Nilde Iotti during the European Parliament presidential election in 1979
Editor’s Note: At a critical moment for both resistance and European democracy, Simona Guerra writes for the London School of Economics website about the role of Nilde Iotti — a resistance fighter during World War II — in post-war Italian politics and European integration.
This research is part of the Caroline: Creating a Network on Female Pioneers, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and the European Parliamentary Research Service.
Leonilde “Nilde” Iotti (1920-1999) has long been renowned in Italian political history. Now she is rightly being celebrated as one of the pioneers of a new Europe after 1945.
Growing up in a patriarchal society, Iotti fought for democracy, European cooperation, and the emancipation of women all her life. Having joined the labor movement as an activist at a very young age, she was appointed regional secretary of the Union of Italian Women in 1945, two years after graduating with a degree in philosophy.
When Italian women gained the right to vote in 1946, she was elected municipal councillor and was appointed member of the assembly of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) assembly. Still only 26, she entered the Italian Parliament together with another 20 women deputies that year.
In the words of the youngest deputy, 25-year-old Teresa Mattei, “We, the whole 21, held each other’s hands, all supporting peace, even the representative of the Common Man Front.” Although these women had lived and been educated under fascist rule, in the 1940s and 1950s they would build their party and the democratic foundation of the Italian Republic.
In the European Parliament, Iotti was a member of the Working Group on Direct Election and the Conference of Presidents. She promoted the creation of an annual Conference of Parliamentary Commissions dealing with European affairs. (Decades later, this would become the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs, now recognized by European treaties.) She introduced and organized meetings of committees by policy across Parliaments, developing dialogues and interparliamentary action on common problems in the European context.
Scholarship has tended to highlight the role of women in promoting the European’s policies on women. Iotti’s life demonstrates the political agency of women for European democracy, with their public contribution at the international as well as European levels. In day-to-day policymaking and in formal and informal procedures in this young legislative institution, Iotti and her colleagues helped establish the European Parliament that is the base of the body of today..
From Resistance to Democracy
The legacy of the war, her experience of the resistance fight, and the strengthening of democracy and its institutions guided Iotti’s involvement in Italian and European politics. She was ardently pro-European in a Communist Party which tended to be Eurosceptic. In 1969, she sat in the European Parliament as an appointed member of the Italian Parliament. Ten years later, she was elected to the European Chamber that she helped to create.
On October 7, 1969, Iotti set out her approach in an important intervention on the European budget. Members of the Left saw a budget advancing the hegemony of the German interests against those of smaller entities. Iotti went further with a vision of a pan-European institution: “the European Parliament [had] to gain more political power, even if it [did] not have any formal right. It [could] not continue to take note of the political right reality of Europe as imposed.”
Iotti welcomed an extraordinary convocation of the Parliament in November; however, she said it was “absurd” that the Parliament was not devoting “any discussion, any act, any word…at the proposed conference on security in Europe”. It was necessary to bridge “the gap which divided Europe at the time and prepare one of the essential acts of a policy of coexistence in Europe and worldwide”. The young European Parliament should be active, breaking from its position as spectator to contemporary political developments.
Do we want to accept forever that Europe is divided into two opposing military blocs, and that within the two we see the persisting fatal consequences of the implacable logic of the bloc regime?
If we want to be Europeans, we must take part in the events of history and European culture, we cannot continue to be absent. The place we occupy and the authority we are exercising are as strong as the measure of our participation in the major European political debates.
An Unexpected Europeanism
Iotti’s Europeanism might not have been expected by many. In 1969, she was one of the seven PCI deputies in the European Parliament and the only woman among them. The Italian Communist members were more often tolerated than welcomed. And while they often proved to be more “European” than Communist counterparts, Iotti was reprimanded by Altiero Spinelli — a Commissioner between 1970 and 1976 — for interventions that were not compatible with the ideology of the party.
But Iotti persisted with an idea of Europe that was more international and coherent with her idea of democracy, maintaining these positions in her Italian parliamentary office. She promoted the Parliament as most important representative institution. She supported more integration, beyond economic solidarity and cooperation. Her proposal of collaboration between the European Parliament and national parliaments would lead, many years later, to the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs.
Totti promoted a cooperation which had to move beyond Cold War antagonism and European integration towards civic and social integration. In 1971, at a meeting of her party on Europe, she would present a paper on “National Sovereignty and European Institutions” for development of a cultural, institutional, and political integration. In 1979, when she was appointed President of the Lower House in Italy, her inaugural speech promoted the “exceptional” qualitative advancement of democracy at the European level with direct elections across member states. At the national level, she further promoted a special committee on European policies and democracy that she long valued and promoted in Brussels and in Rome.
In 1992, Nilde Totti finally stepped down from politics after 50 years. As she left, Europe was embarking on its economic journey of the Single Market. Its journey for her vision of civic and social integration is still ongoing.
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