The road continues

The curtain closes on 2010 and already the EU is looking beyond: because the eagerly awaited holidays at Christmas and New Year grant a much-needed respite from international policy: a few days’ breathing space, but the problems on the table won’t go away: they remain there, and await decisions and interventions at the start of 2011. The heads of state and of government of the Union, MEPs and members of the Commission know this very well. The latest decisions taken by the Parliament in Strasbourg and during the mid-December summit signal some important convergences, but, as ever, the longest stretch of the road still remains to be travelled.Two positive signals in particular need to be remarked. The first regards the budget: after interminable negotiations, the EP has finally voted in favour of the budget for next year. So any provisional financial period, which would have put at risk many EU projects, has been narrowly avoided; then, with a final rush, agreement was reached with the Council, the other EU institution that has budgetary powers in the complex institutional architecture of the Union. Now the figures have been set out in black and white: 141.8 billion euro in commitment appropriations and 126.5 billion in payments (roughly 1% of the total GDP of the Union), with a tiny increase over the financial year that is just about to close. Funds for a whole host of interventions have been found – ranging from support for small and medium enterprises to culture, from aid to the regions to citizenship, from international cooperation to internal security -, but some justifiable requests of MEPs, relating to the EU budget’s “own resources” and plurennial financial perspectives, remain on hold and have been entered in the agenda for 2011.The second positive signal is the “citizens’ initiative”, on which the basis for an agreement has been found in the EU institutions and thanks to which a million citizens of seven member states can ask the Commission to draft an EU law which would then pass to the scrutiny of Parliament and Council. It’s not yet a cast-iron guarantee of participative democracy. But it is undoubtedly a sign of attention towards the “sovereign people”, the “European sovereign people”. The European Community, born 60 years ago with the ESCC Treaties (1951) and then with the EEC Treaties (1957), has always had an intergovernmental character, i.e. one that assigns greater decision-making powers to national governments that to the European Parliament, in which the representatives directly elected by the citizens of Europe sit. But over the last two decades the political weight has slowly but surely shifted to the front of democracy “from below”, and the “citizens’ initiative”, as provided for under the Lisbon Treaty, is a step in this direction. The European Council of 16 and 17 December focused instead on the financial crisis, governance, stability. The 27 national leaders, coordinated by the President of the Council, the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy, have decided to create, by 2013, a permanent mechanism for financial stability, though this requires a small “rejigging” of the Lisbon Treaty and hence a new round of parliamentary ratifications. This mechanism, or “fund”, has still to be defined in detail (size, modus operandi), but it represents a further advance in the economic governance of the EU, albeit limited to those countries that adopt the single currency. The importance of the mechanism could however be increased both through enlargements of the Euro zone (as will happen on 1st January with the entry of Estonia), and in the case of other states deciding it would be expedient to place themselves under the anti-speculative, anti-competitive umbrella of the euro. As has been pointed out, however, what’s needed behind a currency are solid political and monetary institutions, a single market, and a well-oiled economic (and fiscal) machine. And it is just this that remains the challenge for the future, not least because – as was already the intuition of the “founding fathers” of the Community – the necessary premise for increasing economic integration is the development of political Europe.The last European Council however also sent out two other important messages. Firstly, the heads of state and of government of the Union have assigned to Montenegro the status of “candidate”: the process that the small Balkan country will be asked to undertake will be very long, and yet the road to membership has been traced. Indeed, Van Rompuy himself made a point of reaffirming the “European vocation of the western Balkans”, leaving the door open to all the countries of the region which, he said, can find in the EU the solid anchoring to democracy and development whose need is so keenly felt in the territories of the former Jugoslavia. The other input concerns the world scene: the 27 have in fact reconfirmed their relations with their main partners, beginning with the USA, by declaring that “the EU is not only an economic player, but a geopolitical protagonist of strategic importance”. These are affirmations that need to be confirmed “in the field”, but the very fact of gaining an awareness of them seems a by no means foregone conclusion for the European Community.