A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI, #212 - The sunset of Ventotene (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

On August 30, Icelanders rejected, with a 52.8% "no" vote to 47.2% 
"yes," the proposal to reopen talks with Brussels, frozen since 2013, on 
the country's full EU membership. This demonstrates that the Union 
remains attractive to poor countries that would benefit from community 
resources, rather than being net contributors like Italy . And how can 
one not understand Iceland's fears, when the political class that 
governs the Union is composed of Ursula von der Stupid and Kaja Kretina 
Kallas, supported by a Beagle Boys crew of Baltic politicians who have 
occupied the most important positions?
What is striking is not their nationality or their Russophobia, but the 
abject quality of their political skills and the high levels of their 
servile commitment to their US masters, who have managed and financed 
their political careers. It's worth remembering that all these people 
are part of the acquisition campaign developed by the US establishment 
and managed by Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defense, and 
Colonel Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, on the sidelines of 
the "Information Operations Roadmap," a psychological operation ( PsyOp 
) aimed at influencing public opinion in "allied" countries and which 
led, among other things, to building the political careers of both 
Stoltenberg and Rutte, future NATO secretaries. This acquisition 
campaign is now yielding the expected results.
The investment included aspiring politicians, journalists, and political 
analysts, as well as self-styled political scientists, managers or 
analysts of lavishly funded political research institutes, both from the 
European Union and their US masters. These institutes are now acting as 
unequivocal supporters of the war against Ukraine, justifying Israel's 
crimes and the Palestinian genocide. The acquisition campaign did not 
spare financial analysts, entrepreneurs, economists, rating agency 
employees, high-ranking bureaucrats, and various members of the 
establishment, especially European ones, weaving a network dependent not 
only on the US think tanks that guide the country's foreign policy, but 
also at the service of the Jewish lobbies of the Mossad.
Today, the United States is reaping the benefits of this "political 
investment," and the Union's policies, and especially its progressive 
enlargements, are being managed by this handful of sycophants. The Union 
appears to be pursuing the sole goal of enlargement, rather than 
pursuing internal cohesion and the amalgamation of its member states' 
legal systems. This is demonstrated by the fact that Montenegro and 
Albania appear destined to join, while Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine 
remain on hold. These are all countries that would benefit economically 
from joining the European Union, to the detriment of those currently in 
the Union, and which constitute no economic or political advantage for 
the Union as a whole. After decades of waiting, Turkey remains at a 
distance, currently far from interested because it is projected toward 
an autonomous role as a global power and capable of projecting its 
influence from the Caucasus to Africa and the Middle East. Serbia, North 
Macedonia, and Bosnia, in its various branches, are far behind, while 
Kosovo remains excluded due to vetoes from many countries due to its 
legal status as a territory, not a state. The operation is being managed 
by Marta Kos, Commissioner for Enlargement, a former Slovenian swimming 
champion, a diplomat, and a full member of the "brood." On the other 
hand, the enlargement of the Union has so far been managed and has 
occurred at the urging of NATO, which has used membership as a Trojan 
horse to facilitate its expansion and push closer to Russia's borders, 
fueling the heterogeneity of its composition and undermining its cohesion.
Today, Iceland's decision is not particularly surprising, as the country 
is already part of the single market and the Schengen area. However, it 
is evidently not concerned about its strategic position on the Arctic 
route, a short distance from coveted Greenland. Instead, it expects to 
benefit from the opening of the Arctic route and make its ports central, 
while maintaining equidistance.

