Brussels, 11/03/2008 (Agence Europe) - President of the Republic of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves has set out his vision of the future of Europe for his former colleagues in the European Parliament (of which he was a member, within the PES group, between 2004 and October 2006). Looking ten years ahead to when his country will assume the presidency of the EU, Ilves stressed the major challenges for which preparation has to begin to be made today. Energy, the environment, competitiveness, enlargement, the common foreign policy and migration are strategic questions that require courage and boldness of action, beyond electoral cycles, he said.
Solutions must be global, but, in the face of the challenge of competitiveness, action has to be taken now if Europe is to avoid losing its relative prosperity. It is the internal market that allows European nations to be competitive on the international stage and “opening up to competitive pressures within Europe has been the driver of our competitiveness worldwide,” he said, regretting that “current thinking in the EU is not a cause for optimism”, and this for two reasons: the lacklustre achievements of the Lisbon agenda and the EU's increasing protectionism, not only against the rest of the world, but internally as well. In energy, the challenge is both external and internal. A common energy policy with an energy commissioner who has similar negotiating clout to that of the trade commissioner is “an absolute must”, he said. “But for us to develop a common energy policy as we have a common trade regime, we also need the sine qua non of external policy, internal liberalisation,” he said. The European neighbourhood policy is another example of Europe “punching way below its weight”, which leads to the question of the future size of the EU. While there will probably be more member states in 2018 than today, “to our east and our south lie countries that certainly will never join,” he stated.
The European model is not the only one. With our development banks, we support countries of the South which exhibit almost antagonistic trade policies towards the EU. “What good are anti-corruption requirements in World Bank loans to developing countries when Sovereign Wealth Funds offer better deals with no strings attached?” he asked. “We were wrong when we thought we lived in a de-ideologised world. Instead, the rise of authoritarian capitalism as an alternative to democratic market economies is probably the latest ideological-intellectual-moral battle we face,” he went on, before urging the EU to “rethink our policies”. “We need more courage, we need more of a vision and an understanding of where we and the world will be in 20 or 25 years,” he said.
To be strong in the world, Europe has to be strong at home and have the support of citizens. Citizens need to get to know one another, something that would mean more exchanges, better knowledge of our different languages (he would like every student to know another member state language, other than English) and thinking in terms of regions. History is at the heart of this challenge, since, to create a “Europe of European citizens”, it is important to know “who we are, where we came from and how we got there”. We are the inheritors of the Europe of Bismarck's social reforms and of the Salazar regime, of the world's first constitutional democracy as well as the repressions of brutal internal security services, and have to learn to know each other's pasts to build a future together. Europe is far from complete: “may we have the strength to do it,” he said in conclusion. (A.B.)