Documents

Year LXVII, 2025, Single Issue, Page 61

Raimondo Cagiano’s federalist activism
An expression of cultural, political and moral
engagement*

GIORGIO ANSELMI

I wish to begin by thanking Prof. Antonelli, Prof. Norci Cagiano and the Primoli Foundation for hosting us here in this beautiful setting. My thanks, too, to Luisa Trumellini for asking me to speak about the federalist activism of Raimondo Cagiano de Azevedo. I imagine this invitation was prompted by the fact that, in 2017, when Luisa was national secretary of the Movimento Federalista Europeo, it was she and I together who proposed Raimondo as coordinator of our Debate Office. It was a role he filled with extraordinary dedication and commitment until the end of his days, pouring his best energies into it, and even, latterly, the last of his physical strength. I should make it immediately clear that I do not feel worthy of the task I have been given today, and am really not sure whether Raimondo would have appreciated my being the one to talk about his activism. I nevertheless feel reassured by the knowledge that there will also be several contributions from individuals who are certainly better qualified to comment than I am, and who will be able to supplement and even correct what I am about to say. Finally, I wish to apologise in advance for my use of personal recollections.

In the 1970s, Jean-Baptiste Fages wrote Introduction à la diversité des marxismes, a work that was subsequently translated into Italian. I do not believe the time is yet ripe to write an introduction to the different federalisms, which are often labelled with adjectives serving to distinguish and classify them. Allow me, however, to make just two remarks in this regard. The reason behind the search for new terms to refer to current unfolding events or their desired outcomes surely lies in the uniqueness of the process of European unification, which bears no comparison with any other historical experience, particularly that of the United States. This uniqueness also explains why, whenever anyone talks of the ‘United States of Europe’, a slogan coined more than a century ago, there is always someone who will ask, ‘But do we really want to replicate the United States of America?’ I would add here that I am not troubled by the use of various labels. For me, it is a sign of the times—a sign that we have now reached the end of the era when ‘federalism’ was a pornographic word, as Jacques Delors’ so memorably put it. In other words, it suggests that we have entered a time in which federalism in Europe is shifting from utopia to ideology, albeit along lines quite different from those outlined almost a century ago by Karl Mannheim, drawing on Marx and Engels’ famous 1846 text. For Mannheim, in fact, ideology arises from the defence of privilege and is therefore always conservative, grounded in a distorted understanding of reality, whereas utopia ushers in the new. Today, the federalist option is present in European political debate not as a dream projected into some indefinite future time, but as a criterion guiding action and choices today. Those of you who know me will know that I find it almost offensive to be labelled a dreamer, because, on the contrary, I consider us to be realists—the only realists.

With those preliminary remarks made, let us now turn to Prof. Cagiano’s commitment to federalism, which must be set within a cultural and political tradition that arose, between the two world wars, from French personalism. Personalism, as a term, was actually coined at the start of the century by Renouvier, and while this is certainly not the place to explore the key aspects of this philosophical movement, which counts numerous thinkers and schools of thought—one, for example, having a religious orientation and another a more secular nature—what we can do is examine the reasons for its convergence with federalism, which came about primarily through the work of Denis de Rougemont and Alexandre Marc. Certain elements within personalism aligned well with federalism: the centrality of the person, understood not abstractly as a mere individual considered in isolation, but as the centre of a network of relationships extending from the family to wider communities; the rejection and condemnation of all forms of totalitarianism; the critique of the state understood as an absolute entity to which everything must be subordinated and sacrificed; and the idea of the need for the personalist and communitarian revolution referred to in the title of a famous work by Emmanuel Mounier. Federalism, with its community and cosmopolitan dimensions, its division of sovereignty on both functional and territorial bases, and its institutional models designed to safeguard both unity and diversity, offered and still offers a coherent framework able to embody these elements in practice.

It seems, to me, almost inevitable that French culture should have produced a precursor to this convergence of personalism and federalism in the person of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, given his critique of the centralism—monarchical and then Jacobin—of the French state and its enduring Colbertist tendencies. There can be no doubt that it was Alexandre Marc, the same Alexandre Marc—born Lipiansky into a Jewish family in Odesa, forced into exile in France, a convert to Catholicism and also the first Secretary General of the Union of European Federalists (UEF)—who identified Proudhon as a forerunner of that integral federalism of which he himself would become the leading theorist. And Marc is widely acknowledged to have been a mentor to Raimondo, who, in recent years, had his three major works republished in facsimile editions. However, Prof. Cagiano never showed any traces of sectarianism or exclusive allegiances. Anyone who spent time at the beautiful headquarters, here in Rome, in Salita de’ Crescenzi near the Pantheon, of the Centro Italiano di Formazione Europea (CIFE)—of which he was an indefatigable driving force—will recall that a large photograph of Marc hung there alongside similar portraits of Altiero Spinelli, Mario Albertini and Gianni Ruta, the latter a friend from Raimondo’s early federalist years who died far too young. In short, Raimondo was animated by a spirit that I would venture to call ecumenical—one that drove him to seek not merely the superficial, more or less circumstantial reasons for convergences, but also their deeper underlying basis. During a conversation I had with him following President Mattarella’s visit to Ventotene to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the Manifesto, he remarked that the President, in addressing the seminar participants, took the very first lines of Spinelli and Rossi’s text as his starting point not simply because they were the opening lines, but because, in setting out ‘the principle of freedom, according to which man should not be a mere instrument of others, but an autonomous source of life’, they remind us exactly where we should start. He then added: ‘Everything that was built over seven decades is rooted in that principle, which is the starting point we must always return to if we are to avoid building on foundations of sand.’

