An earlier version of the European Union was imagined by secret societies centuries ago.

Fernanda Gallo, associate professor in history and politics at the University of Cambridge, delves into this history.

Fernanda Gallo is an historian of political thought of the long nineteenth century. She is Associate Professor in History and Politics at the University of Cambridge (Homerton College). Her latest book is Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (forthcoming, September 2024).

Italy and the United States of Europe

My research is concerned with ideas about political power. I am an historian of the long nineteenth century, a period often described as the climax of the rise of the Nation-State. By focusing on the case of Italy, my work challenges this view discussing how nationalism in the early nineteenth century actually emerged transnationally. Recently I looked at how the idea of a United State of Europe came about in a circle of radical 19th-century Italian political activists who were the first to think seriously about a political project of a ‘United States of Europe’.

Interestingly, during that time, Italy as a nation-state did not yet exist, rather the Italian peninsula was a cluster of smaller and isolated (and often dominated) states. Italian radicals still imagined a united and independent Italy and, when they did, they conceived of it within a wider project of a European federation. They saw a harmony between national unification and international emancipation: a ‘Europe of the peoples’ meant a continent of citizens instead of subjects, of rights instead of treaties, of assemblies instead of absolute monarchies, of political participation instead of economic regulation.

These 19th-century Italian republicans all had in common the experience of exile, persecuted because of their political beliefs. These experiences connected them with an international society of activists across Europe. Together, they created secret societies, promoted clandestine operations and circulated subversive ideas, and they imagined the United States of Europe’s borders extending east to include Ukraine and Turkey. They envisioned a larger and more democratic Europe than the one we have come to know through the EU, and interestingly the emergence of a European political unity is still nowadays constantly measured with debates on inclusion/exclusion of Turkey or, more recently, Ukraine.

Read More:

[Cambridge University Press] – Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832–1900

[Aeon] – A United States of Europe

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