years ago , we realise how difficult it was to achieve equality on the European continent , and how fragile those accomplishments , on the whole , might still be . Similarly , if we think that , when Tocqueville extensively praised the US political system in La démocratie en Amérique , slavery still existed in the country and a civil war was about to be fought on this issue , we realise how flimsy some of our conventional democratic narratives may turn out to be .
Where does supranational democracy stand in all this ? The coming of age of many democratic systems in European nation states in the second quarter of the 20th century was also the moment of democracy ’ s greatest challenge to date : the rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism , in opposition to pluralism . In 1940 , Altiero Spinelli and other prison inmates on the island of Ventotene reached a clear diagnosis when drafting the European Federalist Manifesto . They stated that the Second World War was raging at that very moment because of the inability of European nation states to combat totalitarianism 1 . At the same time , they saw totalitarianism as an intrinsic endgame to the ceaseless competition between nation states . As such , they predicted that , if victory over totalitarianism was to mean a return to the previous status quo , new competition between nation states would inevitably lead to totalitarianism again in the future . Whether or not one agrees with the Manifesto ’ s pessimistic vision of the ability of national constituencies to protect their own democratic life , regardless of the way the wind is blowing on the international stage , it is fair today to recognise the appeal of the Manifesto in calling for ideological and material resources to be pooled , to protect democracy through unity . Looking back , the Manifesto ’ s authors – like many other early proponents of a European democracy – reconnected with at least one of the main tenets of the first philosophical concep-
1 . A . Spinelli and E . Rossi , Il Manifesto di Ventotene – The Ventotene Manifesto .
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