this term, which he linked to political chaos) and with a certain political ‘spirit’ that was hard to define. Political parties had a major role in mediating conflict between different factions of society, expressing society’s autonomous ability to create alternative sites of political power untouched by the centralised state and legitimised by popular support. In this, his ideas were close to Harold Laski’s view that the state was only one association among many, competing for support and legitimacy. In addition, he underlined the importance of an ‘international community’ as ‘a global hub of social interaction with potential for political change’. Politics was therefore not limited to the party system (despite its evident importance in a democracy) but also extended to civil society. For Sturzo, political interactions between communities across and beyond state borders could be the means for creating a new ‘global’ democracy, yet this proposal remained relatively underdeveloped in his writings.Footnote 55
Nonetheless, Sturzo’s endorsement of democratic pluralism was not always convincing. In 1940, the Italian anti-fascist literary scholar and world federalist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese – also exiled in the United States – reviewed Sturzo’s book State and Church in the Nation. While in theory he supported the vision of the liberating power of Catholic moral and social doctrine, he doubted that it would be possible to separate the moral ethos from the Church’s reactionary politics and fundamental fear of dissent. Arguing that ‘all the state has done or tried to do as a “directive power” in the nearly seventy years during which it could have acted from the experimental vacuum of its wholly spiritualized independence has consistently been along the line of absolutism and reaction’.Footnote 56 Borgese’s argument highlighted the underlying anxiety that motivated Sturzo’s democratic pluralism, a profound fear about the effect of totalitarianism on humanity’s moral convictions, a deep concern for the Catholic Church’s marginalisation in the post-war order and a desire to see Catholics participate in democracy on both domestic and international levels.
Borgese correctly identified a tension between Christian democracy and liberalism, which for Sturzo emerged from the failure of liberalism to deliver on its promise to safeguard the autonomy of persons and communities from the destructive power of the state. Sturzo found in liberal democracies the same ‘irrationality’ that characterised the totalitarian approach towards the person in society. He challenged the idea that liberal democracies could mediate between the qualities of the person and the universal need for political order. While upholding the value of individual liberty, the liberal democracies prioritised the centralised state over other communal associations in which individuals freely united. The crisis of democracy could not be resolved by individualistic rationalism or by a totalitarian centralised state: the only solution was to give political space to the plurality of communities and associations that human persons chose to create. His interpretation of liberalism may have been misguided, but it helps explain why political pluralism became such a central part of his international thought. Pluralism was a framework for the encouragement of social associations, which were essential for the moral development of the human person and could form the foundation of a universal community. Thus, pluralism was a form of order (rather than anarchy) and the necessary preliminary stage for the generation of order-making dialectical interaction between different, opposing social, political and economic powers.Footnote 57
During his wartime exile, Sturzo became increasingly persuaded that the real model for an international democracy was the United States: he asserted that ‘the oldest of the democracies is that of the United States, and through merit of men and events it has lasted and evolved since 1776 with an unbroken rhythm despite wars and crises, moral, political and economic’.Footnote 58 Yet even in this historically successful democracy, he identified deficiencies: deep-seated racial discrimination and lack of proletarian representation. The bipartisan system also failed to represent the pluralistic character of American society, pushing parts of it to the political margins. Sturzo, who considered the party system the central component of the democratic system, saw such a failure as a significant problem. He thus celebrated the United States as a plausible yet imperfect model, but did not discuss in detail the rise of an American-led democratic regime of liberty and equality on a world scale. He gave little detail about what such a regime might look like in practice.