Limits and manipulations of the European Union project

The project of creating a European political entity was conceived, as is 
well known, in Ventotene and found followers among those European 
politicians and intellectuals who had been swept away by Europe's 
fratricidal wars. They supported the project and worked to realize it. 
The document correctly analyzed the consequences of the rise of Fascism 
and Nazism in Europe, the triumph of nationalism, and criticized 
militarism and war, acknowledging that the conflict would defeat 
colonialism and lead to the loss of the empire for England and France. 
The last colonial remnants of Spain and Portugal would collapse under 
popular pressure.
In the view of the manifesto's drafters, this created the conditions for 
the peoples of Europe, submerged in the rubble of war and exhausted by 
mutual massacres, to realize their interest in living in peace. Starting 
from this need, and leveraging common interests rather than ideals, they 
would create collaborative structures that paved the way for the 
construction of a united and federal Europe. This led to the 1951 Treaty 
of Paris and the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community 
(ECSC), the first international organization of a supranational nature, 
which initiated the process of European integration, followed by the 
agreement on a common agricultural policy. Hence the Treaty of Rome of 
1957 and the one on the common agricultural policy of 1962.
It was still a small initial nucleus of Western European countries and 
the scope of action was developed only in the west of the continent, not 
only failing to involve Eastern Europe, but above all excluding from the 
project the territories up to the Urals and beyond, due to the "cold 
war" and not realising, or at least taking note that by doing so the 
possibilities of a future conflict were only partially removed, because 
one of the main actors of the eternal intra-European conflict, Russia, 
then in the institutional political form of the USSR, remained outside 
the aggregation and was indeed considered an enemy.[1]
But it was a time of great hopes and it was hoped that sooner or later 
the conditions would be created to open a dialogue with the rest of 
Europe: while waiting for better times the Union absorbed the countries 
of Western Europe. The ECSC continued to evolve and, after having 
defeated the competition of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), 
established by England to counter the continental countries, it 
proceeded with successive enlargements until it incorporated almost all 
the various Western European states that were part of it. Then, after 
1991 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it implemented further 
enlargements that led the now European Union to incorporate the 
successor states of the former socialist republics of Eastern Europe, up 
to the margins of Russia.
A Russia reborn from the ashes of the USSR and separated from the Union 
by two buffer states: Belarus and Ukraine.
This occurred after the European Union, under German leadership and 
hegemony, had eliminated the competition posed by the former Yugoslavia, 
a potential alternative hub for the Balkan countries, promoting and 
unleashing an ethnic conflict that dissolved the Yugoslavian entity and 
led to the fragmentation of that nation to allow its gradual absorption 
into the European Union, which has not yet been concluded.[2]
Driving the process of European aggregation was the hegemony exercised 
by Franco-Rhine capitalism, which had adopted the theories of ordo 
capitalism, a socioeconomic model in which the state actively intervenes 
to define the rules of the market, rather than leaving it to 
self-regulate, creating the legal and institutional framework to 
guarantee competition, prevent monopolies and ensure monetary stability.
Thus, a regulatory public intervention was developed, differentiating 
this model from the planned economies typical of the Soviet five-year 
plans, which maintained private property and entrepreneurial initiative 
at the center. This model was well-suited to Catholic-inspired 
corporatism, the principle of cooperation, and theorizing state 
intervention to regulate key sectors of the economy to create a welfare 
system that was supposed to provide an alternative to the working 
class's need for economic participation. Thus, society's economic and 
financial order remained within the capitalist sphere, associated with 
exploitative dynamics, and subservient to technocratic and 
market-sovereign tendencies. This evolution and development of 
productive forces differentiated European capitalism from American 
capitalism.
In the late 1970s, after having brought about the economic rebirth of 
Italy and Germany, and indeed other Western European countries as well, 
and enabled the Franco-Rhine economic, industrial, and financial axis to 
assume leadership of European affairs and shape its policies, the 
European productive system witnessed the development of broad and 
radical social movements aimed at improving the living and working 
conditions of the population and achieving greater legal protection and 
civil rights. By the late 1980s, the cycle of workers' struggles was 
defeated, and the economic model was bent by the United States to 
maximize its efforts to win the Cold War, resulting in the collapse of 
the USSR.
The US victory was presented as the end of history, and from then on, a 
profound transformation of the model began, considered too competitive 
by the US imperial power. Initially, it attempted to bring about 
structural changes that would distort, in a liberal sense, the socialist 
elements present within Western European economic systems. These systems 
included a strong emphasis on welfare, partly a consequence of the 
institutional and structural implications of workers' struggles, which 
had led to improved living and working conditions for European peoples 
and the expansion of rights.
This marked the beginning of a deepening of the liberal nature of the 
economic and financial system, characterized by the increasingly marked 
dismantling of public participation in the economy and of the state's 
leadership role in directing economic policies and developing long-term 
planning choices. For Italy, this was the era of the dismantling of 
state-owned companies and the privatization of electricity management 
(it is no coincidence that public management of energy was one of the 
positive characteristics highlighted in the Ventotene Manifesto). Mario 
Draghi, a former official at the Bank of Italy but also with ties to 
Goldman Sachs, and a wife-heir to the Cappello family, the cream of 
Italian finance, rented the yacht Britannia to create a suitable 
environment for auctioning off the state's stakes in Italian industry, 
laying the foundation for the "merit" that would later lead him to head 
the ECB.
Globalization and the decentralization of production, seen as 
capitalism's response to rising wages driven by social struggles that 
led to significant improvements in living and working conditions and the 
growth of rights, continued to produce profound transformations of the 
model in an increasingly laissez-faire and liberal direction, to the 
point of gradually dismantling all the social, economic, and freedom 
gains that had been achieved.

