Short useful recap. The time comes when it's crucial to react. Criticising European unity for one or other of its policies or for its insufficiencies is normal and even healthy - but rejecting it its existence is absurd, damaging and inappropriate. Such an attitude is beginning to emerge, however - most often with the aim of pinning the blame on Brussels for national abuses or mistakes. Let me briefly recap on the twin effect of this unity:
(i) definitive peace between countries which, throughout their history, have fought and were at the origin of two world conflicts last century. For some people, European unity is nothing short of a miracle;
(ii) response to globalisation. Unity enables European nations to have an international role. If these nations remained separate, however, they would be insignificant at a world level in the face of giants like the USA, China, India and Russia, which exceed the European nations in terms of size, population, natural and military resources.
Only a knowledge and understanding of the real situation can allow Europeans to have clout and have an outlook for the future in the unified world. Only unity gives Europe the safeguard of its civilisation and prestige. Only unity enables Europeans to confront the challenges of the future. It is understandable that new generations consider as normal - and definitively in the bag - the situation into which they are born - but nothing is ever acquired to man (Aragon) and we should be aware of the new challenges which united Europe must confront. Let me recall the main ones.
Inevitable enlargements… Despite its current difficulties, the European Union continues to hold an exceptional attraction for the countries that surround it. The New York Times described this attraction as soft power - an atraction that allows the EU to spread and almost impose its principles and rules around it - just through the perspective of opening its doors to all the countries in geographical Europe (the mistake relating to Turkey is gradually being corrected by a common agreement - but without admitting this). Serbia has accepted the compromise with Kosovo so that Serbia's accession might become possible, and the same perspective constitutes the engine of the efforts (which are not always enough or convincing) of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Macedonia.
Yet future enlargements will strengthen the evolution (that already exists) towards a two-speed - or indeed multi-speed - Europe. It is very easy, if not demagogic, to ignore this reality and pretend that the EU can remain remain faithful to the principle of ever closer union that is written into the legal texts.
… and multi-speed approach. Despite the Euro-pessimism that is currently in vogue, the EU's power of seduction is spreading. And the person whoever knew how to look ahead understood from the outset that enlargement of the EU would lead - alongside the positive aspects - to new problems. Even back in June 1991, François Mitterrand spoke of his fear that the EU “might drift towards a vague free-trade area which will destroy the reality and spirit” of the European project. To avoid such an evolution, Europe should organise its functioning with a multi-speed approach. It's inevitable.
Useful aspects of the crisis. There are also aspects of the crisis that I consider as useful - even if I'm alone in pointing them out. The crisis in itself has thrown into relief the breadth of the deficiencies, wastage and abuse that were (and sometimes still are) among its causes. How much European finance has been badly used in the beneficiary member states! How much useless or inefficient spending there has been! How many irregularities have been discovered by Community monitoring bodies! The controls that existed before have been strengthened. The second postive aspect is that some excessive spending of the Community institutions themselves has been - or will be - reduced, and even cut out completely.
The European Commission and the eleven member states that are participating in the financial transaction tax project have no intention of renouncing it - despite ever stronger opposition from the United Kingdom and the banking world (for whom the effects would be disastrous). The European commissioner for this - Algirdas Semeta - has replied that the criticism is largely inappropriate because it opposes arrangements that don't exist in the project, and Semeta has used two arguments of a political nature - the finance sector does not contribute sufficiently to the national budgets of member states, and it is largely exempt from VAT, which costs around €18 billion per year. The new tax, which will enter into force at the beginning of next year, should partly compensate for this loss of income.
(FR/transl.fl)