European intellectuals exiled in the United States, including, for example, Waldemar Gurian, Thomas Mann, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Jacques Maritain, often wanted to distance themselves from totalitarianism and publicly express their support for democracy. Thus, in 1941, Maritain invited Sturzo to sign the Manifesto on the War, an initiative supported by forty-three European Catholics in the United States.Footnote 59 This document condemned the authoritarian regimes dominating Europe and articulated a personalist vision for a democratic post-war world. It expressed the Catholic commitment to fight totalitarianism (which included for them Nazism, fascism and importantly also communism) in the name of the supposedly ‘Western’ values of democracy and human rights. Sturzo added his signature to Maritain’s manifesto reluctantly, because its tone seemed to him too critical of individualist liberal democracies while remaining silent about the fascist connections of the Catholic Church. He refused to sign another manifesto because it undermined democratic commitment to parliamentary representation.Footnote 60 Sturzo’s critique resonates with later analysis by historians James Chappel and Udi Greenberg, who argued that by insisting that the foundational values of democracy should be Catholic (and more specifically Thomist) Maritain and his fellow authors effectively emptied the democratic polity of substance.Footnote 61 The Catholic commitment to social democracy, which Sturzo was keen to advance throughout his career, was never mentioned. The manifesto’s authors framed this minimisation of institutional democracy as an endorsement of pluralism, affirming each society’s right to determine its own political system without adhering to any pre-existing democratic model. Sturzo, however, remained unconvinced. He felt that the manifesto represented democracy as not a valuable political goal but rather a rhetorical tool in the Catholic battle against formidable enemies. This approach missed out on the moral contribution that Catholics could give to the creation of a new democratic order after the war.
The choice between democracy and dictatorship was, for Sturzo, the political decision that would define the post-war era. But in 1943, he concluded that ‘every country will have its democracy, and every age its democracy’.Footnote 62 In Italy, ‘without a true moral catharsis it will not be possible to create a truly new democracy, in which the various social classes and the various cultural groups will have confidence, and for which they will make sacrifices of their self-love, tranquillity and labour’.Footnote 63 In addition to institution-building, emotional and moral elements were also important for the construction of a stable and successful democratic rule; these elements were, for him, to be found in Catholicism.
In 1946, Sturzo insisted that it was wrong to believe that ‘there was a dogmatic (?) impossibility for Catholics to be democratic’, arguing that democracy offered the only defence for minority rights, personal dignity and pluralism, three fundamental elements of the Catholic doctrine.Footnote 64 Leading a Catholic life was the only path to salvation: Sturzo followed the Catholic rites with scrupulous dedication because he thought they embodied an eternal truth. Yet leading a Catholic political life was another matter. In politics, there was no universal moral dogma, but a wide spectrum of legitimate opinions. Democracy depended on securing the support of the people, who remained sovereign; a dogmatic approach could not provide politicians with the necessary tools to convince the public of their plans. Nonetheless, democracy offered to Catholics a space for the realisation of their own plans, if they could secure sufficient popular support. Parliamentary democracy was the only political system suitable for Catholics and everyone else, because it channelled political conflict towards constructive representative mediation. During the war, Sturzo became increasingly interested in the extension of these principles to the international and global spheres.
A Democratic ‘World Order’
Sturzo was keen to show that democracy could be applied universally and become the foundation of a new world order. He was part of a larger American wartime debate on the means to realise a democratic, peaceful international system after the war.Footnote 65 By discussing visions of internationalism, federalism and world democracy from a distinctly Catholic perspective, he sought to make a unique contribution to this debate. As we shall see, his positions distanced him from both liberals, who adopted constitutional and legal measures to realise a new democratic order, and socialists, who centred their internationalist vision on a new economic system based on planning. Moreover, Sturzo’s ideas were at odds with the attempts of Christian Democratic politicians to ‘constrain democracy’ through European integration, as Jan-Werner Müller has argued.Footnote 66 Rather, he linked domestic and international politics in a vision of popular, participatory democracy, arguing for formal and moral transformations of both scales to create a peaceful order.
The epochal clash between democracy and totalitarianism that generated a global war was, for Sturzo, a real opportunity to transform the international order in the direction of democracy and pluralism. He was so concerned with the question of world order that from the 1943 British edition, Italy and the New World Order, to the 1945 American edition, Italy and the Coming World, the chapter on international politics expanded into three chapters, allowing Sturzo to develop his international vision in more detail. How could this idea become reality? An international democracy needed an international demos, just as the democratic state demanded a strong popular commitment. Here, the Catholic moral ethos entered into play as the motivational element grounding the popular legitimacy for democratic constitutions, both domestic and international.Footnote 67 Catholic faith had for Sturzo a world-making power, which connected the particular and the universal. If, as he diagnosed, the crisis of democracy was caused by atomistic liberalism that undermined social cohesion, then democratic Catholic communitarianism could be the antidote.Footnote 68 He imagined the international community as a democratic global hub of social interaction that evolved slowly in a plural bottom-up movement through spontaneous and continuous interaction of millions of persons around the world. This future international community was, in fact, global, not international: more than a reflection of member states, it held a moral–political personality shaped through the actions and ideas of the persons who comprise it, a global Catholic-inspired demos.
