Godfather of the European Union: Altiero Spinelli

Citation

Gamble, C.J. (1998), "Godfather of the European Union: Altiero Spinelli", European Business Review, Vol. 98 No. 2, pp. 135-135. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1998.98.2.135.1

This succinct monograph tracks Spinelli’s political background and shows how he applied relentlessly his communist ideals to shaping Europe, especially when, between 1970 and 1976, he was the powerful European Commissioner for industrial policy, as well as being a communist member of the Italian Parliament.

Spinelli and eight others founded the Crocodile Club, named after the restaurant where they met in Strasbourg, and where they drafted a new treaty of European Union, giving exclusive executive powers to the European Commission and strengthening Spinelli’s own position and his goal of creating a single state, the United States of Europe. The similarity between the former communist Soviet Union and the European Union is striking.

Jenkins shows clearly how even Mrs Thatcher was a victim of Spinelli’s sophistry and of the language of the Brussels bureaucracy which she misunderstood and misinterpreted.

The Spinelli story shows that the driving force behind the creation of a European Union is not economic but exclusively political, as Sir Richard Body points out in his Foreword to this “brilliant pamphlet” (p. l).