A leap forward towards EU unity

A group of Catholic and lay intellectuals called together by a small association with an evocative name (Nuova Camaldoli) meet in the Arezzo monastery to discuss a community document that intends to lay the foundations for a new Europe.

In a very critical phase for the Old Continent, in which the unfinished project of a united Europe, as envisioned by De Gasperi, Schuman and Adenauer, risks collapsing weakened by endogenous nationalistic drives and the neo-imperialisms that have fuelled them, 115 authors jointly outline 'A Code for a New Europe' to speed up the process for the constitution of a true European Federation. "Only by accelerating the process of unification on a federal basis," they state, "will it be possible to overcome the current crisis of consensus and credibility of the European institutions", and take a decisive step towards a Europe "capable of speaking with one voice" and "promoting peace".

The 115 scholars hope for the rapid birth of a European federation among those states that, while remaining within the Union, will first decide to share a significant part of their sovereignty - immediately abandoning the constraint of unanimous decisions - starting with foreign and defence policy, passing through fiscal policy. Initially, it could be three or four countries that give this impulse, perhaps the historical founders themselves (Italy, France, Germany and others who feel this urgency), to extend later to all those who share the same need, up to those who, driven by the aggressiveness of a Russia, hear the sounds of tracks at their doorstep.

It is not only the EU countries that are now at a decisive crossroads in their own history, but the entire European continent. Including those Nordic countries that have hitherto floated on islands of regal neutrality.

The disastrous experience of two world wars should serve as a warning to elevate peace, democracy, justice and freedom to fundamental and founding goods of any human community and to reject all forms of totalitarian regimes that necessarily have to annul these goods in order to exist. Therefore, write the authors of the Code, either we take the path of a more convinced and profound cultural, social, political and economic integration - including the pooling of sovereign debts, as Mario Draghi suggests, and a decompression of wages - or Europe is condemned to a rapid decline. Either it acts united, building institutions that enable it to operate as if it were a single state, or it leaves the field open to resurgent nationalisms, xenophobic populisms and those forces that feed fear, divisions and conflicts, with the risk of a disintegration of its social, civil and democratic fabric.