Sturzo thought that the contribution of Catholicism to democracy extended beyond the spiritual realm to the practical sphere. Indeed, in his long political career, he developed a personalist approach based on political practice rather than on abstract theory. Although he did not engage in theorising a philosophy of personalism, in 1946, he argued that the French theory of personalism was important because it inspired Christians to embed their social thought in democratic theory.Footnote 69 While he appreciated the ideas of Mounier and Maritain, Sturzo’s personalism emphasised the importance of political engagement, especially in the context of democracy. His writings prioritised a concrete interpretation of personalism, which highlighted the role of Social Catholic and Christian Democratic movements in Europe and the United States in facilitating Catholic political participation. It is through concrete action in political parties, religious associations and social organisations that the Catholic personalist approach could shape the form of the post-war world. Thus, Sturzo prioritised contingent interpretations of personalist politics over a universal theory. By focusing on the changing dynamics between the church and the state, he challenged any simple ‘recipe’ for a global Catholic democratic order that assumed both concepts were fixed and unchanging.Footnote 70
Envisioning an international democracy was, for Sturzo, closely related to the problem of political agency. Who had the power to act in the international realm to make it more democratic? The obvious answer, from Sturzo’s wartime perspective, was that the victors would be endowed with world-making agency. Yet he criticised the Allies’ wartime conferences, from Moscow to Yalta (and, in 1945, San Francisco), as instruments of power politics rather than tools of democratisation. Moreover, the nascent rivalry between the United States and Soviet Russia, as the post-war superpowers, represented for him a limit to the political agency of Europe. The corrosion of Europe’s agency became increasingly evident to Sturzo. If in 1943, he asked, ‘What will Europe do? Such is the constant question of non-Europeans. Will she form a federation? Various confederated federations? An assembly of individual states brought together in the League of Nations? A continent divided into spheres of influence between London and Moscow?’,Footnote 71 in 1945, his approach changed: ‘the first question that rises in everyone’s mind is: What is to be done with Europe?’Footnote 72 The war reduced Europe’s ability to act politically, and he therefore proposed to return to the Atlantic Charter as the best top-down guarantee of democracy at a time when the political agency of the European peoples was suspended.
The question of agency was particularly relevant to Italy’s future. In Italy and the New International Order, Sturzo reflected on the reconstruction of democratic Italy after fascism, drawing a parallel between the future of Italy and the future world order. As Traniello suggested, this link was not only contingent but also conceptual, reflecting the close interconnectedness that Sturzo found between national and international politics.Footnote 73 In a similar vein to Adom Getachew’s claims about postcolonial awareness of the need to transform the international sphere to realise claims of national self-determination, Sturzo advanced the idea that Italy’s future democracy required a world-making effort on a global scale to sustain a stable transition from dictatorship to democracy.Footnote 74 After the 1943 armistice, could Italy democratise itself and participate in the new international democratic order? Sturzo argued that Italians would be able to transform their regime into democracy through their own will:
the determination of the Italian people to have a democratic government, even during the war fought on its own soil, has prevailed over the intrigues of fascism, over the unjustified fears of Allied military commanders and over the incomprehension of the political leaders of England and the United States.Footnote 75
Yet the role of the international powers was also important as interlocutors in this process: ‘Italy awaits justice and understanding from the Allies, so that she may resume in Europe that place which rightly belongs to her as a free and democratic country.’Footnote 76 The question of political agency was therefore important for not only Italy’s domestic order but also the role it would play in international, regional or global politics.
Germany and even France posed, for Sturzo, a similar concern with political agency. Would they be able to democratise of their own accord, or would a regime change have to be imposed on them? Also on this point, Sturzo’s view changed over time. In 1945, he argued that ‘we have no choice but to reconstruct. Germany, defeated and prostrate, must gradually regain her moral and economic health, and remain one of the cornerstones of the political edifice of Europe’. The main concern, ‘even above the question of just atonement’ – is how to bring Germany back to a human and Christian sense of civilisation, which meant ‘sovereign equality’ in the ‘general international organization’ or the ‘family of democratic nations’.Footnote 77 Yet how could this be achieved? If in 1943, he argued that ‘this “optimistic” vision of the future Germany is founded on the principle of trust and on the method of liberty’, by 1945 he replaced trust with faith, recognising perhaps the lack of common accord on this issue.Footnote 78 The turn to spiritual and religious terminology does not imply that Sturzo wanted to blur the boundaries between politics and religion, but rather that he found some elements in the religious toolbox useful if applied to solving concrete political problems of international cooperation.
