Introduction: contextualizing the Ventotene Manifesto
The Ventotene Manifesto is the most widely recognized document in the history of Europeanism—and the most misunderstood.Footnote 1 Intellectuals and politicians alike extol its impassioned cry for continental unity but overlook its radical substance: the call to dismantle the nation-state and structure the new European federation along socialist lines. Originally titled For a Free and United Europe, the manifesto took its name from the prison island of Ventotene in southern Italy where the two veteran antifascists Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli first drafted it in the summer of 1941. Rossi and Spinelli blamed war on the anarchy of the international order, which made survival depend on the ability of states to dominate each other. To break from this vicious circle of violence, a rupture was necessary. The manifesto urged the immediate creation of a “United States of Europe,” endowed with clear and exclusive federal powers and an economy nationalized “on a vast scale.”Footnote 2
Crucially, Rossi and Spinelli did not expect to achieve their goals through a democratic process. They argued, instead, for the creation of a “revolutionary party,” led by trained militants who would carry out a proper federalist coup. Rossi and Spinelli anticipated that such activity would have to take place in the most challenging and illegal circumstances.Footnote 3 In moments of revolutionary crisis, so they believed, only an enlightened minority could impose new civilizational norms from above. In contrast, democratic procedure risked paralysis when action was most urgent. The European demos plays a passive role in the manifesto’s vision: it does not shape the new democracy but inherits it. Even if the establishment of a democratic system remained the final goal, it would not be brought about through popular deliberation, but through what Spinelli called, borrowing from Nietzsche, the “lawmakers of the future.”Footnote 4
Rossi and Spinelli’s methods expressed what I call “Jacobin utopianism,” a revolutionary outlook that seeks complete political and moral rebirth by top-down means. The term, as I use it, does not imply direct influence. In Rossi and Spinelli’s writings, echoes of historical Jacobinism are evocative rather than explicit. What I am trying to highlight with this term is rather an underlying affinity. Spinelli spoke of Rossi’s “Jacobin spirit” as encompassing all those minorities in history who “have adopted certain ideals of civilization and compelled everyone to accept them.”Footnote 5 The two believed that political palingenesis had to be initiated by a vanguard, entitled to suspend normal procedures in moments of emergency.Footnote 6 In the manifesto, revolution and federalism became, in effect, inseparable. The “dictatorship by a revolutionary party” was the necessary vehicle for “moral reform” and political emancipation after twenty years of fascist morass, while the new federation would, in turn, justify the cost of revolution.Footnote 7
Notwithstanding its radicalism, the Ventotene Manifesto remained relevant long after the war. As continental integration began in the 1950s, it was presented as a key Europeanist text, and it remains so to this day.Footnote 8 In the official narrative of the EU, the document symbolizes an ideal bridge between wartime antitotalitarianism and the postwar construction of Europe.Footnote 9 This link was reinforced by historiographical accounts that projected a teleological pathway of Europeanization, “from Resistance to … Integration.”Footnote 10 Walter Lipgens helped establish this reading, concentrating on what Alan Milward sarcastically called the “European Saints,” the founding fathers of Europe, from Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman to Paul-Henri Spaak.Footnote 11 Figures like Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli were seen as their heroic forerunners.Footnote 12 However, the message of the manifesto sits uneasily with the cautious principles underpinning the present-day union.Footnote 13 As more recent research shows, the influence of resistance groups on the launch of the European project was, at best, difficult to measure. Their plans clashed with the pragmatic orientation of the early European institutions, which prioritized economic cooperation over political unification.Footnote 14 Going back to the original words of Rossi and Spinelli is, therefore, a way to recognize the manifesto’s revolutionary thrust, concealed beneath the sediments of political mythologizing.
In this article, I seek to recover the voice of the manifesto by situating it within the political ferment of the interwar and wartime years. I argue that the idea of a united Europe developed in Ventotene should be seen as a last-ditch response to the crisis of the nineteenth-century nation-state system. The utopianism of the manifesto was backward-facing, driven by the urgency to resist structural collapse. Like other coeval Europeanist projects, it was “a defensive formation, [starting] not so much from a positive and creative point of view but from the need to save European civilization from decline.”Footnote 15 For Rossi and Spinelli, federalism was the final bulwark against the forces threatening to destroy Europe. The impending sense of doom they experienced reinforced their belief that only sweeping institutional change could forestall breakdown.
The militant federalism of the Ventotene Manifesto is rooted in the intricate landscape of prewar and wartime leftism, common to other “heretic,” fleeting groups like the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK), Giustizia e Libertà (GL), and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). By focusing on Ventotene, I try to fill a gap in general histories of socialism, which ignore socialist federalism because it does not match the paradigm of the socialist mass party model.Footnote 16 This allows me to shed light on the manifold and often diverging developments of socialist ideology and make sense of the sharp political edges of Rossi and Spinelli’s text.Footnote 17
Finally, putting the Ventotene Manifesto in context adds to the growing body of work on the history of European ideas.Footnote 18 Works such as Anthony Pagden’s The Pursuit of Europe and Shane Weller’s The Idea of Europe offer broad analyses of the evolution of the concept. They explore competing visions of Europe often marked by irreconcilable cultural foundations.Footnote 19 Pagden and Weller pin these competing visions down to a relatively stable meta-concept of Europe. Broad-stroke accounts of European identity like these reveal a paradox: they present internal diversity as a defining feature of Europe and at the same time bring out unifying elements (political, cultural, or religious) that hold that diversity together.Footnote 20 This perhaps inadvertently contributes to a “mythology of coherence,” attributing logical consistency to heterogeneous philosophical and political ideas across time.Footnote 21 Readers can easily become lost in the maze of competing proposals, struggling to determine which is closer to a supposed “essence.”
