Università Roma Tre

Europe is born from a myth: the abduction of Europe by Zeus in the form of a bull that takes it from the East to the West, in Greece where the first Mediterranean civilization, the Mycenaean civilization, blooms. Initially identified in Greece as opposed to the Persian "barbarians", Europe took different forms over time with different traits (Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Christian Respublica, République des lettres, etc..), opposing from time to time to the "barbarian" of turn, tearing itself apart in internal wars, conquering a cultural, scientific-technological, political and civil, and finally becoming a "torch of civilization" in the world outside Europe to be civilized, or to be conquered. Eurocentrism, colonialism, imperialism on the one hand, nationalism, racism, totalitarianism on the other, plunge Europe into the barbarity of world wars and the moral defeat of the Holocaust.
After the Second World War, Europe was reborn as the European Union, in the name of peace, democracy and the guarantee of subjective rights.

Contents
The course is divided into two parts: a general part and a monographic part.
1) General part: historical reconstruction of the idea of Europe, its identity and its civilization, as they were formed and developed along a historical path that begins in ancient Greece and reaches the present day, when it materializes politically and institutionally in the European Union. Particular attention will be given to the birth of the European Union thanks to Altiero Spinelli, author of the Ventotene Manifesto, programmatic text of the construction of a European federation, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
2) Monographic part: analysis of 2 "classic" texts on the formation of a united Europe
1. For the perpetual peace of Immanuel Kant
2. The Ventotene Manifesto by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi

Testi
1. F. Chabod, L’idea d’Europa, Laterza, 2007
2. P. Rossi, L’identità dell’Europa, il Mulino, 2016
3. I. Kant, Per la pace perpetua (qualunque edizione)
4. A. Spinelli ed E. Rossi, Il Manifesto di Ventotene, Oscar Mondadori, 2006