The notion of faith was connected to the insufficiency of material conditions in fostering a stable international order. In 1946, Sturzo wrote that technology pushed humanity towards a greater interdependence, but like many others, he suggested that moral and spiritual interdependence lagged.Footnote 79
Today, after having passed through two seas of blood with the two world wars, we see that the time is ripe for a new and complete international and there is no need for a third war. For more than a century, man has been advancing toward an international consciousness, from the day when he crossed the ocean in a steamboat, when the continents were linked by telegraph, when on the ground distances were shortened by the automobile, and in the air he could travel around the world in a few days [.] The invention of the atomic bomb forces man to seek an international solution to the security problem, for the nation no longer has boundaries, or economy, no longer has protections, and man himself has no longer any personal refuge from the world wherein he lives.Footnote 80
Sturzo shared the view of other internationalists, from Alfred Zimmern to Barbara Ward, that an international consciousness was needed to generate a new international order.Footnote 81 The problem of agency returns implicitly, suggesting that for Sturzo, it was not enough to impose a new democratic international order; a bottom-up participatory transformation was necessary but depended on the emergence of a new international consciousness.
As the new Cold War mentality started settling in, Catholics dedicated growing attention to identifying and attacking the common enemy, communism. Sturzo feared that a pro-democratic attitude would lead to accentuating the tensions between Christian Democracy and competing ideologies that Catholics identified as their intellectual and political opponents. As mentioned above, his own ideas were often criticised by American Catholics for their supposed proximity to socialism and communism. Yet in the 1940s, his political writings shifted their target of criticism from fascism to communism. Advancing democracy became not only a good in itself but also a weapon in the struggle for dominance between capitalism and communism on a global scale.
Internationalism became, for Sturzo, a necessary ideology for the post-war era. In Sturzo’s second wartime book, Nationalism and Internationalism (1946), he discussed the international community as a sphere of faith in universal values but, reaffirming his commitment to pluralism, did not seek to transform political contradictions into unity or demolish the boundaries between politics and religion.Footnote 82 The multiple sources of democratic social interaction between, across and above states led him to favour a plurality of locations of political power, each with its own limited autonomy and authority. In his inter-war treatise on international law, he had already argued that private international relations could create collective organisations that would serve as the foundation for public international institutions.Footnote 83 In the 1940s, this idea acquired a concrete possibility of realisation, yet Sturzo did not offer a clear blueprint for translating the moral and emotional sense of global interdependence into a democratic institutional scheme. He doubted that the will to resolve disputes through political practice could suffice to overcome conflicts. Instead, he envisaged the foundation of a global democratic order through a dual motion of grassroots activities and a centralised political act of leadership.Footnote 84 Finally, he warned that shedding off national prejudices would take education, time and practice.Footnote 85
The intellectual and moral foundations of internationalism, an important concern for Sturzo, could not be found in socialism or communism, as both these ideologies were ‘international totalitarian dictatorships’. For him, ‘pure internationalism will come neither from civil wars promoted with the aim of smashing bourgeoisie and landowners, as Russia in 1917–1918, nor from levelling of the world into one single working class under a single Social-Communist banner and system’.Footnote 86 The origins of his critique of communism can be traced to the Spanish Civil War, which taught him to beware also of Catholic authoritarianism. The negative aspects of communism were grounded in its atheistic materialism and authoritarianism, which threatened, he argued, the foundational premises of the Catholic way of life. Yet he suggested that the rise of communism in Europe and the massacres in the Spanish War were the unwanted legacy of the Catholic failure to respond to popular social needs. The tragic outcome of the war was blamed on not only the communists and socialists but also the Catholics. In 1936, he argued that the Spanish people were ‘spiritually abandoned and socially left prey to socialism and syndicalism and today to communism’.Footnote 87 While the communists were right in identifying the true social and economic concerns of the working classes, they failed to deliver on their promises by compromising the value of liberty. Their global vision was a false hope. It was Catholicism’s task – and duty – to offer an alternative world order in which social and economic concerns of the working classes would be properly addressed.