A focused historicist perspective reveals how often ideas of Europe emerged from lived political struggles, not just philosophical reflection. The accounts of Pagden and Weller do not give much weight to texts such as the Ventotene Manifesto, focusing instead on canonical figures like Kant or Isaiah Berlin. The result is a strange mismatch: on the one hand, the highest echelons of the EU abound in tributes to Ventotene, while, on the other, scholarly attention remains scarce.Footnote 22 To fully understand the evolution of European ideas, it is crucial to consider the influence of activist ideologues like Rossi and Spinelli and the relevance of ephemeral texts such as the Ventotene Manifesto, whose impact might have been overlooked by intellectual historians and blown out of proportion by interested politicians. To this end, the next section historicizes the manifesto’s genesis, while the following one examines its content and theoretical tensions in greater detail.
The antifascist roots of the Ventotene Manifesto
The first version of the manifesto was smuggled off the island in the summer of 1941 by Ada Rossi (Ernesto Rossi’s wife) and Fiorella and Gigliola Spinelli (Altiero Spinelli’s sisters) who transcribed the text in small letters on thin cigarette papers.Footnote 23 This early edition was divided into four sections, combining philosophical–historical reflection with a normative federalist vision.Footnote 24 The first part, “The crisis of modern civilization,” interprets Europe’s collapse as rooted in the Hobbesian, lawless nature of international politics. The second, “Postwar Tasks—European Unity” lays out the political objective: the creation of a supranational federal government, which is considered the necessary condition to secure lasting peace. Given Europe’s central role in fueling global conflict, Spinelli, who authored these first two parts, argued that world concord depended on stability on the continent. The manifesto acknowledges the ideal of a global federation, but the immediate focus remains on Europe. This was also a matter of expediency, given the unlikely opportunity engendered by the German conquest. The “collapse of most of the continent’s states under the German steamroller,” so the manifesto contended, “has already united the fate of the European peoples.” The challenge would be to defeat the German Moloch while preserving this unity through the creation of a supranational state.Footnote 25
The third section of the manifesto, “Postwar Tasks—The Reform of Society,” was written by Ernesto Rossi, and advances a socialist vision of reconstruction. It calls for state intervention in the economy, the redistribution of land and capital, and the protection of civil and political rights. The final part, “The Revolutionary Situation: Old and New Currents,” makes the most explicit strategic intervention. It urges the formation of a tightly disciplined political vanguard, a cadre of militants responsible for seizing the historical moment and carrying out the transition to the new federal order.
Taken as a whole, the four sections advance a vision that is not only antinationalist, but also profoundly anti-gradualist and elitist. The manifesto embraces political rupture and rejects the democratic logic of incremental reform and mass consensus. For Rossi and Spinelli, this stance was a logical necessity. It was an insight sharpened by the catastrophe of war, which, as they wrote, “opened the eyes even of those who did not want to see and … ripened many conditions favorable to our ideal.”Footnote 26 In contrast to the vague aspirations for a future union of European states imagined by intellectuals like Saint-Simon and Victor Hugo, the spiritual and political breakdown of the continent demanded immediate revolutionary intervention. As Spinelli later acknowledged in his memoirs, the manifesto was not saying anything new about the crisis of European civilization or the idea of federation. What set it apart was the recognition of the rightful need for leadership to exercise power in a moment of change.Footnote 27 This leadership had to be conscious of the necessity to guide the masses and their movements, an idea he expressed in uncompromising Leninist terms.
What were the roots of this radical vision? Two elements shaped the conceptual foundations of the Ventotene Manifesto. First, the peculiar environment of confino, a form of internal exile imposed on political dissidents by the Fascist regime, which created the material and psychological conditions for imagining a break with the existing order. Second, Rossi’s earlier involvement with Giustizia e Libertà (GL—Justice and Liberty), the “liberal–socialist” movement he helped to found, grounded the manifesto in a political current already committed to radical federalist action. GL had been promoting Europeanist ideas since the early 1930s and offered an earlier example of the Jacobin revolutionary ethos that would later inform the Ventotene group. Of note is also Spinelli’s past militancy in the clandestine Communist Party, which had left him with an inflexible Leninist conception of political struggle. Spinelli retained this mind-set even after breaking with the party.Footnote 28
Rossi and Spinelli’s faith in revolutionary possibility was a reflection of the peculiar circumstances of their confinement. Isolation from the outside world fostered a heightened sense that political opportunities might be at hand. In 1939, the two had been sent to Ventotene, a small island off the western coast of southern Italy, to complete their prison sentence for antifascist conspiracy. The island was used as a place of detention for political dissidents known as confinati (“confined”). The confino policy, inherited from earlier practices of the liberal Italian state, aimed to sever prisoners from political life. It forced individuals deemed dangerous to the regime to live in remote locations throughout Italy as a form of internal exile.Footnote 29 The Fascist regime then institutionalized the confino through the so-called leggi fascistissime (ultra-Fascist laws) of 1926 and routinely employed it to neutralize the opposition. The law on public security expanded the use of confino by circumventing judicial procedures and placing decisions in the hands of administrative authorities.Footnote 30
Confino created two conditions necessary for imagining a text like the Ventotene Manifesto. First, it imposed a critical distance from the center of political action. On Ventotene, cut off by the sea, news of Europe’s collapse arrived in fragments, reinforcing the sense of an irreparable break. For Rossi and Spinelli, confino made it possible to imagine a complete departure from what had come before. This sentiment was nourished by the memory of earlier “revolutionary crises” in which political upheaval, driven by a small group of revolutionaries, had succeeded. The Bolshevik example of 1917 was, of course, a key reference. The Russian Revolution had established a “new paradigm” for political transformation, demonstrating how crisis could be seized to overturn existing structures.Footnote 31
Second, confino allowed for the sustained intellectual engagement that made the conception of the manifesto possible. Historians have shown that the confino zones emerged as politically fertile collective spaces for antifascists.Footnote 32 Unlike in prison, detainees had relatively easy access to books and could interact with one another with some degree of autonomy, fostering the development of an intellectual environment “livelier than anywhere else in the peninsula.”Footnote 33 As a result, islands of confinement such as Ventotene came to subvert the nature of the punishment the regime had intended to impose. They occupied an ambiguous position, suspended between censorship and freedom, allowing political thought to develop under conditions that were neither fully repressive nor entirely free.
