historical conditions belongs not to history , but to prehistory : it is an antecedent that can easily be taken for granted .”
Federalism , Reform of Society and the Movement for Free and United Europe
The federalist theory was discovered by Spinelli in his discussions with Rossi about the crisis of the League of Nations , the weakness of which had already been criticised in a series of articles published in 1919 in the Corriere della Sera signed by a mysterious Junius - the pseudonym of the economist and future President of the Italian Republic Luigi Einaudi - then collected in a volume published by Laterza which attracted the attention of the two internees . Prompted by Rossi as a fellow economics professor , Einaudi sent them some books on English federalist theory from the 1930s . Among these books , Spinelli mentions in his autobiography The Economic Causes of War by Lionel Charles Robbins ( 1939 ): in it we find a chapter entitled The United States of Europe , dedicated to the prospect of peace to be achieved by overcoming the conflict between the different European states through the example of the American Federation .
The Manifesto declares the necessary “ definitive abolition of the division of Europe into national , sovereign states ”, to be achieved through a federal reorganisation of the continent , since a balance of independent European states was no longer conceivable after the failure of the League of Nations which “ claimed to guarantee international law without the need of a military force to impose its decisions ”.
If therefore the prospect of a European federation was not original in itself , revolutionary is the theoretical-practical caesura that indicates an unprecedented political watershed : the new “ dividing line between progressive and reactionary parties ” will be that which separates on the one hand those who “ conceive as the
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