The challenge of the new democratic world order was therefore to transcend ideological conflicts and create a common framework for international cooperation. Despite his rejection of communism and specifically bolshevism as authoritarian and therefore politically illegitimate, Sturzo opposed the exclusion of communist parties from the nascent post-war democratic order in Europe. Communist and labour parties should be included in the political order if they played by the rules of parliamentary democracy. The Catholic battle against communism should be conducted on the ideological and discursive plane, as two viable visions offered to the public to choose from. For Sturzo, communists knew how to respond convincingly – yet wrongly – to the great popular demand for social rights, political emancipation and better living conditions. To convince the public that the communist emancipatory promise was false, Catholics must offer a worthwhile and persuasive alternative social policy.
Already in 1936, he thought that the scope of social Catholicism should be international rather than national: Catholics should take a leading role in the creation of a democratic world order with the aim of extending the social benefits of democracy to all. If they were successful in building a pluralist democratic order that provided credible solutions to concrete social problems, it would be the ultimate proof that Catholic morality, and not communism, was the key to peace, freedom and prosperity in the post-war era.Footnote 88 After the failure in Spain, Sturzo argued that the Catholic social and political vision of democracy deserved a second chance to direct the world’s peoples towards political and economic well-being and moral salvation. This new opportunity seemed to have arrived during the Second World War, when Sturzo started developing his new international vision with Maritain, Wickham Steed and Salvador de Madariaga at the ‘People and Freedom’ group in London. In 1946, he looked back at their discussions and suggested that they had envisaged
a real League of Nations, with political and juridical functions, with its own means for impeding effectively new recourses to arms. People and Freedom of London promoted an inquiry based on the motto, ‘A League of Nations Now’ which had authoritative support. The defense of the Atlantic Charter against every realpolitik manipulation has been supported by the press and in timely discussions.Footnote 89
Indeed, if we consider Sturzo’s 1943 article in the London-based People and Freedom, which promoted a ‘New League of Nations’ based on the principles of ‘centralization and decentralization, one soul and multiple activities’, the theme was crucial to his thinking at the time.Footnote 90 The League of Nations ‘was to be a step forward toward a healthy and organic internationalism’ to abolish wars and bring about a new order based on the principles of international control, peace, political like-mindedness and a strong political conception of supra-national cooperation.Footnote 91
Sturzo suggested the existing League should not be blamed for failing to keep the peace as ‘the methods adopted were inadequate and insufficient: it was doomed to failure’.Footnote 92 With the benefit of hindsight, he argued that
the political setup of the League of Nations was, in fact, fictitious and apparent rather than real, not only because of the law of ‘unanimity’ which prevented the League to form an active policy of its own and confined it to negative compromises, but also because the League of Nations (as any other similar body) was composed of nations having opposed ideologies, principles and goals: democratic and liberal nations together with totalitarian nations.Footnote 93
Thus, the problem of the League was its ideological incoherence vis-à-vis the democracy/totalitarianism antinomy. In addition, he argued that
judicial, political, organizational Internationalism, achieved through the will of governments with the goal of permanent understanding, is certainly a step forward toward the coordination of the world; but we cannot ask from such organizations as the U.N. today more than they can give us; that is, a Forum of discussion and an Exchange for transactions. We must not deceive ourselves into thinking that an international consciousness of peoples is formed by such leagues.Footnote 94
Sturzo returned to the role of faith in internationalism:
to create a United Nations there is needed faith in Internationalism. I say ‘faith’ rather than ideal or conviction, because since a true United Nations has never existed and since the League of Nations has failed, we need faith to convince ourselves that the effort has not been in vain, and that the apparently insurmountable difficulties can be surmounted.Footnote 95
A successful international organisation would be internally coherent in its commitment to the values and institutions of democracy. Like other internationalists of his time, he criticised the excessive reliance on national sovereignty in the formation of the League of Nations, and later the United Nations, arguing that ‘the lack of a systematic international law which all States great and small would be equally obliged to observe, as well as the lack of a judiciary body which would see to it that the laws were enforced, has been and is one of the serious misfortunes of the international organization’.Footnote 96 Thus, an alternative way of imagining the future would be to think of a ‘league of peoples’, not a league of nations: ‘an international parliament elected by the people of the associated States, giving the representatives legislative powers and the executive committee political, administrative and military powers’.Footnote 97 With an international demos, it would be possible to create the ‘effective collective consciousness which could make us go beyond national boundaries’ up to a ‘world parliament’.Footnote 98
