La via dell'Europa passa per Maastricht? / Conclusions

Testo disponibile solo in lingua inglese.
In recent years, a great many political and intellectual stands have been taken on European unification. The vast majority of them have been to champion a certain single idea of Europe – the top-down road to unification staked out by the Treaty of Maastricht. In a liberal perspective, it is advisable, indeed necessary, to question precisely this conception of European unification. Europe and liberalism are a well nigh indivisible partnership, since for liberals national spirit and nationalism have never in any way overlapped. It is necessary to ask, however, which European institutional arrangement tallies with a specific liberal vision. The contributions collected in this issue of our review – not all of them written from a liberal standpoint – set out to reiterate to public opinion the basic reasons and problems of European unity, well removed from the clichés and rituals which invariably accompany it.