I movimenti per l'unità europea e la storia dell'integrazione europea

The study of the movements for European unity is in a new phase of research, starting to analyse the period that integration historians have just begun to face, the one that ranges from the first universal suffrage election of the European Parliament, in 1979, to the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, on 1st January 2009. The beginning of a new season for the study of movements for European unity is also an opportunity to present the state of the art and for a wider reflection on their setting in the historical and historiographical context. If much remains to be written, however, this is a histo- riography that has a wide, constant and in-depth production, from Pistone s texts on movements for European unity to the book of Landuyt and Preda, in which they pro- pose a summary of the main movements we are talking about. The Italian and Euro- pean history of movements is greatly important because they were born thanks to the ideas of some men sent to the confinement by the fascist regime and who conceived a united Europe as a reaction to the dramatic mistakes of the nationalisms. It is not a marginal and niche history, but it is fully part of the history of contemporary Europe.