Sovereign equality in international organisations was, for Sturzo, one of the key obstacles to the creation of a truly democratic world order. It led, he argued, to the paralysis of the League of Nations and could do the same to the post–First World War international organisation. Drawing a parallel with the United States, he suggested that member states should give up their sovereignty to the central federal body with its own judicial and political powers to avoid the ‘imperialistic pre-dominance of the Big Three’.Footnote 99 In an afterthought, Sturzo turned his gaze to the new post-imperial order in Asia and Africa. He envisaged a series of charters or international treaties modelled on the Atlantic Charter, recognising the interests of the ‘native peoples’ as a step towards an ‘articulated international society’, or ‘world society rather than domination’.Footnote 100
By the publication of the 1945 American edition, the charter of the United Nations realised many of Sturzo’s forecasts. The possibility of military intervention against rogue countries, which he had advocated for in 1943, was realised in the power given to the Security Council. He welcomed the wide-ranging topics addressed in the charter, including economic, social and humanitarian affairs, but hoped for a more detailed intervention in national policies, such as the management of European tariffs.Footnote 101 Moreover, the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations represented for him an undesirable turn to anti-democratic power politics. In a sense, the power of veto emptied the political discussions at the Security Council of substantial meaning. The option of avoiding discussion through veto undermined, for him, the effective role of struggle and conflict in creating international cooperation. Rejecting political and spiritual monism, he favoured a continuous battle between a plurality of worldviews. A world without contradictions, without struggles, without differences was ‘impossible. That would be a lifeless and sterile world.’Footnote 102 Pluralism, participatory democracy, struggle and faith were thus confirmed as the fundamental elements in Sturzo’s international vision.
Democracy and Federalism
In the 1940s, many political thinkers around the world proposed federal political structures as solutions to internal conflict and national animosities, leading to a global ‘federal moment’.Footnote 103 During that time, Sturzo also turned to consider the merits of federalism in shaping the post-war world order. His attitude towards federalism remained ambiguous, a stance that can be explained by the tension between his commitment to political decentralisation and the growing public appeal of federalist visions, on the one hand, and his scepticism about the practical feasibility of implementing genuinely federal structures at the international level, on the other. Sturzo was thus implicitly critical of the rising popularity of federalist proposals in the 1940s. He distinguished between the many plans proposed by ‘experts, university professors, amateur politicians, phantasy-filled (sic) journalists’ and those of ‘men of merely average intelligence but with political responsibility’: the former were ‘speculators of theoretical truths’ and the latter ‘creators of practical realities’. Plans for international transformation, including a European federation, required political change on a global sphere, which he argued could only be undertaken by responsible politicians, not by political visionaries.Footnote 104 This framing, which emphasised the primacy of politically feasible international visions over those that were merely desirable, reflected Sturzo’s enduring preference for practical politics over abstract theory.
A federation, for Sturzo, was a political system that embraced diversity and pluralism without succumbing to chaos, creating a space for political heterogeneity. It was a check on political centralisation, because it divided political power among multiple entities on the domestic, regional and international scales.Footnote 105 For Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Sturzo’s proposals reflected the Catholic conception of subsidiarity, because he envisaged a federation that could express the multiple spontaneous associations in society. Thus, his federalism did not follow the liberal idea of constitutional federalism, which employed the law to create political change.Footnote 106 While the participatory element in Catholic subsidiarity was central to Sturzo’s thought, in the 1940s he used the term ‘federalism’ (rather than ‘subsidiarity’) to argue that the ‘common good’ – conceived in terms of natural law – justified the limitation of state power through political unification (and not only the bottom-up multi-layered restructuring of political order). In this sense, binding together multiple polities in a federal order served not only to decentralise power but also to enhance international cooperation in a democratic, non-authoritarian framework.
