It’s also an ethical project

The outcome of Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty of October 2 is crucial for the future of Europe. Indeed, only with a majority vote will the reform treaty – ensuring greater freedom of action and transparency in the EU – be finally enforced, in light of the endorsement of the 26 Member States. However, this 27-State European Union, marked by an exceptional organization tasked with developing and enforcing common policies in the interest of its own members on the basis of treaties that need to be reviewed at a few years’ distance, what is it exactly? Is it an alliance, a federation, a confederation of States or a federal State? The many answers touch individual feelings, political expectations and political beliefs along with the very finalities of the European Union. What will be of the EU? The many possible answers show that the future of our European community will remain a hanging question until its members reach an agreement on its finalities. Thus even after the Lisbon Treaty’s enforcement the EU will be addressing an open process. It’s a political project whose contents and geographic scope are yet to be defined. In the book “Der unvollendete Bundesstaat” (1969) – (“Europe in the Making”), Walter Hallstein, one of the architects of European treaties and the first president of the European Community Commission (1958 – 1968), described the institutional and political system of the European Community on the basis of his own experience. Hallstein believed that the logical development of the European Community had to follow a new federal system. He motivated his position with the fact that the Community’s legal system described in the Treaty of Rome (1957) bore all the features enabling this kind of development, -although the different government responsibilities are distributed differently among European bodies, as compared to a traditional Federal State, and correspond to the development stage of the integration process -. As relates to Community responsibilities, legislative functions are performed by the parliament and by the Council of ministers, while the Court of Justice and the Commission and tasked with juridical questions.In order to describe and identify the European Union as a supranational community that would necessarily require a federal legal system, classical political science concepts (Federal State, federation of States, etc.) don’t appear to be particularly useful. Only by observing reality and its evolution will it be possible to understand this new political system and its future developments. Contemporary political sciences propone a multi-level system (region, nation and Union), whose organization is subject to modification. But accordingly, the structure’s performance depends on everyone’s cooperation. The reality of the European Union and its evolution has brought us to reach the threshold of a political Union as the one described in the Lisbon Treaty. This reality encompasses much more than what is stated in the Treaties. It involves the dynamics of the political process, the ongoing interaction of the organs and stakeholders, the progressive and concrete interaction between the power systems of the different responsibility levels, the increasing monitoring and organizational powers of the European Parliament, the role and the influence of European parties and the relative supranational groups, the progressive trans-nationalization process of civil society, the ongoing Europeanization of the public opinion, and lastly, the Monetary Union successfully accomplished in a federalist manner. These features characterize the European Union much more than formalized treaties have envisioned. However it must never be forgotten that the European Union is also an ethical project, since its institution and the fulfillment of its policies formulated at EU level ought to primarily serve reconciliation and peace, justice and solidarity among peoples and European States. Until this motivation persists, we will need to acknowledge the European Union’s quest for its own identity, all the more so since the EU’s democratic organization expressed in the Lisbon Treaty paved a path in this direction.