Finally, I suggest that the physical dislocation and marginalization imposed by internal exile offered federalist thinkers a vantage point beyond the nation-state. The insular character of Ventotene allowed the authors to observe the nation from a distance. Cut off from direct participation in Italian politics on one side, and from the immediate concerns of clandestine antifascist groups on the other, Rossi and Spinelli were able to conceptualize the nation-state not as the inevitable political horizon of modernity, but as a contingent historical form. In this sense, enforced marginality enabled a critical detachment from national paradigms, an effect of epistemic exile that opened up space for imagining transnational alternatives.Footnote 34
And yet the stimulating environment of the confino and the cross-party ties it enabled should not obscure the fact that sectarian rivalries also plagued life in internal exile. Ventotene was home to communists, socialists, and anarchists, as well as ordinary prisoners (the so-called “Manchurians”), who slept and ate in different areas and received material support from their respective cohorts. The federalists also created their own separate group after 1941.Footnote 35 Discord persisted during the war and informed the drafting of the manifesto.Footnote 36 In Spinelli’s case, his past in the Communist Party remained a source of suspicion among other detainees, even though he had begun distancing himself from Marxism years before and was expelled from the party in 1937. Spinelli had joined the PCI when he was still a teenager in his native Rome. After spending a decade in prison, his rupture with communism enabled the independent intellectual trajectory that would culminate in the federalist project of Ventotene.
Ernesto Rossi was also sent to Ventotene after a long period of imprisonment. He was already a recognized leader of GL, the antifascist group founded in Paris in 1929 by Italian exiles of liberal–socialist orientation. Its members in Ventotene were especially mindful of the political barriers separating them from the communists.Footnote 37 In fact, Rossi encountered considerable opposition from his fellow GL members due to his collaboration with Spinelli. Longtime allies such as Riccardo Bauer went so far as to temporarily sever ties with him. This rupture caused Rossi deep personal distress. Working with “heretics” of socialism like Spinelli thus carried significant material and emotional consequences.Footnote 38 The confino fostered specific dynamics that set it apart from other established loci of political dissidence, such as prison or exile. It offered more freedom of discussion beyond the confines of party politics, but this freedom still came at a price. It could lead to social excommunication, even for respected leaders like Rossi.
Some of the ideas later developed in the Ventotene Manifesto first began to germinate in the milieu of GL. I turn here to Rossi because his background in GL more directly anticipates the manifesto’s federalist and leftist core. Under Carlo Rosselli’s leadership, GL championed a “liberal socialism” that rejected both Marxist determinism and liberal passivity. In its place, the movement called for political voluntarism and immediate revolutionary action.Footnote 39 Federalism, particularly as formulated by thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and later Georges Gurvitch, gained increasing importance in GL’s debates. Rosselli was among the first to advocate for a “United States of Europe,” which he framed as a response to the international character of Fascism in the pages of the Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà between 1932 and 1935.Footnote 40 Although Ernesto Rossi was imprisoned during these years and did not participate directly in the movement’s debates, their echoes reached him in prison. These ideas, transmitted through the GL journals and discussed among fellow detainees, played a crucial role in fostering his commitment to European federalism.Footnote 41
The long period of imprisonment also marked a broadening of Rossi’s political vision. It added a more distinctly socialist orientation to his original radical republicanism.Footnote 42 The Spanish Civil War was the main turning point.Footnote 43 For GL, events in Spain exposed the moral bankruptcy of the democratic powers, which refused to intervene on behalf of the republicans.Footnote 44 It also confirmed what the Italian case had already shown, namely that many capitalists were willing to align with authoritarian movements to safeguard their interests, thereby exacerbating political instability. This realization informed Ernesto Rossi’s critique of capitalism, pushing him towards a kind of socialism tempered by liberal democratic principles. As Rossi would explain in 1945 to Marion Rosselli, Carlo Rosselli’s widow, “I have critically revised many of my economic positions and find myself much more to the left than I was in 1930. I am now truly a liberal socialist; that is, a non-Marxist socialist.”Footnote 45
Rossi and his GL circle in prison interpreted the Spanish conflict and the earlier Abyssinian crisis as symptoms of a renewed surge in nationalistic passions that called for an internationalist response.Footnote 46 As documented by his correspondence, Rossi’s ideas on European federalism began to take shape during this period.Footnote 47 At this stage, he was deeply influenced by the internationalist vision of the Italian Risorgimento, particularly the ideas of Carlo Cattaneo on the federation of peoples, of which his friend and historian Gaetano Salvemini was the most prominent interpreter on the left.Footnote 48 Cattaneo had explicitly called for the establishment of the “United States of Europe” in the context of the 1848 revolutionary period.Footnote 49 Although Rossi eventually renounced Cattaneo’s intra-national federalism, where municipalities and regions were granted large political autonomy, he maintained the same commitment to republican values and civic activism.Footnote 50
In April 1937, in a letter to his mother, Rossi asked for Nello Rosselli to send him some books on the United States of Europe. Rossi wanted to study the subject and needed reference material. In a following letter, he sent to his mother an outline of his research program on the problems of European federalism. This document represents the earliest known expression of the ideas that would later take shape in the Ventotene Manifesto.Footnote 51 Rossi thought that a supranational government in charge of its own independent military forces would discourage despotic regimes from aggression. Only in a stabilized international environment would domestic reforms be feasible, allowing a move towards socialist transformation. Therefore continental unity should take priority over other national problems: federalism must be enforced as soon as the right contingencies occurred.