Sturzo’s argument in favour of federalism was closely intertwined with the concept of the ‘common good’ as the goal of political order. His agonistic reflection on the nature of political conflict led him to support federalism as the optimal political solution for preserving the freedom of small states and allowing greater political diversity within a territorial political unit. War prevention embodied a strong incentive to federate, but Sturzo also endorsed the view that a flexible federation would set a more stable framework for post-war democracy than allegedly homogeneous nation-states. In a wartime article on geopolitics, he criticised the political logic of geopolitical visions of world order, which focused on the interests of large states in disregard for the rights of small states.Footnote 107 The pre-war status quo of a world system of small states and large empires tied together by treaties was not worth preserving. Instead, Sturzo considered regional federations a more solid basis for a new world order.
While supporting some forms of federation on a theoretical level, Sturzo highlighted the practical difficulties facing most federalist visions. In 1943, he argued that a world federation or a single (world) state would be ‘impossible’ to realise and, for a similar reason, excluded also a single European federation (although ‘desirable’ in theory). He also criticised some of the most discussed federalist visions in British and American public debate at the time.Footnote 108 He opposed the plans of ‘Count Coudenove-Kalergi’ (sic) for a European federation excluding Russia, as it would create an ‘intolerable dualism’ between Germany and France that would encourage European intrigues. He criticised Jan Smuts’s suggestion that small European democracies should federate with Great Britain without Russia, for the result would similarly be, he argued, the division of the continent between two alternative blocs, a British and a Russian one, transforming Europe into a zone ‘to be utilised for the ends of a third world war’.Footnote 109 He also opposed federations ‘constructed a priori on paper’ (as he suggested was proposed by ‘Ely Cumberson and the Geo-politicians’) because they lack ‘moral and material interests’. Federation, like democratic politics, was based on grassroots participation, not on top-down ordering.
The tension between desirability and feasibility guided Sturzo’s reflection on federalism. In theory, he was convinced that ‘Europe must move towards the unification of all states, including Great Britain and Russia’,Footnote 110 but in practice, such federal union seemed unfeasible. In alternative, he proposed a gradualist transition towards a ‘new League of Nations’, a supra-national organisation that would prepare the ground for multiple local European federations of free peoples. Like other federalists, including, for example, members of the British association Federal Union, Sturzo highlighted the importance of the economic aspects of federation.Footnote 111 Yet, for him, economics was not the origin of the federal impulse, but rather a potential obstacle for the realisation of an essentially political plan: ‘there will be no hope for a European confederation if a tariff policy is not fixed in the terms of an armistice’.Footnote 112 Economic issues represented for him a barrier of ‘private and nationalistic interests’. If economic issues are ignored, ‘any rational plan of federation will be blown up by capitalist dynamite’. Sturzo was persuaded that an economic agreement was not a sufficient condition for the foundation of a European federation: the main obstacle was the democratisation and integration of post–Nazi Germany, a topic of political contention, not an economic issue per se. Thus, without a clear idea of Germany’s place in the future of Europe, ‘it is impossible even to foresee how a European federation can be reached, or on what bases it should be established’.Footnote 113 In 1946, Sturzo turned away from discussing European federalism and instead indicated domestic Christian democracy as the direction towards which German post-war politics should go:
The new position of political and governmental responsibility of the Christian Democratic parties in Europe during the coming year of reconstruction will test the strength, usefulness and the possibilities of a movement created by the people and for the people, and a movement which is popular in its structure and in its aim, truly democratic and fundamentally Christian.Footnote 114
Although federalism proved difficult to realise in the European context, its appeal for Sturzo extended beyond Europe and informed his thinking in other political settings, for example in postcolonial regions. As a critic of colonialism and imperialism, he argued that colonial autonomy and independence should be guaranteed before the inclusion of ex-colonies in a federal order.Footnote 115 In an unpublished and undated wartime text, he proposed that India should become a free federal state (or autonomous dominion) and Africa should also be reorganised in one or more federations, where communication technologies would put in close contact the various states and colonies of the continent.Footnote 116 Thus, Britain could be an important component of federal structures, because its empire could build political, economic and cultural bridges between Europe, Africa and Asia. Yet, the British Empire should not be transformed into a transnational federation, as proposed by his contemporaries Lionel Curtis and Alfred Zimmern, because such a proposal lacked democratic legitimacy. Sturzo also rejected ideas of a Eurafrican or Eurasian federation, which failed to take into account the political will of the colonial peoples.
