Why we need a European Economic Federation

Alongside the tenacity with which peoples, small and large, yearn to conserve and perfect their own spiritual, cultural and political autonomy, we have the opposite tendency of the economy towards unity, not merely of large areas, but of the entire world. Not just small states but large ones too have become economically anachronistic and absurd. The modern states, those of 1914 and 1939, are just as absurd today as were the many communal republics of central and northern Italy at the end of fourteenth century, or the small Italian principalities at the close of the fifteenth century, or the several tiny states into which Italy was fragmented in 1859. In the past, roads, gunpowder, the discovery of America, the growth in literary and epistolary communications had rendered obvious the incongruence of closed borders between city and city, principality and principality, state and state. People yearned to move about freely, to contract and trade unhindered; they could no longer remain shut inside the old, cramped borders. A formula for mediation between small homelands and great territories was not found and the small homelands were submerged. In his large volume on the question of Italian unity, [Raffaele] Ciasca gathered thousands of eyewitness accounts of the fervour with which, between 1800 and 1859, the needs pushing toward Italian unification were expounded, debated and championed.