Europe of the peoples? A historical utopia

Edenamism looks with genuine enthusiasm at the idea of a Europe of the peoples as conceived by Altiero Spinelli and developed in the Ventotene Manifesto and agreements. Not out of ideological nostalgia, nor adherence to an abstract Europeanism, but because that vision contained—perhaps for the last time in modern European history—an authentic attempt to overcome the logic of the power-state, of competitive nationalism, and of sovereignty as an instrument of domination. Ventotene was born from a wound: two world wars, millions of dead, peoples reduced to cannon fodder for economic, imperial, and industrial interests. From that wound, Spinelli had the courage to draw a radical conclusion: as long as Europe remains a mosaic of competing sovereign states, war will not be an accident, but a structural consequence.

Edenamism recognizes in this intuition a deep affinity. The idea of a Europe of the peoples—federal, subsidiarian, built from the bottom up rather than imposed from above—is consistent with a worldview that places concrete life at the center: community, balance between human beings and their natural and cultural environment. A Europe of the peoples is not a super-state, but a network of living, autonomous, and cooperative communities. It is the opposite of the technocratic and mercantile Europe we see today.

And yet, this is precisely where the knot tightens: the Europe of the peoples has remained, throughout history, an utopia. Not for lack of ideas, but because of the uninterrupted continuity of a power model based on profit, domination, and control.

Already with Charlemagne—often celebrated as the “father of Europe”—we witness the birth of a unity forged by sword and cross, not by the consent of peoples. The Carolingian Empire was not a federation of cultures, but a hierarchical structure that imposed language, religion, and political order, erasing or marginalizing local identities. Its dissolution did not lead to a harmonious autonomy, but to centuries of feudal fragmentation, dynastic wars, and endemic conflict.

With the rise of modern nation-states from the sixteenth century onward, the logic did not change; it became more refined. Sovereignty became absolute, borders sacred, the people a mass to be mobilized. Ethnic, linguistic, and cultural minorities were not valued as richness, but perceived as problems to be assimilated or repressed. Bretons, Basques, Catalans, Occitans, Sardinians, Corsicans, Flemish, Slovenes, Roma—just to name a few—became foreign bodies within states that demanded uniformity in order to function more efficiently as fiscal and military machines.

European colonialism exported this same logic on a planetary scale: profit, exploitation, hierarchy. The two world wars were not a deviation from this path, but its extreme outcome. Even the postwar period, despite the rhetoric of peace, did not truly break the paradigm; it froze it, reorganized it, disguised it.

The contemporary European Union presents itself as a transcendence of nation-states, yet reproduces their vices on a larger scale. It is a Europe of markets before peoples, of economic rules before communities, of central banks before human relationships. Sovereignty has not disappeared; it has been transferred from national parliaments to technocratic bodies far removed from citizens. Minorities continue to be tolerated only as long as they do not disturb economic balance. War, far from being repudiated, returns as a legitimate political instrument, financed and justified in the name of abstract values.

Edenism observes all this with lucidity and disillusionment. The Europe of the peoples, as imagined in Ventotene, was not betrayed by isolated mistakes, but by a deep historical continuity: Europe’s inability to renounce domination as its organizing principle. As long as Europe lacks the courage to place life, measure, limits, and non-utilitarian cooperation at its center, it will remain imprisoned by its past—even when it pretends to have escaped it.

Perhaps the Europe of the peoples has been a historical utopia. But like all authentic utopias, it continues to fulfill an essential function: reminding us of what we have failed to become, and pointing—toward those who still walk beyond the noise of profit and fear—a different direction. An Edenamist one.