Adopting Machiavelli’s vocabulary, Rossi mentioned the American Revolution and Italian Unification as practical historical examples where the meeting between “fortune” (an exceptionally favorable moment) and “virtue” (of an enlightened minority) culminated in successful political change. Such transformation, he argued, required clarity of purpose and the will to act at the right moment. From GL, Rossi inherited a political ethic that combined theory and action. Revolutionary thought only mattered when it was made operative in the world.Footnote 52 This principle blended seamlessly with Giuseppe Mazzini’s moral teaching and the Jacobin tradition. Mazzini, the “high priest” of the Italian Risorgimento in the mid-nineteenth century, exalted the fusion of moral conviction and revolutionary will as the driving force of historical transformation.Footnote 53 Both “Mazzinianism” and Jacobinism thus recognized the enlightened minority as the engine of historical change. Filtered through the experience of GL in the 1930s, these traditions helped shape Rossi’s political imagination.Footnote 54
The priority of European unification over questions of socialist or democratic politics was the central premise of Rossi’s early federalist reflections. This emphasis would become the core insight of the Ventotene Manifesto, setting it apart from other revolutionary programs developed during the war. As we have seen, the European federalist tradition had been advocated in GL circles as early as 1932–5. The outbreak of the Second World War intensified a rethinking of international politics that was already underway. Rossi’s letters underscore the continuity between interwar Europeanism and its wartime rearticulation, but they also point forward to the conceptual breakthroughs that would take shape on Ventotene.Footnote 55 It is now time to focus on the Ventotene encounter between Rossi and Spinelli, which crystallized this evolving political vision and gave it definitive form.
Federalism as a post-fascist utopia
In 1940, Rossi would become the initial “vehicle of federalist culture” on Ventotene.Footnote 56 Early discussions of the Europeanist question soon included other fellow confinati, such as the socialist Eugenio Colorni and his German wife, Ursula Hirschmann.Footnote 57 Colorni was a professor of philosophy who had collaborated with GL in Milan and Turin before joining the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). He was arrested as a Jew and a committed antifascist and deported to Ventotene in 1938. After his release in 1943, he participated in the founding of the clandestine European Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Europeo, MFE) with Rossi and Spinelli. The following year, he published a revised edition of the manifesto, to which he added an important introduction, which I discuss below. Serving as a bridge between GL and the PSI, Colorni embodied the cross-party spirit of liberal socialists that shaped the early federalist movement during the Resistance. His assassination by the Fascist police in 1944 undermined the development of a strong federalist current in the PSI after the war.Footnote 58
Rossi and Spinelli borrowed their initial federalist framework from Luigi Einaudi, a liberal economist and antifascist. In a series of articles collected in Lettere Politiche di Junius (1920), Einaudi criticized the League of Nations as a fragile construct, which failed even to dent the absolute sovereignty of nation-states. Taking inspiration from the Federalist Papers, he argued that without a supranational authority, international relations would remain unstable.Footnote 59 In 1939, Rossi received a copy of the volume directly from the author. Einaudi’s central argument, namely that lasting peace depended on the creation of a solid international state, would later reappear in the manifesto.Footnote 60 Einaudi also introduced the Ventotene group to more recent federalist literature, especially the works of the British Federal Union (FU), founded in 1938. Although Rossi and Spinelli read only a handful of FU publications before 1941, their critique of national sovereignty helped shape their thinking.Footnote 61 Books such as Lionel Robbins’s The Economic Causes of War attributed responsibility for imperialist conflicts to the anarchic international system, thus challenging Marxist–Leninist explanations, which focused instead on capitalism. The proposed remedy was a rules-based order backed by supranational institutions.Footnote 62
Despite their later claims, Rossi and Spinelli seem to have only partially absorbed FU’s internationalism, which in the manifesto was combined with a critique of capitalist imperialism that echoed Lenin and Luxemburg’s themes. The result was an uneasy synthesis of liberal and Marxist conceptualizations. In section I, “The crisis of modern civilization,” Spinelli argued that modern European nation-states operated in restless pursuit of their Lebensraum. Totalitarianism and imperialism were expressions of this dynamic, which, he wrote, “led to the desire of each [nation] to dominate the others and to consider as its own ‘living space’ increasingly vast territories, deemed necessary to … secure its means of existence without depending on anyone.” In this vision, the European states were not necessarily hostage to financial oligarchies. On the contrary, imperialist wars were strategies of state survival. Earlier in the text, however, Spinelli had suggested something different. He described capitalist imperialism as having “expanded to the point of forming totalitarian states.”Footnote 63 Left unchecked, the dominance of financial and industrial monopolies could tip regimes toward militarism and aggression abroad. This followed a Marxist–Leninist logic that challenged Lionel Robbins’s liberal economic explanation by assigning primary responsibility to the capitalist class. The liberal internationalism of the FU and Lenin’s critique of imperialism pulled in opposing directions, leaving the manifesto suspended between conflicting frameworks. What this tension ultimately demonstrates is that Spinelli had not yet broken with the revolutionary tradition that shaped his early politics.
