Altiero Spinelli, Trotskyite, the new ‘father’ of the EU, in 1984

When I was a teenager in England during the 1960s, supporters of Josef Stalin were rare even among the “reddest” of leftists in the Labour Party. Leninists were more common, but the most frequently encountered Reds were supporters of Lev Bronstein, a.k.a. Leon Trotsky. Because Trotsky had been exiled and later murdered by Stalin, he had become the beloved underdog of Communism. The “Trotsky good, Stalin bad” meme was the way the Left maneuvered around the “excesses” of Stalinism — if only Comrade Trotsky had become General Secretary of the Party, what a different place the USSR would have been!

The Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli (1907-1986) was a devotee of Trotsky, and also one of the “fathers” of the European Union. If you’ve never heard of him, you’re not alone — his name rang no bells with me until I read the article below from Poland. And I’ve even been inside the building in downtown Brussels that was named for him; I just wasn’t paying attention.

The following video — also from Poland — provides a useful introduction to the topic of Altiero Spinelli (the translation leaves something to be desired, but it was already subtitled in English, giving me no opportunity to edit it):

Many thanks to Ava Lon for recommending the video and translating this article from Tygodnik TVP, a weekly magazine produced by the state-sponsored Polish TV channel:

A “masked” plan for Europe?

by Krzysztof Zwolinski
October 5, 2018

The White Book of the European Future doesn’t mention Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi, Jean Monet or Konrad Adenauer any longer. It transpires that the ideological father of the European Community is a little-known Trotskyite postulating the destruction of nation states and of private property. Is it his radical plan that is now being put into practice by Eurocrats?

“Fog in the Channel — Continent Cut Off” was allegedly the title of a Times article in 1930. Whether fact or urban legend, it doesn’t matter, because it perfectly expresses the famous British “splendid isolation”. This aspect isn’t mentioned as one of the reasons for Brexit, but who knows? The mentality of nations reinforced for generations might have more influence than was ever suspected by accounting experts.

But why would this ‘isolation’ awaken again? Perhaps, even at the last moment, the very nation that not long ago ruled over half the world decided that enough is enough. If, of course, as has become the habit in the EU, the referendum were not to be repeated or rendered void by some new treaty. Obviously the EU is advancing in a precise direction, about which everyone knows everything, and those who don’t know probably only pretend not to know. Everyone meaning the Euro-Mandarins.

The conclusion drawn from World War Two, was that nation states cause wars, and uniting Western European states via close economic cooperation would remove the threat of another one. And where the peace east of the River Elbe was concerned, the Soviet Union would take care of that, in its own way.

Former “fathers” of the European Economic community, the Christian Democratic politicians Alcide de Gasperi (Italy), Konrad Adenauer (German Federal Republic) and Robert Schuman (France) in 1951 in Strasburg.

There were even voices about political integration in the form of a common country, following the example of the United States of America, but the road that was chosen was via a federation of ever-tighter cooperating — on the economic level — sovereign nation states. This is how first the European Coal and Steel Community, and later the European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community were created.

In 2004 Poland joined the European Community, which was commonly known in the press and even in the internal documents as the European Union, even though it acquired this legal status later, after the Lisbon Treaty (2007). Whatever the name, we certainly were accepted into a federation of sovereign European countries.

Time passes, and the citizens of the Republic of Poland, who voted in the referendum for joining the EU, maybe have begun to feel the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Among voices coming from Brussels — besides the usual assurance that we will live in the EU in good health, increasing wealth, and mutual respect, with particular emphasis on respect for minorities — there’s a voice that seems to have reached the forefront concerning the virtue of unity. And it doesn’t look as if the suggested unity would be diverse; rather the opposite.

Sovereignty, yes; but the Union has values that are required to be upheld. Those values are defined by conceptually capacious slogans that are imprecise enough, so that everything may be decided through interpretation. Therefore the interpretative code is of utter importance: Christian Democratic, [classical] Liberal, Social Democratic, or maybe some other.

The European revolution must be socialist, which means that its goal has to be the liberation of the working class

Above the main entrance to the building of the European Parliament in Brussels there’s a large inscription: Altiero Spinelli. It must be the name of someone, who had sizeable merits for the European Union, and who is very important for its theory, and perhaps also for its practice. Otherwise there would be no such an inscription in such a place.

The Altiero Spinelli Building in the central part of the European Parliament in Brussels opened in 1998

Altiero Spinelli, as reported by Wikipedia, was born to a family with socialist traditions, which means that he was weaned on Marxism. At the age of 17 he joined Italian Communist Party, which kicked him out for his “Trotskyite distortion”.

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