“The European project is faced by a crucial phase. We need a new vision of the future: a vision that may bring new signs and that has meaning for the young”, declared the President of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, addressing a seminar on the future of European integration in the Spanish city of Santander in recent days. In his speech, Borrell said: “The negative majority vote of French youth on the referendum on the European Constitution is a fact that cannot pass unobserved. These youth perceived the divorce between the symbolic (incorporation of the word Constitution and constitutional amendments) and the real (the content of the concrete policies that do not represent transcendental or easily explicable changes)”. This “gap between the real and the symbolic is being registered everywhere”, said Borrell, who then gave some national examples. “If the European project is not linked with the real world, with the concerns of citizens, it will fail to involve or interest them”. The fact is that the “project of European integration was born from a few minds; now there’s the risk of losing not only a part of the passengers, but of interrupting the journey as a whole: in other words, the chance of realizing a form of political integration able to play a major role in the globalized world”. Borrell therefore appealed for the debate on the future of Europe, on “what we wish to realise together”, on the great common objectives and values, to be intensified: “This is the best way of tackling our future”.