For all its internal contradictions, the manifesto advanced an original brand of internationalism that left no space for domestic concerns. Central to this vision was a rejection of the idea that only autocracies adopted aggressive foreign policies. In the context of international lawlessness, democratic and socialist governments also needed to compete with other states for power, prestige, and resources, thus generating grievances and disputes.Footnote 64 Consequently, a stable system of international cooperation could not exist even among the most progressive regimes. The manifesto exposed the limitations of contemporary internationalism, which could not stand without a strong federal government “with well-defined and real powers” to dominate and conciliate its members.Footnote 65 This critique was clarified by Eugenio Colorni in his 1944 introduction to the manifesto. According to Colorni, socialist and liberal parties considered international solidarity a “necessary and almost automatic consequence” of achieving their domestic goals. This approach, however, had weak foundations, because even democratic and socialist states would be unwilling to cooperate peacefully if driven by egoistic economic considerations and chauvinistic impulses.Footnote 66
Colorni believed that all political problems should now be addressed from a “new visual angle.” Domestic issues resulted from international frictions, not the other way around. Therefore change had to begin at the supranational level. Democratic and socialist internationalism needed a stronger cosmopolitan orientation, which could take into account the shared destiny of all humanity.Footnote 67 “The essential contradiction,” Rossi and Spinelli wrote in the manifesto, was “the existence of sovereign states” operating in a situation of bellum omnium contra omnes with each other.Footnote 68 The creation of a federalist state should be recognized as the precondition for any meaningful project of social emancipation or political liberation, the dividing line between progressive and conservative politics. Federalism now served as the litmus test, displacing older criteria rooted in class struggle or national liberation.Footnote 69 This was the manifesto’s real breakthrough. Building on Rossi’s insights from 1937, it crystallized federalism as a coherent doctrine rather than a subsidiary element of a broader political vision.
The distinctive federalist internationalism of the Ventotene Manifesto stands out most clearly when compared to other left-wing programs of the time. Even before 1917, Leon Trotsky had argued that the unification of Europe could advance the cause of socialism, especially as a driver of economic integration.Footnote 70 After the failed revolutionary wave of 1917–23, Trotsky even succeeded in persuading the Comintern to briefly adopt the slogan of the “United Socialist States of Europe.”Footnote 71 But, for Trotsky, the creation of a European federation was secondary to the advent of socialism, whereas for the Ventotene group the federalist revolution was the conditio sine qua non for constructing a new economic order. For the authors of the manifesto, this did not imply giving up the socialist character of the European revolution. In section III of the text, focused on the reform of society, Rossi made the point explicitly: the new European federation “must be socialist,” resting on “the emancipation of the working classes and the realization of more humane living conditions for them.”Footnote 72 What distinguished Rossi and Spinelli’s vision from Trotsky’s was the precedence they accorded to federalism above all other political objectives.Footnote 73 In this regard, the manifesto’s silence on earlier Europeanist texts reflects a deliberate effort to distance itself from traditions that treated European unity as secondary to socialist or democratic revolution.
In the immediate context of the Second World War, other left-wing antifascist movements also turned to the political manifesto to articulate their visions for postwar renewal. Between 1941 and 1945, groups such as GL, the Italian Socialist Party in exile, the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, Combat, Libérer et fédérer, and the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) adopted the form to assert continuity with earlier revolutionary traditions.Footnote 74 Notably, all called for some form of European integration. Political manifestos flourished as a way of invoking a break with the prevailing order, leading to what I call a veritable “manifesto moment.”Footnote 75 While part of this broader revolutionary wave, the Ventotene Manifesto had a different and specific quality. Other wartime manifestos sought to balance domestic priorities with international aspirations.Footnote 76 Rossi and Spinelli, in contrast, used the form to impose a singular strategic vision of federalism. The political manifesto as a literary genre suggests a shared sensibility, highlighting the subversive character of a large part of the antifascist resistance.Footnote 77 But the revolutionary federalism of the Ventotene Manifesto stood out as a more unusual voice on the antifascist left.
