Europe’s Embattled Progressives

François Valentin and Jorge González-Gallarza | 12th November 2021 | Brussels, Comment, Diplomacy

Europe took a decidedly neoliberal shift thirty years ago, but centre-left moderates still view the union as a beacon of progressivism

It’s the summer of 1941. Italy is conducting a series of territorial annexations in east Africa and the Mediterranean. On one of its smaller islands, Ventotene, a little-known anti-fascist activist is languising in prison. Altiero Spinelli is putting his fantasises about Europe’s post-bellum future to paper. The resulting document, Ventotene Manifesto, would become the blueprint of the European Federalist Movement (EFM) founded two years later. It’s a call for the nations of the Old Continent to forfeit their sovereignty and give way to a European federation under socialist principles. 80 years into the integration project that Spinelli helped spearhead, has the European Union lived up to the expectations of its progressive cheerleaders? One goal, two paths Undoubtedly yes, argued historian Konrad H. Jarausch in the latest episode of Uncommon Decency. Right-wing populists, he argues, view Europe as something of a dirty word, on both sides of the Atlantic. For Jarausch, this is a testam...

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