The Project Establishing the «European Defense Community»: Alcide De Gasperi and the Relevance of his Lesson for Securing Europe

This essay, contextualized in the years after World War II and the first stirrings of the «Cold War», aims to reconstruct the events related to the failure to implement a European defense army. To the extent that the creation of a European defense system represented for European states an initial surrender of their prerogatives in defense and foreign policy, the subject matter of this paper is enriched (and complicated) by a number of policy implications, both domestic and international. These issues would see in the figures of Alcide De Gasperi and Altiero Spinelli the personalities most engaged: the first, moved primarily by the desire to build military structures embedded in the general context of the defense of the Western worldt; he second, moved primarily by the will to create-including through the establishment of a common army a federalist Europe, not only in economic but also in political matters. The failure – after four years of lively debate-of the establishment of the «European Defense Community» – is to a large extent at the root of Europe’s current difficulties in managing an effective foreign policy. In the literature, after the pioneering writings of Mario Albertini (covering a long phase from the late 1950s to the 1990s), studies periodically republished in the journal «Il Federalista», essays by Lucio Levi, Alfredo Breccia, Sergio Pistone and Daniela Preda have been published, while studies by Pier Luigi Ballini, Stefano Bertozzi, Daniele Berardi, and Eugenio Guccione are more recent. Archival documents consulted can be found in Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Historical Diplomatic Archives), European University Institute («Fondo Alcide De Gasperi»), Central State Archives.