Rossi and Spinelli’s leftism was idiosyncratic in many respects. In section III of the manifesto, Rossi stressed the role of direct state intervention in correcting market distortions. He identified four strategies for breaking up monopolistic power: nationalizing major oligopolies (electricity, steel, mining, and banking), supporting cooperatives, introducing worker share ownership, and carrying out agrarian reform.Footnote 78 These changes aimed at vast but still partial public control within a mixed economy: “the correct socialist solution was to determine the sector that needed to be socialized and the reasons for it, rather than planning everything.”Footnote 79 Market mechanisms were not rejected but subject to regulation. The challenge, as Rossi and Spinelli saw it, was to have an economic system capable of integrating elements of state control without sacrificing individual liberty. This would have entailed an initial series of drastic reforms and public expropriations to counterbalance the malpractices inherited from Fascism, while leaving space for private enterprise. In the liberal–socialist tradition of GL, the goal was not the domination of a particular class, but the emancipation of individuals from material dependence and subordination.
Beyond its social and economic vision, the essence of the manifesto’s revolutionary federalism resided in its political strategy, namely, as I already noted, its “Jacobin utopianism.” Federalists were called upon to form a revolutionary cell capable of “guiding progressive forces through all the popular organs which grow spontaneously.” Their role was not to wait for popular sanction, but to take the initiative in seizing and exercising power.Footnote 80 The suspension of democratic norms was framed as a temporary but necessary measure, justified by the urgency of breaking any continuity with the fascist state.Footnote 81
In the manifesto, Spinelli’s Leninist outlook is reinterpreted through its encounter with Rossi’s Jacobinism. Rossi argued that at the origin of any society, it is always a minority that first embraces the ideals of a new civilization. He called these individuals “Jacobins,” regardless of the historical context in which they operated or their ideological orientation. The Jacobins must establish a new political order—if necessary, by force. Rossi would later write that, in a revolutionary crisis, violence is not merely a tool of repression, but an instrument for forging a new civic consciousness.Footnote 82 This radicalism drew on the legacy of thinkers such as Machiavelli and Carlo Cattaneo. In a letter sent from prison in 1931 to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, Antonio Gramsci described Machiavelli and Cattaneo as the first and second Italian Jacobins.Footnote 83 In that lineage, I would propose Rossi as the third Italian Jacobin, in his words, a “giacobinissimo giacobino,” an arch-Jacobin. His political vision constituted a continuation of this Jacobin brand of revolutionary republicanism.
In 1943, Spinelli would theorize the vanguard party as the modern embodiment of Machiavelli’s Prince: its task would be to seize control of the state and govern the masses according to specific civilizational values. For Spinelli, only those capable of exercising command could be expected to determine the direction of history, and they should not be bothered with democratic procedures while creating the new polity.Footnote 84 By prioritizing the question of power over other democratic concerns, Spinelli arrived at conclusions similar to those expressed by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, particularly the belief that a conscious political organization is indispensable for changing the status quo. According to Spinelli, the revolutionary party needed to define the ethical and cultural values with which it would confront the existing hegemonic order. If it succeeded in rallying “all the necessary forces” within the working class and its allies around a new civilizational project, it would succeed.Footnote 85 Beneath these affinities, however, lay a fundamental divergence. Writing at the height of Fascist popular consent between 1929 and the mid-1930s, Gramsci envisioned a long battle for cultural hegemony. He used the metaphor of the “war of position” to describe a struggle that ought to be waged first across civil society.Footnote 86 Spinelli, on the other hand, wanted immediate action vis-à-vis civilizational collapse. His language was more openly hostile towards the liberal democratic tradition of Italian politics that Gramsci sought to undermine from within.
Rossi and Spinelli’s elitism ultimately rested on a pessimistic view of human nature, a negative anthropology shaped by the catastrophic events in the European Civil War.Footnote 87 The failure of the democratic forces to face the totalitarian threat prompted a harsh critique of socialist and liberal progressivism and the positive view they attributed to the role of the masses in political life. Here, Machiavelli was once again Rossi and Spinelli’s master. The lesson of The Prince was that “men are … so dominated by immediate needs, that a skillful deceiver always finds plenty of people who will let themselves be deceived.”Footnote 88 In the context of interwar politics, Mussolini and Hitler played the role of deceivers not only for the upper and middle strata of European society, but also for substantial parts of the working class. For Rossi and Spinelli, this shattered the socialist myth that the proletariat was inherently antagonistic to bourgeois society. A revolutionary group could not rely on the spontaneous action of workers but should guide the burgeoning movement in the direction it desired.
In the manifesto, a Machiavellian, pessimistic view of human nature is combined with the interwar discourse on Europe’s cultural decline. Authors like Ortega y Gasset and Johan Huizinga were influential on GL. This “culture of crisis,” which emerged as a reaction against the rise of mass society, expressed a desire to reconstitute political life on distinctly “spiritual” grounds.Footnote 89 Totalitarian regimes appeared as manifestations of the irrational forces unleashed by large-scale popular engagement. As Rossi wrote to Salvemini, “Fascism, and even more Nazism, were two typical mass regimes” that manipulated the masses by appealing to emotions rather than public interest.Footnote 90 Their success crushed individual rights and promoted unreason in culture, and, consequently, authoritarianism in politics. Rossi and Spinelli absorbed Gasset and Huizinga’s insights on cultural elitism but emphasized their immediate political implications. This reinforced their skepticism about the role of popular participation in the genesis of new political orders.
