Il Parlamento europeo “coscienza e motore del processo unitario”:il contributo di Gaetano Martino all’Assemblea di Strasburgo (1958-1966)

The work of Gaetano Martino is well known to historians mainly for the role that he, as Italy's Minister of Foreign Affairs, played between 1954 and 1957 to relaunch the process of European integration. One of the less known aspects of his activity concerns the contribution made to the European Parliament's activity, the statesman was member of between 1958 and 1967 and President from 1962 and 1964. As protector of the "spirit of Messina", which, in his opinion, represented a warning to the government of member States for the realization of a political Europe, he played and intense and passionate activity in Strasbourg Assembly; and even if he belonged to a minority group as the liberal one was, he brought to complete maturation his Europeanism, aiming at a federated and democratic Europe and at the rise of a widespread 'European consciousness'. His commitment focused on two main aspects: the first one, at a political-institutional level, dealt with the election of the European Parliamentary Assembly by universal suffrage and with the attribution of greater powers to that organ; the second one, at a cultural level, concerned the institution of a European university. Both were part of the wider objective of gradual and progressive realization of the European political unity, through the complete implementation of the treaties of Rome. In this path, Martino assigned to the European Parliament, in a balanced relationship among the European institutions, a primary role.