You would be fighting. We kept quiet in this column last week, during celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the declaration by Robert Schuman that got European unification off the ground. The reason is simple: it was for Jacques Delors and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Etienne Davignon and Karel van Miert, and other distinguished speakers to take the floor.
A week later, we would like to add three exhortations.
The first is addressed to the new generation that gives the impression it does not share the European fervor and watches the Union, its actions and functioning, with disenchantment and scepticism. We reject the idea that young people are no longer capable of enthusiasm or of fighting for an ideal. We know several who are disappointed with our society precisely because it seems to lack impetus, pursuing purely material comfort. They would be prepared to fight (and sometimes do) for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, for children dying in the third world, for immigrants. To these young people we would very simply say: what you would like to achieve today is exactly what Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill and Alcide de Gasperi, Paul-Henri Spaak and Jean Monnet dared 50 years ago. The hatred and rancor between our countries, after the frightful war and horrors about which you have heard, were certainly no less strong and tenacious than those in former Yugoslavia or the Middle East; and the hungry children were here, in our countries. It was at that moment that the aforementioned figures had the political courage to pool certain essential elements of sovereignty, to create a supranational authority, to set the objective of the unity of peoples who had just torn each other apart. Where are the men with the generosity of spirit and broad-mindedness needed to launch similar projects in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa? In the past, there was a war in the heart of Europe around every 20 years. At that rate, given my age (I was a child during the last world war), I would be on my third war today. And you, young Europeans, would be fighting, if the visionaries we celebrated last week had not undertaken what they did. It is too easy to forget this and to display a lack of interest or even scorn for this Europe which has made a success of what counts most. Although there is still fighting in Europe today, it is not in the EU, but around it.
Every generation has its ideal. The second exhortation is addressed to my generation. We, the elders, must understand that every generation needs to live its own ideal and fight to attain it. The ideal of one generation means nothing, or virtually nothing, to the next. If I tell my children, who studied with young people of all European nationalities, that without a unified Euorpe they could one day find themselves fighting the friends of their earliest childhood, they look at me as if I were abnormal: you agreed to do that? No: we refused to accept it for our children. And today we must realise that for them, this situation is normal. What has already been achieved can no longer represent an objective to be attained. We must not be surprised if the unification of Europe no longer represents an ideal for the new generations. It is now time to go further.
The right to advance. The third exhortation is addressed to political authorities and the European institutions, in particular the negotiators at the Intergovernmental Conference. Now that the fundamental principles of the Union are an acquis and are shared by all its member countries, there is nothing to require that, to make further progress, they must all have the same objectives, that they must seek the same degree of integration. The Norwegians and the Swiss, who have chosen not to be part of the Union, are as European as the others. Some peoples aspire to increasingly closer integration, others prefer to keep a higher degree of autonomy. History, geography, traditions and mentalities determine each one's preferences; all choices are respectable. There is no need to try to make all peoples fit into the same mould. But everyone must respect the others' choices. The peoples who prefer not to go beyond a certain degree of integration must have the possibility to organise themselves as they like, but they cannot try to prevent others from going further if they so wish and deem it necessary.
Ferdinando Riccardi