Why Italy Was for Europe. On the History of the 1989 Advisory Referendum

B I B L I O T H E C A H E LV E T I C A R O M A N A

38

GEORG KREIS

WHY ITALY WAS FOR EUROPE

ON THE HISTORY OF THE 1989 ADVISORY REFERENDUM

Bibliotheca Helvetica Romana

Herausgegeben von Joëlle Comé und Adrian Brändli

Band 38

Georg Kreis

Why Italy Was for Europe On the History of the 1989 Advisory Referendum

Schwabe Verlag

Published in collaboration with the Istituto Svizzero, with the support of the Embassy of Switzerland in Italy and Presence Switzerland

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Cover illustration: Historical Archives of the European Union - Nicola Di Gioia’s collection / HAEU, NDG-50 Translation and Copy-editing: Anthony Mahler, Basel Cover design: icona basel gmbh, Basel Graphic design: icona basel gmbh, Basel Typesetting: 3w+p, Rimpar Print: CPI books GmbH, Leck Printed in Germany ISBN Print 978-3-7965-4263-3 ISBN eBook (PDF) 978-3-7965-4264-0 DOI 10.24894/978-3-7965-4264-0 The ebook has identical page numbers to the print edition (first printing) and supports full-text search.

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Six equal sisters, contemporary women instead of classical, baroque, or historicist representational figures. Their equality is evident in their tricolored skirts, and their solidarity in their holding hands. But “Italia” stands at the center of this small human chain. This emigration country celebrated the free movement of people, “soprattutto per il lavoro”, as early as 1957.

Contents

Foreword of the Ambassador of Switzerland to Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Foreword of the Istituto Svizzero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 I Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 II The 1989 Referendum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 III The Short Prehistory of the 1989 Referendum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

1

Disappointment with the results of intergovernmental cooperation 31

2

The further development of trans- and supranational parliamentarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

3

Deliberations on the referendum act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

IV The Long Prehistory of the 1989 Referendum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 V A Short Chapter on the Long After Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

1

What immediately followed the referendum in June 1989 . . . . . . . . 84

2

How the situation developed over the next two decades . . . . . . . . . 89

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

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Contents

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Parliamentary minutes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Private archive of Pier Virgilio Dastoli (PVG) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Newspapers and magazines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Yearbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Works cited or consulted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Foreword of the Ambassador of Switzerland to Italy

The Italian statesman Alcide De Gasperi belongs to the pioneers of the European Union; as the foreign minister and prime minister of Italy (from 1945 to 1953), he worked for the unity of Europe as the way to heal the wounds of the two world wars and to prevent a repetition of past atrocities. He articulated the position that after the two world wars “the future will not be built through force, nor the desire to conquer, but by the patient application of the democratic method, the constructive spirit of agreement, and by respect for freedom”. Through his efforts, Italy became, in 1951, a founding member of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which in turn laid the foundations for today’s European Union. He would not live until 1957 to see the signing of the Treaties of Rome, which established the Common Market, but he contributed significantly to its creation.

To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Treaties of Rome in 2017, Italy designed an exhibition together with EU institutions and the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre of the European University Institute. It was entitled Ever Closer Union – Un’Europa sempre più unita. Starting with the Manifesto di Ventotene from 1941 – when Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, who had both been imprisoned by the fascist regime on the Italian island of Ventotene, proclaimed a free, united, and federal Europe during the heights of the Second World War – the exhibition tells the story of European integration up to the present day.

The Swiss historian Georg Kreis has now singled out a very special and less known episode in this process of European unification. It is the advisory referendum that, on 18 June 1989, gave Italian citizens the opportunity to express their view on the question of whether the European Parliament should draw up a constitution for a European Union. Part of Kreis’s book

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Foreword of the Ambassador of Switzerland to Italy

was written during a research stay at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome in the autumn of 2019, when I had the pleasure of being introduced by him personally to the subject of his research. The study is now available in English so as to make its contents accessible to a wider audience. It sheds light on a moment in the development of Europe so memorably described by Alcide De Gasperi. De Gasperi was also convinced that this development would require time and would encounter setbacks. In a speech in Aachen in 1952, on the occasion of his receiving the International Charlemagne Prize, he referred in particular to the Swiss Confederation as an example of how history teaches us not to neglect the factor of time in democratically legitimized processes of integration.

For decades over the course of his career, Prof. Dr. Georg Kreis has engaged with the Second World War, the history of Switzerland, Swiss foreign policy, and the history of European integration. From 1993 to 2011, he was the founding director of the Europainstitut in Basel, which is defined by its interdisciplinary teaching and research. Now an integral part of the University of Basel, the Europainstitut was created in 1992/1993 in the context of the federal referendum on whether to join the European Economic Area.