The realization that the modern, popular mass-state was incapable of guaranteeing peace was seen as a symptom of a deeper civilizational decline. Julien Benda struck a similar note in his 1933 Discours à la nation européenne, calling for a Europe grounded in rediscovered common spiritual and intellectual values.Footnote 91 Other coeval Europeanist texts by thinkers such as Heinrich Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre were ensnared in the same cultural and existential malaise.Footnote 92 Although they shared the fears and anxieties of their peers, Rossi and Spinelli’s language was much more attuned to the upheaval of war than to detached intellectual speculation. The rhetorical force of the manifesto rested on a subversive vocabulary forged over years of antifascist struggle. As I see it, the Ventotene Manifesto was to 1941–3 what the Communist Manifesto was to 1848: a call for revolution by any and all means.
A central objective of the Ventotene Manifesto was the establishment of a “new genuine democracy” within a socialist federal Europe. However, its “Jacobin utopianism” did not resolve the impasse between the achievement of a functioning democracy and the unruliness of the masses. In the third section of the manifesto, Rossi and Spinelli argued that a federalist revolutionary dictatorship would not become permanent unless a “servile society” emerged. It would be the party’s role to ensure that all citizens could participate in political life, thereby cultivating individual freedom. Over time, as new civic habits took hold, society would evolve, increasing its commitment to the new federal order, and the dictatorship would wither away.Footnote 93 However, the manifesto did not indicate at what point the revolutionaries would need to relinquish power. Rossi later acknowledged this blind spot: the duration of the dictatorship “and the manner of its cessation,” he wrote, “can only be judged by the party itself.”Footnote 94 Even in 1941, this conditional approach to democracy raised doubts. Several members of GL in Ventotene, such as Riccardo Bauer, Vincenzo Calace, Francesco Fancello, and Nello Traquandi, rejected the manifesto on these grounds and broke with the federalists.Footnote 95
Additionally, the revolutionary dictatorship, as Lenin had stated, would be a means of using the state machinery against a section of society. Against the bourgeoisie, in Lenin’s case, and, in the case of the manifesto, against those who resisted federalism.Footnote 96 Though the opening line of the manifesto strikes a Kantian note—“man must not be a mere instrument of others but an autonomous center of life”—this principle is disregarded in the context of revolutionary upheaval.Footnote 97 One could imagine there would be great opposition to the new Europe, especially in the early phases of the transition from the old regime. Rossi and Spinelli regarded coercion, even when exercised violently, as necessary for shaping the human personality, which in their view was not innate but shaped by external experience.Footnote 98 To build their state, federalists would also need to create the new democratic man. The implications of this political reeducation were left to the discretion of the revolutionary elite and go unspecified in the manifesto. Spinelli would later write that man is both the means and the end of any political project.Footnote 99 In the manifesto, one gets the sense that the Kantian ideal of moral autonomy has been stretched to accommodate the demands of the authors’ utopian vision.
Rossi and Spinelli were in fact expanding the concept of dictatorship inherited from the radical theorists of the Italian Risorgimento. The “Risorgimento dictatorship” was a solution conceived essentially for the political–military confrontation in the fight for independence. It did not extend to the imposition of new values. In Mazzini’s view, for example, a provisional authority should yield to a freely elected assembly after defeating its opponent.Footnote 100 By contrast, Rossi and Spinelli’s “legislators of the future” must strive to impose their new civilizational ideals. What’s more, for Spinelli, these principles couldn’t be logically demonstrated: they “are a prius with respect to rational conduct, as in mathematics the axioms are a prius with respect to theorems.” The ruling class could only posit these values with an act of will and bestow them on the rest of the population.Footnote 101
Finally, doubts about the democratic nature of the system proposed by Rossi and Spinelli are justified by their reliance on the works of the “Italian school” of elite theory, particularly Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, which they rediscovered in Ventotene. Mosca argued that every society, no matter how egalitarian in aspiration, inevitably produces a ruling class. An oligarchy, he believed, does not disappear over time but adapts to the changing social and political circumstances. It fulfils the functions of leadership, which are essential for the functioning of any complex society. Its existence is necessary, and it will not relinquish its position willingly.Footnote 102 For Rossi and Spinelli, this was more than a theoretical insight. If the presence of an elite was inevitable, then the only alternative was to take on its role and guide Europe toward a just and “democratic” federation.
The theories of Mosca and Pareto reinforced Rossi and Spinelli’s ultrarealism in matters of power, “the cynical path of seeing things as they really are.”Footnote 103 This cold-eyed vision was a constitutive element of their “Jacobin utopianism.” The manifesto is marked by a profound disenchantment with democratic idealism, against which a pragmatic acceptance of political hierarchy is presented as necessary to achieve the higher goal of European federalism. What this elite-oriented approach overlooked was the danger of a permanently entrenched ruling class. The lack of directions regarding the power transfer from the revolutionary vanguard to the new democratic institutions created a gap for arbitrary interpretations. Rossi and Spinelli did not provide clarity on this matter, despite their otherwise strong critique of the Bolsheviks’ authoritarian holding on to power after the 1917 Revolution.Footnote 104
In the Ventotene Manifesto, a democratic project coexisted with an authoritarian political philosophy. This is made evident by Rossi and Spinelli’s continued adherence to their “Jacobin utopianism,” even when events forced them to abandon the idea of a revolutionary vanguard. After Mussolini’s fall in July 1943, the main left parties began to regroup, leaving the Ventotene federalists with little hope of competing on their own. By August, Rossi, Spinelli, and Colorni had joined other antifascists in Milan to found the MFE. In line with their new “federalism as a movement” strategy, they agreed to infiltrate larger parties of the left and push them in a federalist direction.Footnote 105 What did not change from the manifesto to Spinelli’s Political Theses, approved at the Milan congress in August 1943, was the idea that progressive forces must be ready to “impose” a federation of free peoples “at the most immediate and critical juncture.”Footnote 106 At this time, we start to notice a shift in the tone of their message. Relocating to Switzerland, Rossi and Spinelli turned their focus to building a broader network of antifascist federalists. To bring moderate and Christian groups into the fold, they softened the manifesto’s harder edges, crafting a more conciliatory, if still radical, federalist language.
