In the face of Trumpism Andrea Pisauro urges us to revisit the antifascist roots of European integration
On December 2, 1804, in the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon put on his own head the Crown of Emperor of the French. He did so in front of Pope Pius VII and more than ten thousand members of the French elite and European dignitaries. Two million more people celebrated across Paris. This remarkable self‑coronation established that the legitimacy of Napoleon’s reign was not derived from the Church, marking the beginning of the end of spiritual power.
On December 5, 2025, in a hotel in Washington DC, Donald Trump put around his own neck a “peace prize” medal awarded to him by FIFA president Gianni Infantino during the Football World Cup Draw. A few dozen FIFA officials were in attendance, while many more signalled their uneasiness to the press. This embarrassing “self‑medalisation” signified Infantino’s attempt to please Trump after he failed to fulfil his desire of receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1804, the then 16 United States of America had gone through four presidential elections. They have since had another 56, through which the US became the longest continuous democratic system in history and the world’s hegemonic power. With the second Trump presidency, we can no longer trust the US to remain a democracy nor to maintain its hegemony.
Trump’s narcissism is not a character flaw but a feature of his fascist movement. A cult of personality is the basis of any fascist ideology. Gaslighting the public with post-truth “alternative facts” fits the fascist tendency to weaponise language to impose its aims. Describing opponents as “enemies within” is both authoritarian and consistent with narcissist’s tendency to interpret disagreement as betrayal. The world’s response – from Infantino’s medal to European leaders’ photo‑ops – has too often been to feed this narcissism in the hope of managing it, normalising the abnormal rather than confronting its authoritarian logic.
That logic is now codified in the US National Security Strategy issued in November 2025. The document rails against “globalism” and transnational institutions, and anchors US power in an aggressive doctrine, a XVIII century mercantilism with XXI century weapons. It proclaims that, “the era of mass migration must end”, turning migration policy into the central principle of foreign policy.
The dark irony is unmistakable. A republic literally built by European migrants now tells Europeans to block or repatriate migrants, in the name of avoiding “civilizational erasure”, a definition more fitting for the fate of indigenous North Americans centuries ago. The same document explicitly sets out to “restore Europe’s civilizational self‑confidence and Western identity,” casting us as a cultural outpost to be disciplined into line, while boasting of a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” to secure the Western Hemisphere as its own imperial backyard, the ideological basis of past and future aggressions against Venezuela and Greenland. The AfD in Germany, the Front National in France, Orban in Hungary, and Farage in Britain are the European heralds of this authoritarian worldview.
If Washington now speaks the language of fascism, our task in Europe and across Britain must be rediscovering the European Union anti-fascist roots, first articulated on a volcanic rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Manifesto di Ventotene, drafted while Europe was devastated by a fascist war by Italian anti‑fascists Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi while confined on the small island of Ventotene off the coast of Rome, is one of the foundation documents of early European integration. Building on ideas championed by Matteotti and other anti-fascists, the Manifesto diagnosed the monoethnic nation‑state as the incubator of fascism, and proposed a European federation as the only way to overcome national rivalries and guarantee democracy and freedom.
Ventotene’s vision was radical and concrete. It called for a federation endowed with real powers over foreign policy, defence and key economic levers, grounded in civil liberties, social rights and democratic participation that would bind citizens across borders. The goal was not a technocratic market, but a political community in which the unity and freedom of Europe’s peoples would make it impossible for any one nation to drag the continent back into authoritarianism or war. It is an argument for transnational democracy as the only durable defence against both domestic and imported fascism.
The EU we have is not the federation Spinelli and Rossi imagined. It is an incomplete construction in which intergovernmental bargaining often trumps parliamentary democracy, and where constitutional solidarity mechanisms remain fragile and contested. Italian Prime Minister Meloni has mocked Spinelli’s legacy in Parliament, a gesture symbolising the nationalist backlash against the revolutionary idea of a post‑national Europe.
Rediscovering Ventotene today is not a sentimental exercise, but a strategic necessity. Defending ourselves from the new fascist menace means completing the federal project: strengthening the European Parliament, empowering transnational parties, and embedding irreversible mechanisms of social solidarity. Only a Europe that can act as a political subject can resist being reshaped by Washington’s authoritarian turn or its European imitators. The implications for anti-fascists in Britain are clear: the fight to rejoin and reinforce the EU is the fight to defend democracy in Britain and across the continent: “The path to follow is neither easy nor safe, but it must be followed, and it will be”.