What’s lacking?

“The European Union has a need for more politics”: this conviction provided a connecting thread for the conference on “What does Europe lack?”, promoted jointly by the European Parliament and the parliaments of member states to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the founding Treaties of the EEC. The conference programme included a first day of discussion, on 22 March, at the European University Institute at Fiesole (Florence) and a second session in Rome on 23 March. Divided into three sessions (politics, economy, society), the conference was introduced by Yves Mény, President of the European University, and by Fausto Bertinotti, President of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament. INSTITUTIONS AND CITIZENS. SIMON HIX , professor at the London School of Economics, gave the first report. “More politics are needed in the EU – declared Hix – if it is to progress beyond the common market, mediate between the conflicts that economic reforms generate, and also to bring home to citizens what are the objectives that the EU institutions pursue and what solutions they intend to adopt to respond to people’s needs”. “All this – said Hix – requires that trans-national party coalitions, differentiated positions between right and left, be identified. It needs a real policy of alternation that would be expressed during the campaigns for the election of the Parliament in Strasbourg. But that does not happen today, because on those occasions the parties speak solely in national terms”. A position in some sense antithetical to that of Hix was supported by STEFANO BARTOLINI , director of the Schuman Centre at the European University. “The EU ought in the first place to give convincing institutional responses to the problems of citizens, instead of concentrating on a greater politicization of the Commission or the European Parliament”. ENVIRONMENT, INTERFAITH DIALOGUE. A wide-ranging debate followed the six official reports, two for each session. HANS-GERT POETTERING , President of the European Parliament, declared that “the EU is now a composite reality, with 27 member states and 500 million citizens”. In this situation, “the fundamental and inalienable principles to foster unity must be underlined”: first, “solidarity” among states and peoples; second, “patience, to grasp complex problems, to seek shared solutions and to pursue their implementation”; third, “there’s a need for trust in the European Community”, which over these last fifty years has achieved significant successes, but which “is now faced by new challenges”. RENÉ VAN DER LINDEN , President of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, made another point, recalling that “often politicians use the EU as a pretext, either to shift onto it the blame for national problems they have no intention of solving, or to gain electoral advantages”. According to the Dutch politician, “it’s time to seek the greater involvement of civil society and those intermediate subjects able to promote European integration in their specific sectors: for instance in the environment or in interfaith dialogue”. SINGLE MARKET AND SOCIAL EUROPE. “The member countries of the European Union must have the courage to pool their economies more”, to avoid “the risk of being crushed on the one hand by globalization and on the other by resurgent nationalism”, said LOUKAS TSOUKALIS , President of the Greek Foundation for Foreign Affairs. In his address to the conference marking the 50th anniversary of the EU in Fiesole, he expressed doubts about whether fiscal policies could remain an exclusive national competence in an integrated market (he also called for an EU tax to “support the meagre EU budget”); “what is certain – he added – is that while we have a centralized monetary policy, we don’t have any real control of the economy”. For his part JEAN-PAUL FITOUSSI , of the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, pointed out that the Union “is the world’s largest economy”. “But while European GDP has increased by 36% over the last ten years, that of the USA has grown by 60% and the Asian GDP altogether by 174%”. The French economist considers it positive “that the poor countries are growing more rapidly” than the West: yet this demonstrates that “ours is an economy with great but untapped potential”. So Fitoussi calls for “radical structural responses”. First, “more power needs to be assigned to the European Parliament, to manage monetary policy together with the Central Bank”. Second, “the Council needs greater powers, to annually define what national investments to detract from the budget deficit”, so as to reinforce the infrastructures, boost research and “pursue the objectives of the Lisbon Strategy”. There was also a lively debate on the EU model of social development: various participants insisted on the need to combine the construction of the single market with national social systems, to ensure fairer distribution of opportunities among citizens and create consensus in public opinion on the “common home”.