My closing speech at the Global Jean Monnet Conference on 24 and 25 November, which brought together university professors of the Jean Monnet Chairs within the Union and in third countries, was as follows:
“Not being a professor but simply a journalist, I seize this opportunity to speak of my modest academic experience and the lessons I have learned from it. The European College of Parma, in Italy, has created a masters degree for young people who, after obtaining their university qualification, consider it useful to do a further year's study in order to better understand what the EU is and how it works. I discarded the idea of giving a specialised lecutre as I have neither the ability nor the knowledge. I preferred to speak of the “four journalistic battles over Europe” that I have conducted over the years as part of my profession. The first thing I noted was disconcerting. It was that young university graduates on the whole had little knowledge of the meaning of European construction. They knew more than I did when it came to many technical and legal details but most had no idea of what brought about the creation of the three successive Communities - ECSC, EEC and Euratom.
Steel is the sinews of war. The first, the coal and steel community, was seen as a purely economic venture to the service of the steel industry. The students were not responsible for this lack of understanding. The previous generation, which had followed that of the founding fathers, had largely lost all sense of the true origins and goals of the ECSC. That is why the first of the four “battles” which still make up my lecture is to point out “the highly political objectives of European construction from the outset”. ECSC was a political creation aimed at reconciliation between peoples who had confronted each other in unending wars (once every twenty years, as Jacques Delors once calculated). The ECSC was born against the will of most industrialists and the world of finance. Management of steel, which at the time represented “the sinews of war”, was removed by the ECSC from national authorities and entrusted to a supranational High Authority where all countries were represented.
The Declaration of Laeken, which was to relaunch European construction several decades later, still defined the ECSC as no more than “economic and technical cooperation”, when it really denoted reconciliation between peoples who had only just come to the end of a terrible war tearing them apart. It represented their definitive reconciliation in peace and unity and was to represent “the first stage in the European Federation”. In 2002, Max Kohnstamm, the last survivor of the 1950 protagonists, had explained that, during the war, he had “become aware of how fragile our civilisation was” and that the birth of the ECSC had allowed him to understand the “possibility of giving a meaning to his own existence”. That is why the reality of the ECSC was my first “battle” to put over to the young.
Recognising the role of agriculture. The subject of the second “battle” is the “role and significance of agriculture for European civilisation, against the tendency of considering it an activity in decline”. Carried out during decades while powerful interests tended to destroy European agriculture or reduce it to the role of folklore, it affirms the significance of food sovereignty and shows what is really important for poor countries, interests that are so often distorted by trade and other objectives - for example the World Bank's tendency to guide these countries towards exportable monoculture.
The third “battle”, conducted around the year 2000, concerns “obstacles to and, when all is said and done, the recognition of the need for a European industrial policy” - a battle justified by the tendency of economic circles in some member states to only maintain the “noble aspects” of industrial activity in Europe (research, product conception, financial management, commercial strategy), entrusting the material manufacture of goods to low salary third countries. I have the impression that this tendency has waned. It is now generally admitted that the manufacturing industry represents the basis for European prosperity.
The fourth “battle” describes the long political, legal and social dispute over services of general interest, first of all little known and misconstrued, and finally recognised as one of the pillars of European civilisation. But this battle is still being waged with several aspects still on the table.
I believe that the professors holding the Jean Monnet Chairs should - each in his own way and according to his own convictions - not forget to remind their students of the real meaning and aims of European construction, beyond its errors and its failings”.
(F.R./transl.jl)