This spirit, which I have taken the liberty of calling ecumenical, not only guided Raimondo in terms of principles and values, it also found concrete expression in his interactions with the organisations that Umberto Serafini referred to as the ‘federalist force’, and which, more circumspectly, we might call the ‘federalist galaxy’. Be it the Movimento Federalista Europeo, the Movimento Europeo – Italia (MEI), the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, or the European Teachers’ Association (AEDE), Prof. Cagiano offered each organisation engaged in the common struggle to unite Europe his intellectual input, often hosted them at the CIFE headquarters, and was always ready to give them words of support and encouragement. Raimondo was equally ready to engage with a much wider circle of bodies, institutions and associations, as confirmed by the numerous roles and recognitions that appear in his remarkable curriculum.

We all had opportunities to appreciate his receptiveness to other people, even the humblest, his willingness to exchange in dialogue, and his thoughtful consideration of ideas and positions he did not necessarily share. One clear memory comes to mind in this regard. A few years ago, we invited him to speak at the regional debate we organise each year in Sezano, in the Valpantena hills north of Verona. I asked him whether he would rather stay in the town or at the Olivetan monastery where the event was being held. He said he preferred the latter option, and so I drove him from the station to Sezano. On the way, I asked Raimondo if knew that the monastery would also be hosting Riccardo Petrella, who had founded a so-called Università dell’acqua bene comune (University of Water as a Common Good) there. He immediately replied that he’d like to meet him. I discreetly reminded him that Petrella, once one of our activists and a member of staff at the European Commission during Jacques Delors’ terms, had gone on to become a harsh critic of what he considered—and still does consider—the wrong directions followed by the EU, particularly in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis. (At this point, as an aside and without meaning to flatter our distinguished guest, whom we are honoured to have with us today, I would simply note that, looking back and considering how the ‘peripheral’ countries—I reject the English acronym used in the past—have actually fared, it may be time to reconsider some of the hasty judgements made during that period—judgements that, unfortunately, have not been completely abandoned). But, to return to my anecdote, Raimondo turned his head slightly toward me—a familiar gesture—and, glancing at me almost slyly, retorted: ‘I said I’d like to meet him.’ Ultimately, his warm manner proved decisive in putting his interlocutor at his ease—Petrella, let’s not forget, had not been expecting to meet someone from a part of his past he had chosen to turn his back on. Actually, Prof. Cagiano did even more than that, managing to persuade Petrella to present his ideas during the following day’s debate. The differences in the two men’s analyses and judgments persisted of course, but that discussion was certainly much appreciated by the audience present that day.

Prof. Cagiano’s manner never betrayed even the slightest trace of disdain, still less arrogance. While teaching at the University of Pescara he met Lino Venturelli and Damiana Guarascio, a married couple who, for many years, kept the local section going and also established the regional centre. Both of these endeavours enjoyed Raimondo’s constant support. Indeed, he took part in many of the trips to Abruzzo’s towns and valleys that Damiana organised with such meticulous care—outings that some of us experienced as well.

The debates, staged in eleven towns across eight regions, that Prof. Cagiano organised during his time as coordinator of our Debate Office perhaps constitute the most important legacy of his commitment to the Movimento Federalista Europeo. For each one, he drew on the extensive network of academic and political contacts he had built up over the years, thereby allowing our members to really grapple with the main theoretical and political issues of the past decade. Writing in L’Unità Europea, Fernando Iglesias also recalled Cagiano’s—ultimately successful—efforts to get an ‘Altiero Spinelli’ professorship created at the University of Buenos Aires. Whenever Cagiano addressed our meetings, he not only kept us updated on this project, but would often also add reflections and analyses on Latin America—a subcontinent close to his heart—or on Africa and the tragedies of migration, informed by his expertise in statistics and demography.

And so, I come to my final thoughts. When preparing these remarks, I couldn’t help wondering: what exactly was it about Prof. Cagiano’s tireless activity that earned him such widespread recognition during his lifetime, and can explain the unanimous outpouring of sorrow triggered by his passing? The answer that immediately came to me, which is not to be taken as a flippant remark, is that Raimondo was one of the few—the very few—activists with whom I never had any kind of falling out or even disagreement, something for which he, of course, deserves full credit. Then, thinking about it more, I came to the conclusion that Raimondo possessed, to an exceptional degree, ‘a sense of proportion’, for Max Weber ‘the decisive psychological quality of the politician’. In other words, the politician’s ‘ability to let realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness. Hence his distance to things and men.’ It is this alone that allows us to avoid what Weber, quoting his friend Georg Simmel, refers to as ‘sterile excitation’. So, at a time when—on both sides of the Atlantic—we are witnessing so much sterile excitation, fuelled—to use Weber’s words once again—by vanity, ‘the deadly enemy of all […] devotion to a cause, and of all distance, [above all] of distance towards one’s self’, Raimondo Cagiano de Azevedo’s example should be taken as both a source of inspiration and an important admonition.

It now falls to us, as a duty, to continue his battle, which is also our battle. As Hannah Arendt paradigmatically put it in a tribute to her mentor Karl Jaspers shortly after his death, ‘That which is most fleeting in a man—a spoken word or a single gesture—dies with him, rendering necessary the memory of him we keep. Memory finds its fulfilment in our bond with the deceased […] and echoes anew in the world.’ (Tribute to Karl Jaspers, 4 March, 1969).

Thank you, Raimondo, may we not prove too unworthy of you.