The article examines the 1941 Ventotene Manifesto, one of the most celebrated—yet widely misunderstood—documents in the history of federalist Europeanism. Written by Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli while confined on the island of Ventotene for antifascist activity, the text diagnosed Europe’s collapse as the consequence of sovereign nation-states operating in an anarchic international order and called for the creation of a supranational government imposed by a revolutionary elite. This article situates the manifesto within interwar and wartime socialist, liberal–socialist, and antifascist debates, showing how Rossi and Spinelli elevated federalism as the primary criterion of political progress, displacing class struggle and national liberation. I argue that the manifesto’s revolutionary aims have been obscured by postwar narratives of European integration, which retrospectively recast it as a program for the gradual development of what became the present-day EU. Rather than being a blueprint for incremental unification, the manifesto advocated for a revolutionary federalism that fused socialism with a Jacobin conception of political power. This study challenges teleological readings of Europeanism, offering a historicist account of wartime federalist ideas as shaped by crisis, exile, and revolutionary expectations.
Edoardo Vaccari (Thu,) studied this question.