PREAMBULE

• Europe, 2018. After decades of confidence and trust in the process of unification of the European countries and the unquestionable success of 70 years of peace and prosperity in the majority of our countries, the conjuncture of a deep and long economic crisis and political stagnation created, among the European disillusioned peoples, the space for the raise – once again – of nationalism and populism.
• For the first time since decades, the survival of the European Union and its  achievements has become uncertain and the hope to have in future a more united and strong Europe is threatened at its real basis.
• This happened because, since the end of the cold war and the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the European countries (political mismanagement after political mismanagement) failed in making the next step: transforming the actual confederal arrangement of the EU into a real European Federation: the ‘United States of Europe’.
•  Some weak attempts to improve the EU were done (European Convention in 2004, Treaty of Lisbon in 2009) but none of them tried to overcome the real issue that made impossible the creation of a real federal Europe: the intergovernmental system that is nothing but a continuous accumulation of conflicting national interests.
• We recognize that, failed the approach from the above in the past when the trust and confidence in the EU was very high, today the only way to overcome this situation is to trigger a significative change, a ‘quantum leap’, to start a bottom-up process, involving all the federalists movements and organisations and all the grassroots that are in favour of a more democratic, accountable and united Europe, to launch a Federal Constitution for Europe, overcoming the actual treaties and the intergovernmental system, and creating the United States of Europe.
• In 1787 the 13 North American colonies that acquired their independence from the United Kingdom only a few years before, after many attempts to form a workable Confederation, were finally facing a deep crisis (similar to the one that the actual EU is facing nowadays). Trying to prevent the collapse, a Convention was gathered in Philadelphia, and the representatives of the 13 states, which had the mandate to reform the previous treaties, they decided to disobey the mandates received from their respective governments by provoking a ‘quantum leap’ and wrote the draft of a Federal Constitution. In September 1787 this constitution was submitted to the American people with the intention of transforming the Confederation into a federal State based on a Constitution. The citizens ratified the Constitution and this was the born of the United States of America, the more successful federation in World’s history. This historical key episode of “constructive disobedience” that has caused a radical change of discontinuity (‘quantum leap’) that brought to the creation of the USA must inspire the FAEF action strategy and the narrative to the EU citizens by adapting them to the actual ”historical conditions”: existence of the EU and the institutions, the upcoming EP elections, the diversity of the cultures of the 27 UE countries, the opportunities offered by today’s technologies, etc.

The Purpose of FAEF

Article 1.1

FAEF aims at ‘federating the federalists’ as a completely new approach contributing to the ultimate goal: creating a federal Europe from the ‘bottom-up’,  based on a federal Constitution. This is not an easy task in view of the fact that all attempts to create a federal Europe have failed in the past. Furthermore, there is not much applause for the idea of an USE, either from the point of view of society, or from the point of view of the political establishment. Our first task is:‘federate the federalists’. If the very many single, decentralized unitary federalist movements in Europe are not able, nor prepared to upgrade their organizational density, they will never be able to create a federal Europe.

Article 1.2