Index > Manifesto
The Ventotene Manifesto by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi.
For a Free and United Europe. A draft Manifesto.
The Ventotene Manifesto was written in mid-1941 by Spinelli and Rossi (an economics professor leader of the social-liberal movement Giustizia and Libertà) in confinement on the island of Ventotene.
After the reading of two articles written in 1918 by Luigi Einaudi (a liberal economist who had been Rossi’s professor) predicting that the League of Nations would not prevent another European war and advocating a European federation, Spinelli and Rossi studied works by contemporary British federalist writers and wrote the Ventotene Manifesto in order to initiate a movement to campaign for a European Federation.
Spinelli drafted all Manifesto’s sections save one which Rossi drafted on economic and social policy but each of them influenced what the other wrote.
Spinelli in the second half of 1942 wrote the essay on ‘The United States of Europe and the Various Political Tendencies’ and in 1943 the one on ‘Marxist Policy and Federalist Policy’.