Ventotene is not just a small Italian island, where Altiero Spinelli, Eugenio Colorni and Ernesto Rossi, confined by the fascist regime, wrote the Manifesto that laid the theoretical, economic and political foundations of a united Europe. It is the symbol of an ideal resistance to the barbarity of brute force, at a time when the continent had chosen the supremacy of power over the protection of rights.
While totalitarianisms reduced law to an instrument of power, men deprived of freedom thought up a Europe founded on the opposite: not the law of the strongest, but the force of law. The Manifesto was not a theoretical exercise, but a radical stand against barbarism. The idea that European civilisation could only survive by transforming conflict into rule, power into limitation, sovereignty into cooperation.

Today, in the time of global disorder, that choice is not a thing of the past.

It has once again become a political question: can Europe remain true to human rights in a world that once again speaks the language of force?
This question is not a sterile exercise in rhetoric, it is now four years since war returned to European soil after the end of the Second World War and the conflict in the Balkans, borders have become armed frontiers, political discourse has once again veered towards a securitarian dialectic that gives way to propaganda, ideas are polarised and democratic principles are continually questioned.

The temptation is ancient, when the world becomes unstable, law appears fragile

Then the twentieth-century illusion re-emerges that force protects more than rules, that the exercise of power is more effective than legality. But the force on which Europe was founded was never a force of power, it was never an exclusively military force. The foundations of a united Europe rest on the ability to transform the law into an instrument to protect fundamental rights.

This concrete power finds its heart in the European Charter of Human Rights and the Court of Human Rights, the principles and institution that make the Ventotene promise operational, binding states to respect fundamental freedoms, succeeding in guaranteeing protection where national policies repress or fail. The defence and promotion of rights, in this way, is not left to the ‘good will of governments’ alone, but to an established system of protection, capable of concretely affecting the lives of citizens. When the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) condemned Italy for prison overcrowding in the Torreggiani case, it recalled that dignity is not suspended behind bars. When, in the Hirsi Jamaa case, it censured collective rejections to Libya, it affirmed that rights do not stop at the border. And in his numerous rulings against torture, arbitrary detention and restrictions on freedom of expression, he forced European states to measure themselves against their own limits.

European Institutions: Frontier of Individual Protection

It is not an army, it is not the power of force, but its effectiveness is real: it controls, it enforces the law and defends it, it guarantees. In this sense, Europe’s apparent weakness is transformed into a unique regulatory power, capable of protecting the individual even against the state.
But it is precisely here that a knot becomes intertwined that becomes decisive. If the protection of rights is Europe’s identity, what happens when that legal space is threatened from outside?

The old international order, based on multilateral balances and shared rules, no longer exists in the form in which we have known it since 1945. In such a context, to think that the ‘European area of rights’ can survive without adequate protection instruments is to expose oneself to irrelevance or vulnerability.

Without rights, Europe loses its essence

But without defence capabilities, it risks not being able to guarantee them. That is why the issue of a single European army and truly common borders cannot be dismissed as a bellicose drift but is of overriding urgency. It is not a question of building an aggressive power, nor of pursuing the logic of global military competition. It is about equipping the Union with the tools it needs to protect its legal system, its democratic institutions and its citizens.

A common European army would only make sense from this perspective: as the ultimate guarantee of a political space founded on the dignity of the individual and the primacy of law. If Europe wants to contribute to the reconstruction of a global order based on human rights, it must first prove that it knows how to defend its ‘democratic garden’.

Force, in this case, does not replace law: it makes it possible

In a world where the law of the strongest once again imposes itself, the European challenge is opposite and more ambitious: to build a force that does not dominate, but protects; that does not expand, but guards; that does not annul the law, but is itsultimate defence.
Europe was born to take politics away from the law of the strongest; today it can only survive if it can count on a force to defend it: not to dominate the world, but to prevent the world from dominating the law and bending human rights to the logic of the strongest.