The Left's Responsibilities in the Degeneration of the European Economic 
Model

The collapse of the USSR eliminated the element of comparison and 
competition that had until then driven Western European capitalism to 
ensure widespread forms of welfare, in order to withstand comparison and 
competition with the Soviet model. At the same time, it opened the vast 
territories of the East to Western investment, offering a skilled and 
educated workforce, along with the availability of enormous untapped 
resources, enabling the migration of populations to the West. This 
allowed the labor market to be demolished through the introduction of a 
huge industrial reserve army, which initially depressed wages, causing 
stagnation, and then lowered them thanks to rising inflation and the 
progressive loss of purchasing power. It constituted an initial response 
to the emerging demographic crisis of European states, driven by 
relative prosperity and increasing wage restrictions.
This shift in the economic structural foundations created the conditions 
for a transformation of political balances as well, and a progressive 
and growing regression of left-wing political forces began. This 
regression has not yet stopped, threatening to overwhelm the remaining 
forms of parliamentary democracy and is at the root of the return of the 
right and fascism in Europe.
Left-wing political formations, devoid of ideological references, 
ignorant of their historical memory, forgetful of the categories of 
economic and political analysis, lacking ideas, proposals, planning, and 
programs, have become aligned with the policies of the so-called 
"progressive" American left, which focuses on the protection of civil rights
rather than prioritizing economic and social rights (although a profound 
reflection currently appears to be underway, accompanied by a shift due 
to the growth of the socialist component within and outside the US 
Democratic Party).
Also driven by the political trends just noted, the European Union, 
initially taking responsibility for the deterioration of global climate 
conditions, and under the pressure of environmental movements, adopted 
the Green Deal policy , aiming to achieve climate neutrality and protect 
natural resources
through common regulations and strategic plans. Implementing this policy 
would have required enormous capital investment and planning capacity, 
which were lacking, both in terms of the scale of investment and the 
inability to foresee the profound economic repercussions such a 
transformation would have on the productive, financial, and industrial 
fabric of the European region and to adopt appropriate measures to 
address them.
On the other hand, the US empire, in crisis and now living off debt, 
having dismantled its productive fabric, needed the savings accumulated 
by the European populations to drain and use for its own purposes, 
financing its debt. Hence the decision to plunder Western Europe, which 
it considered a protectorate.
This has accentuated intra-capitalist competition between different 
regions of the planet, and US imperial power has been cornered by 
China's rise as a geopolitical power on the global market and by the 
increasingly effective attempts of many peoples around the world to free 
themselves from domination and exploitation. Thus, the BRICS were born, with
all that this entails, and the countries on the margins of the empire 
are gradually becoming more and more autonomous, increasingly limiting 
the ability to project US military power. The imperial power's control 
of the seas is being challenged, beginning with the control of the 
Straits, and we are witnessing the emergence of regional powers and 
regional alliances aimed at building an increasingly multipolar world. 
The tariff policy implemented by the United States to further squeeze 
the various countries under its protectorate and finance their deficits 
appears to be in dire straits.
This unprecedented attack has been waged through the two ongoing wars: 
that of Ukraine and that in the Middle East, whose causes and effects 
are complex and have been analyzed by us on several occasions, to which 
we refer. What is worth noting here is that the attack on the European 
Union definitively undermines the ordo-liberal economic management of 
the economic and political system, which is forced to engage in war and, 
in order to survive, transform its own economy into a war economy, 
dismantling the welfare state that had been built with so much effort 
and with the contribution of workers, dragging the entire planet into a 
possible nuclear war.
In this way, the reasons that led us to favor the idea of a European 
federal state as a tool for preventing and permanently eliminating war, 
at least in Europe, have disappeared.
The European Union, as it is shaping up in this new scenario, is losing 
its raison d'être.
Remaining convinced that peace is a precondition for peoples to find and 
achieve greater social justice and create the conditions for their 
emancipation from exploitation, we are aware that we must undertake a 
profound reflection on the possible means to achieve our goal of peace 
and greater well-being for the peoples of Europe.
The first step is undoubtedly to free ourselves from false myths, such 
as the European Union in its current form, avoiding the trap of 
Westernist rhetoric preached by nostalgic Atlanticist pundits, by the 
remnants and residues of the war against communism, and by false 
readings of history, even when these people hold the highest offices of 
state and embellish their speeches with the defense of freedoms they 
themselves fail to protect, despite their mandate to do so.

[1]The contradiction constituted by the lack of involvement in the 
process of European aggregation was not unknown to the authors of the 
manifesto and is highlighted by Ernesto Rossi in his book (Ernesto 
Rossi, L'Europa di domani. Un progetto per gli Stati Uniti d'Europa 
1944, Introduzione di Nicola Colaianni, 2026). As it could not be 
resolved in the political contingencies of the time if not by promoting 
a dialogue or a partnership conditioned by overcoming the opposition of 
the blocs resulting from the Cold War. When in 1991 these constraints 
seemed to have been removed, the then European community did not know 
how to take advantage of it and preferred to embrace the NATO philosophy 
which in the initial phase of its journey had facilitated its birth, 
introducing a virus, that of incorporation and progressive enlargement 
which would determine the failure of the project.
[2]It should not be forgotten that at the time Yugoslavia was the 
leading country of the non-aligned movement, a highly branched movement 
of countries which placed themselves in an intermediate position between 
the US and Soviet blocs and which undoubtedly constituted a political 
aggregation centre of international importance.

Gianni Cimbalo

https://www.ucadi.org/2026/09/29/il-tramonto-di-ventotene/
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