Happy birthday, Altiero!

Altiero Spinelli was born on August 31, 1907. His life was marked in an extraordinary way by a rare adherence to the historical events of the past century. In his memories he was aware of this “consonance” between his personal life and the general history he lived both as a spectator and a protagonist.

Ulysses in prison

Spinelli’s youth was marked by political commitment and his imprisonment by the Fascists. In 1924 he started studying law at University and joined the Communist Party in Rome. He started an eventful activity which continued in a clandestine way under the pseudonym of “Ulysses”. He was arrested in Milan and served 16 years and 8 months in various prisons (Lucca, Viterbo and Civitavecchia) and was interned on Ponza and Ventotene islands. His imprisonment was one of the longest among the antifascists, but he would never give up his own ideas and in prison he completed his formation. In the Thirties he gradually abandoned the Communist ideology, also prompted by Stalin’s cynical policy. In 1937 on Ponza Island he definitively left the Communist Party and a period of deep solitude was ahead of him.

In July 1939 he got on Ventotene island where he stayed until August 1943 (from the age of 32 to 36). Those were important years for him. And it was on the Ventotene Island that Spinelli wrote his Manifesto for a free and united Europe together with Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni, which was to become known as the Ventotene Manifesto, according to which a European federation was the action priority in the post-war period for all democratic forces. A federal and united Europe was the new political proposal to safeguard peace among European peoples and to defeat any expression of nationalism. Spinelli was faithful to this intuition throughout his life and as a free man he worked hard to accomplish it. A new idea needed a new instrument: that is why Spinelli founded the Movimiento federalista europeo (MFE) in 1943 together with other antifascists. It was an organisation not leaning towards any other political party which will support him in his vanguard battles and is still today a workshop of new ideas and a political arena for many young people.

Altiero Spinelli-Video (copy to http:// location):

mms://wm.streampower.be/ep/ondemand/spinelli_hommage_20060524.wmv