The success of federal institutions depended, for Sturzo, on the political coherence of its members, implicitly echoing the views of earlier federalists, including John Stuart Mill, who demanded a political common-mindedness as a requisite for federation.Footnote 117 The changes required to create a peaceful world order were formidable and global:
When we shall have a Russia that has established democratic liberties, a re-organized China, an independent India, the world will be able also to embrace as brothers Germans and Japanese in a true League of Nations. Then Europe will have her Federation, Africa her legal status, the natives on the shores of the Pacific their autonomy, America will be truly a Pan-America, and the British Commonwealth will be completed as one of the greatest historic experiments in freedom and co-operation.Footnote 118
The realisation of this vision depended not on the application of a new federal constitution but on the practical abilities of politicians and the democratic participation of the international demos.
Conclusion
Sturzo’s years in the United States were a critical time for re-imagining democracy on a global scale. Public intellectuals, political commentators and scholars, both emigres and Americans, envisaged the post-war world order as a space of democracy, liberty and cooperation. The Allies did not wait for the end of the war to start planning the post-war order, stimulating a wider debate about the principles and institutions that should guide it. Yet there were multiple views about what this order might look like, how it would relate to existing states and how the principle of ‘democracy’ could be extended globally. Against the backdrop of war, exile and the collapse of European political authority, Sturzo argued for an international community shaped from below through social associations, political parties and a shared moral consciousness, but also requiring from above a coherent constitutional framework capable of constraining state sovereignty. The decisive element in the formation of a new democratic internationalism was a moral transformation, an act of faith.
Sturzo developed his arguments with limited reference to the scriptures or to ecclesiastic leaders, blending commentary on political events with philosophical reflections. He was confident, however, that democratic participation, equality and liberty, which he interpreted through a Christian lens, should become the guiding principles of political relations within and beyond the state: ‘Such a palingenesis will not be possible unless the moral law of justice and liberty is accepted and proclaimed as the true law of the world, to animate the material and practical law such as the security law will be.’Footnote 119 It is evident that the international political dimension was neither a secondary aspect of his thought nor a mere extension of his pre-war activism but rather a central part of his thinking about politics, morality and world order. Morality and politics were not the same: distinguishing between these two domains, he thought Catholics had a particular contribution to make to democracy on a world scale through their interpretation of equality, solidarity and liberty.Footnote 120
Rejecting the reduction of politics to either technocratic liberalism or ideological monism, his wartime writings expressed a clearer critique of statism and nationalism. He contributed enthusiastically to the debate about world order, responding to contemporaneous visions of world federation with his own critique of great-power domination. His call for a ‘league of peoples’ and ‘world parliament’ anticipated later debates on regional integration and global governance, even if his reflections often remained programmatic rather than fully elaborated.
Sturzo’s internationalism was marked by its own tensions and blind spots. His faith in Catholic moral leadership sometimes muted his willingness to confront the authoritarian tendencies within the Church, and his hope for a federated Europe left unresolved its relations with Europe’s colonial dependencies and non-European actors. Despite his critique of European imperialism and its legacies of exploitation and racism, he was confident that Europe could establish a new democratic international order through institutional and moral change. Moreover, his appeal to an emerging ‘international consciousness’ rested on assumptions he did not fully theorise. Despite these flaws, returning to Sturzo’s mid-century writings offers an opportunity to understand the main tenets of Catholic democratic internationalism and to reflect on some of its limits. Through his ideas, we gain a richer understanding of Christian Democracy’s intellectual genealogy within the broader effort, in the midst of global crisis, to envision alternatives to the politics of domination and despair. His wartime publications demonstrate how his Catholic democratic vocabulary was mobilised to imagine new forms of cooperation beyond the nation-state and why pluralism, participation and moral responsibility remained, for him, the indispensable foundations of any durable world order. In view of recent reflections by Pope Leo XIV on the fundamental links between international order, democracy and the ‘moral law’ of the human person, Sturzo’s original ideas acquire a new relevance to international political thought.Footnote 121
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