La resistenza federalista nel mondo alpino

This essay explores the theme of resistance to Nazi-fascism in the Alpine world by looking up from the events of a single country or territory to Europe, and reconstructing the common thread of transnational events which, starting from that period, have influenced the course of history. Infra- and supranational federalist thought has developed in particular, transforming itself into political action, starting from the second half of the 1930s, within the Alpine world through the work of Emile Chanoux (1906-1944) and Adolf Gasser (1903-1985) who elaborated, starting from different historical and political contexts, an analysis of the facts and political solutions that presented particularly significant analogies. It was the criticism of the centralizing and leveling State that led them to meditate on the need for a profound change in the structure of European States, aimed at safeguarding those forms of local autonomy that they considered fundamental for the defense of personal freedom itself. Their intellectual and political work therefore aimed at laying the cognitive and moral foundations capable of promoting, starting from the Alpine region, a change, both within individual states and in the European context, which was to be based on the reconquest of local freedoms. However, they had to be inserted into a broader European context: the United States of Europe.