Build the future, overcoming the past

Since the calling of the Conference for the future of Europe we are overcoming major crisis: the fight against the pandemic, the recovery of the economy through a major common impulse. In every case, after some doubts, the answer has been a major step forward, leaping from crisis to crisis applying the “methode communautaire” (deciding together) following the wise prediction of Monnet.  The instruments are building a Health Union, and a Next Generation Plan doubling the budget and mutualising the debt. 

Now the dramatic war in Ukraine raises the major challenge bringing us back to one of the mayor crisis of the European construction: the failure of the European Community of Defence in the French Assemblée Nationale in 1954. The debate is no more a theoretical one about the CFSP and European sovereignty. It is about war in our continent just in one of the major scenarios of the two World Wars fruit of an internecine and  massive attack of  Putin’s Russia to Ukraine, breaking with all the international law rules, causing havoc for a peaceful population  and trying to ignore the EU. 

In the last month, we are talking major, historical decisions: to convert the EU in a political leader, with  Germany taking the most important  political and budgetary decision on security and defence since the creation of the Federal Republica  and France asking for an European sovereignty,   reviving NATO with   Sweden and Finland preparing the entry and  and applying a common immigration and  asylum policy. Moreover,  deneutralising Switzerland,   making Japan to reconsider its nuclear weapons policy and  getting an overwhelming vote of condemnation in the UN General Assembly of the Russian aggression to its neighbour and the  internal repression of its own people critical of the war. It is a European and global crisis. 

The conflict will be long and painful. We must build on  the momentum of the    impressive wave of European solidarity  giving the step forward of creating  the European Union of Defence  adding it to the Member Countries,  Citizens’ and Monetary Union that we have been able to create.  It is not only about our future, it is about peace in the continent and beyond. 

The first phase of the Conference for the future of Europe is coming to conclusion under French Presidency that has the responsibility to make a proposal for the next step, culminating its open ended constitutional process. By a curious irony of history, it is France that has the responsibility of launching this major step forward that must allow us to overcome the failure of 1954. Now is the moment to consolidate participatory democracy through representative democracy, improving the system created in the Maastricht negotiations and developed in the Conventions. The   index of the proposals of improvements is in the reality in front of us.

Above all, we must be clear on one critical point, we will never accept to come back to the Europe of 1945 and its balance of power fruit of havoc and arms and not of the will of the peoples. We shall fight for preserving peace and the principles and values that have allowed us the longest period of peace and prosperity in the history of Europe. @mundiario