With its interdisciplinary orientation, it is one of the early institutions of its kind and was the product of a broad will to strengthen the academic and intellectual ties between Switzerland and the EU. This became particularly significant when the Swiss people rejected accession to the European Economic Area on 6 December 1992. Today there are many academic institutions in Switzerland that provide research, expertise, and training on European integration. Since 1991, Switzerland has also cooperated with the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, where a Swiss Chair in Democracy and Federalism was created in 2001.

To mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Europainstitut in Basel invited the Swiss foreign minister Ignazio Cassis to give a public lecture in the autumn of 2018. On this occasion, he discussed the increasingly dense network of agreements between Switzerland and the European Union. He stated that stable and rule-based relations with the EU that can be further developed would remain the main objective of the Federal Council. Switzerland pursues cooperation with the EU through the so-called bilateral path on the basis of sectoral agreements. Over the past twenty years, this approach has been endorsed by the Swiss electorate in various referendums. Located in the

Foreword of the Ambassador of Switzerland to Italy

heart of Europe, Switzerland is intimately tied to the surrounding countries economically, academically, demographically, socially, and culturally. It works closely with the EU and its member states to strengthen prosperity, security, and democracy in Europe. It shares their fundamental values and is a reliable partner that stands in solidarity with the EU. Its neighbors, and so also Italy, play a particularly important role for Switzerland.

At least since the founding of the Europainstitut in 1993, Prof. Dr. Georg Kreis has been a major driving force in promoting discussion on Europe.

From its beginnings, the Basel Europainstitut has also served as a platform for exchanging knowledge and a forum for public dialogue. I am pleased that Prof. Dr. Kreis has offered us a further occasion to advance the debate with the present volume of historical scholarship. It is not only the subject of this publication and the history of its production that form a link between Switzerland and Italy. In the spirit of Alcide De Gasperi, it also takes up topics that are essential to further development on the European continent.

Rita Adam Ambassador of Switzerland to Italy, Malta, and San Marino

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Foreword of the Istituto Svizzero

The coronavirus hit the European Union at a most inconvenient time. Shook to the very foundations by Brexit, which marks the United Kingdom’s impending departure from the bloc, the member states seemingly failed to implement a consistent strategy to counteract the impact of the pandemic. The self-sustaining protection of national health care, the uncoordinated curtailing of free movement within the eurozone, and the subsequent struggle over stimuli to rebuild the economy point to a recurring problem: the polyphony of politics that renders concerted action difficult. Some observers show themselves disenchanted with the situation, wishing their countries out of the union; others take the signs as a much-needed call for reform.

As the first-hit European country and one of the worst-hit countries in the world, Italy has been at the epicenter of the debate right from the start.

Ursula von der Leyen, the newly elected president of the EU Commission, was even hard-pressed to offer a heartfelt apology to the Italian government for not having stood by its side when the swelling sanitary crisis required swift and supportive action. Among Italians, opinions were, however, made quickly: “tutto andrà bene” not because but in spite of the European Union.

Public criticism of the EU is certainly no new phenomenon; populist movements all over the continent have thrived on it for years. But there have been times when the call to unity, the idea of a single market based on shared values and governed by common institutions, sparked more enthusiasm than it does today.

Italy’s advisory referendum of 1989, the subject of this historical inquiry, seems far removed from the present-day situation. It was intended to gauge the popular support for the process of European integration, and the results were conclusive: roughly 88 percent of voters favored Italy’s path within Europe with a more-than-solid voter turnout of just over 80 percent. With the backing of its people, there was no doubt that Italy was to play an important

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Foreword of the Istituto Svizzero

role in creating a united Europe. As early as 1957, this country, with its long and eventful history of emigration, celebrated the principle of the free movement of people – “sopratutto per il lavoro”, as highlighted by a contemporary poster that now fittingly accompanies this study. Six equal sisters, modern women instead of classical, baroque, or historicist representational figures march joyously along into what was envisioned to be a bright and prosperous future. Their equality is evident in their tricolored skirts, and their solidarity in their holding hands. Unsurprisingly, “Italia” stands at the center of this small human chain, seemingly taking the lead in the process of unification.

Thanks to the scholarly verve of Georg Kreis, senior fellow of the Istituto Svizzero in September 2019, this study makes sure that an often overlooked piece of history will not fade into obscurity but, quite to the contrary, spark further investigation into the history of Italy’s involvement in and positioning toward the European project. As a Swiss historian with a particular interest in Switzerland’s international embeddedness, the author can claim the benefit of an outsider’s perspective that permits him – as impartially as humanly possible – to circumvent ideological battlegrounds.