It was only when the prospect of rapid federalist transformation faded after 1945 that Rossi and Spinelli placed the manifesto on the back burner, and for a time withdrew from the MFE. Ironically, it was the younger militants of the movement who later revived the text in opposition to the growing political moderation of its authors.Footnote 107 But the era of radical aspirations was coming to an end; a new political landscape was emerging under the influence of the two superpowers that had won the war. For Rossi and Spinelli, European unification should now be pursued with the backing of the United States and through cautious collaboration with Christian democratic forces, in open defiance of Soviet interests. The Ventotene Manifesto had been the product of exile and crisis, but in the early postwar years it lost political expediency for its own authors—a relic of a recent revolutionary epoch that had reached its end.
Conclusions: Utopia by command
With the Ventotene Manifesto, Rossi and Spinelli sought to carry out a conceptual shift: they recast federalism as a distinct political ideology capable of securing peace in Europe and the world. Their vision was motivated by what I have called a “Jacobin utopianism.” Only resolute political action could bring about a new polity. In the words of the Italian political theorist and liberal socialist Norberto Bobbio, the manifesto laid out a “theory of freedom” that saw European unification as the engine of historical progress.Footnote 108 This progress, however, was inseparable from rupture. It required a decisive break with existing political conditions, carried out by a committed elite even by violent means, if necessary. The revolutionary party would bear the task of imposing new “civilizational values” and of forging a new democratic man for a new democratic society. Rossi and Spinelli addressed the question of political power with absolute intellectual ruthlessness, to the point that their manifesto admitted no higher moral or political standards than those set out by the revolutionary federalist party itself.
The federalism of Ventotene was revolutionary because it drew inspiration from a long tradition of radical thought that flared up once again between 1941 and 1944 and then burned out. Its revolution was federalist because any meaningful change had to occur within the new framework offered by a strong supranational structure. Federal unity would force the European nations out of the state of nature in which they competed like “lawless savages,” and into a juridical state where rights would be secured and justice administered.Footnote 109 In a world torn apart by war, the collapse of existing institutions made radical transformation appear possible to many in the antifascist milieu. This was the brief “manifesto moment,” when rupture was heralded through political manifestos issued across Europe. The logic of Ventotene could only claim coherence in such a climate of instability.
The current prevailing reading of the manifesto downplays its revolutionary character. It softens the text’s radical critique of national sovereignty and capitalism, anachronistically projecting onto it the concerns that shaped postwar Europeanism and the institutional logic of European integration. After the war, the ground shifted. Like many others, Spinelli adjusted to a political climate in which revolutionary ambition gave way to institutional compromise. Today, Europeanism signifies something entirely different and is definitively severed from the utopian rupture imagined at Ventotene, despite recent attempts to reclaim its legacy.Footnote 110 In response to this interpretation, I have advanced a close reading and historical contextualization that recovers the radical language and themes of the manifesto. My interpretation serves as a counterweight to narratives that extract from it a generic Europeanist ideal while ignoring the palingenetic ambitions of Rossi and Spinelli.
Not unlike the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the Ventotene Manifesto was explicitly antidemocratic in method, even if democratic in aspiration. It did not offer a gradualist template for implementing federalism but demanded a radical response to civilizational collapse. Rossi and Spinelli envisioned a socialist federation imposed from above by a revolutionary elite. Their “Jacobin utopianism” prescribed coercion and party hierarchy as essential tools for building the United States of Europe. This lack of alignment between method and aim remains the manifesto’s unresolved paradox. In this sense, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s recent critique of the manifesto as undemocratic is not entirely unjustified, but it misses an essential point.Footnote 111 An elitist conception of politics was integral to both right- and left-wing traditions of European thought, from Mazzini to Lenin, from Pareto to Gramsci. The manifesto definitely belongs in that political lineage. If there is anything worth recovering from Ventotene, it is its ethical imperative to confront present problems with unflinching realism, rather than by clinging to the rhetoric or revolutionary aspirations of a world that no longer exists. Today, that same imperative calls for more democracy than the European Union currently fosters or even allows.Footnote 112
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dina Gusejnova, Piers Ludlow, Fernanda Gallo, Martin Conway, and Gianna Pomata for their very helpful advice and comments at various stages in the gestation of this piece. I am very grateful to Catherine Dewar for her invaluable support and unremitting dedication to improving my English. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful criticism, which has helped me a great deal in giving this article its final form. Finally, many thanks to Tracie Matysik, who kindly guided me throughout the revising process.
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