Thrust from the crisis

Those who have followed the development of the European Union from the onset – as the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), to the European Economic Community (1958) up to its current shape, established with the Lisbon Treaty (2007) – did not fail to acknowledge a marvelous history of success. This is all the more true considering that old Europe was torn down by World wars which ended only few years before the first efforts for European Unity, and that the psychological and moral ruins, caused by naziist and racist ideologies that were put into practice with the war, continued being widely experienced even after the war. Concrete cooperation in the European unification project thus resulted particularly effective and long-lasting.No one could guarantee the success of European integration, which had been consolidated across the years. However, it was widely acknowledged that the enterprise that had been launched on solid grounds didn’t have to fail. It was widely acknowledged that there existed no better way to ensure peace across Europe, defend the freedom of European populations and promote their wellbeing.Nonetheless, the history of integration and unification, that began with the participation of six States only, and which has expanded to include today 27 States, has always been marked by ups and downs. Times of momentous changes, with new successes of integration and related, ensuing, optimism were always followed by crises, retrocession, stagnation and phases of pessimistic forecasts. A clever observer, who followed the events in Brussels for decades, and examined the action of people and individuals involved in this process, claimed, at the beginning of the 1990s, that it was a seven-year cycle: seven years of success until a new peak was reached, followed by a seven-year temperamental downturn that escalated into a new crisis – then, again, an upturn normally triggered by a new, hope-fomenting project, bringing about new energies leading to renewed unity.Maybe it wasn’t always a seven-year period, nonetheless the evolution of the European Union is characterized by an oscillation. The serious crisis that has hit the European Union today, is to be viewed within the cycle marked by a positive peak in 2004, with the approval of a “Constitution for Europe” on the part of the European Convention, and almost simultaneously with the expansion of the Union and the entry of a large part of populations and States of central and Eastern Europe. The ensuing decline, which led to the ongoing crisis, began with the failure to ratify the Constitution on the part of France and The Netherlands in the national referendums of 2005.Now the crisis is marked by a lack of trust among Member States, due to heavy indebtedness contracted by euro area countries and by the desperate efforts to safeguard the stability of the common currency, that doesn’t only represent the central nucleus of the European Union as it also represents the solid expression of its ideal cohesion. It’s a dramatic crisis, which wears out the solidarity between Member States and punishes citizens for the faulty behaviour of the political realm of which they are directly responsible. In the indebted countries considerable material and social sacrifices are demanded of them to redress public deficits. And in the Countries called to provide bailout, citizens are exposed to risks that jeopardize the security of their own savings. This affects also the trust relationship with national and European institutions. It entails not only a risk for the integration and unification process but also for democracy in Europe.Considering this crisis it is therefore opportune to recall the ups and downs, which express the dialectic dynamics referred to the future, to the positive aspects of Europe’s unification process. In this case we are addressing a fundamental condition of that process. Thus even the ongoing crisis will trigger renewed thrust that will go be beyond the defeatist view that the monetary Union and the EU have reached a dead end. The European unification project will not fail, not even with this crisis. In the past, the European Union has always grown through its crises. Crises stir those forces aimed at their resolution, along with the necessary energies to dare and overcome the status quo, contributing to the development of the European government system understood as federalist solidarity.The outcome of the crisis meeting of Euro area heads of Government or State, held in Brussels on July 21st, confirms these forecasts.