Adrian Brändli Head of Research, Science, and Innovation, Istituto Svizzero

Acknowledgments

For various clarifications, I have received valuable help from Romina Palotto, the librarian of the Istituto Svizzero di Roma, and from Chiara De Vecchis of the Senate Library. Angelo Mastrandrea from Il Manifesto and Matteo Mirti, a doctoral student of jurisprudence, provided me with important guidance. It was particularly enriching to have the opportunity to talk with Virgilio Dastoli on 12 July 2019 in Milan and on 12 September 2019 in Rome about the various issues I discuss here. Dastoli was Altiero Spinelli’s personal assistant and the secretary of the Intergroupe Fédéraliste pour l’Union Européenne of the European Parliament; he is now the president of the Italian section of the Mouvement Européen des Fédéralsites. With his permission and under the courteous guidance of Andrea Becherucci, I had the opportunity to consult his papers in the Archivi Storici dell’Unione Europea at the Villa Salviati in Florence. It was then important to come in contact with my Italian colleague Sergio Pistone from the University of Turin, the leading expert on the history of the Italian Federalists. We first corresponded with each other and then met in Turin on 30 December 2019. From him, I received numerous references to the contemporaneous news media. Above all, I thank Adrian Brändli, the head of science, research, and innovation at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma. Without his invitation, my research stay in the capital of Italy would not have been possible and this short study would not have come about. And since in the end the quality of a text’s language is important, I thank the translator Anthony Mahler for his excellent work.

I Introduction

On 18 June 1989, Italian citizens had the opportunity to express their opinion about whether the European Parliament (EP) should draw up a constitution for a European Union. This referendum is the starting point and focus of my engagement with Italy’s view on the question of Europe in this book.

Consulting citizens on this issue was so important to the Italian political powers that they enacted a constitutional amendment to make it possible.

This “notable” event could have been celebrated with a thirtieth anniversary in 2019, but no commemoration took place. The “historic” event is also hardly ever mentioned in general historical accounts; in non-Italian scholarship it has gone almost completely unnoticed.1 A commendable exception is a small essay by a South Tyrolean teacher that was published in 1995 as part of a volume on transnational democracy.2 And even in Italian scholarship, the referendum has received little attention.3 The present study aims to

1 Hülsken 2011. With regard to Italy, Hülsken only states that the Italian Communist Party no longer belonged to the group of traditional communists but to the group of the European United Left (211).

2 Pöder 1995. Pöder lauds the referendum as the “provisional high point” for the many Italians who wanted to give the EC a democratic basis (310). With regard to the situation a good five years later, he remarks that today “we the Italian people” would no longer provide the same support, because Brussels has not yet proved to be particularly productive “for us” (315).

3 I could not consult Neri Gualdesi 1992. It is striking and indicative that the referendum is not mentioned at all in Di Nolfo 2003, which is the result of a conference at the Filippo Turati Foundation for Historical Studies and pays tribute to the international politics of Prime Minister Bettino Craxis’s administration from 1983 to 1987. The volume opens with a contribution by Antonio Badini, a close diplomatic adviser of Craxis’s; he

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I Introduction

counteract this. To start, I want to accord the referendum its place in history by reconstructing the concrete events leading up to it. It occupies a special place in the history of European referendums because it was called on its own accord (without constitutional necessity as in Denmark and Ireland in 1992 and also not on a presidential whim as in France in 1992 and 2005) and was met with overwhelming approval.4 The European referendum possesses a special status in Italian domestic politics, in terms of both its content and form. Previous referendums, which certainly did exist (there were, after all, fourteen from 1974 to 1989), all had restrictive functions: they could either repeal a law or, under certain circumstances, refuse to confirm a constitutional amendment.5 In order to be able to hold the European referendum, a constitutional reform was passed on 3 April 1989 after a long preparatory process and four readings (two in each chamber);6 the reform made a positive referendum (referendum di indirizzo o consultivo) possible for the first and only time.7 What political conditions led to holding such a referendum and what effect did it have? In two separate chapters, I will distinguish between two different histories leading up to the referendum: an immediate prehistory that begins in 1979 with the first direct elections for the European Parliament or in 1984 with the adoption of a draft constitution at the end of the first European Parliament; and a longer history that begins in 1941 in the

proudly declares that at the Milan summit, Italy was not just a car but the locomotive of the European train (“Italia locomotiva, non vagone del ‘treno Europa’”) (Badini 2003, 34).

4 For a complete list of the referendums on Europe, see, among others, Kreis 2017, 303 ff.; Hobolt 2009.

5 For a referendum to repeal a law (referendum abrogativo), at least 500,000 signatures must be collected from registered voters in three months; see Pino Strano: “Italien – Abstimmungen im Dienste der Parteienwirtschaft”, Europa-Magazin: Forum für direkte Demokratie; EU-kritisch, ökologisch, sozial, https://europa-magazin.ch/zone?14@@. eebbf74 [01. 06. 2020].

6 In the Chamber of Deputies on 2 and 14 December 1988 and on 15 March 1989; in the Senate on 20 December 1988 and on 20 March 1989 (on individual votes, see below).

7 Indizione di un referendum di indirizzo sul conferimento di un mandato costituente al Parlamento europeo che sarà eletto nel 1989, L.Cost., 3 April 1989, n. 2 (1), https:// www.camera.it/files/leggi_costituzionali/2_1989.pdf [01. 06. 2020].