The common destiny

“With a bit of political courage, the crisis of the single currency could give rise to what many hoped from a common European foreign policy: a consciousness that transcends national frontiers and shares a common European destiny”, declares the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, in a reflection in the weekly “Die Zeit”, contained in the volume “A guide to tomorrow’s Europe”. The publication (September 2011) presents a collection of articles from the international press proposed by Presseurop.eu, multilingual press information website launched by the European Commission in May 2009 and run by a consortium of four reviews specialized in international current affairs: Courrier International (France), Internazionale (Italy), Forum (Poland) and Courrier Internacional (Portugal). The volume contains comments, analyses and reportage, chosen following the 26 letters of the alphabet to help readers discover a varied, dynamic and at times surprising Europe.Politics and integration. According to Habermas (P for politics), European leaders have failed to grasp the sheer scale of the challenges that face the old continent. At the same time, the “spread of the financial crisis” confronts us “with a congenital defect: that of a political union that has remained unfinished”. “The countries of the Eurozone – he warns – are heading towards a parting of the ways: they will either have to choose whether to deepen European cooperation or renounce the euro. It is not a question of ‘mutual surveillance of economic policies’, but acting in common”. According to José Manuel Fernandes, columnist of the Portuguese daily “Público”, “hitherto Europe’s successes have always been linked to European integration, whereas its failures have been bound up with attempts to create a continental political power”. European crises, he warns, “are not only an occasion to put the foot down hard on the accelerator on the road to be travelled. They are also an opportunity to change direction” (I for integration).Diplomacy, culture, decline. “A sarcastic diplomat: ‘So the European External Action Service has been born? And exactly what action are we speaking about?”. Writing in the French daily “Le Monde”, Philippe Ricard and Jean-Pierre Stroobants (A for Ashton) point out that when people speak of European diplomacy, EEAS and High Representative for Foreign Affairs, “the responses in Brussels range from the caustic to the pessimistic” and people wonder whether Catherine Ashton “will be able to elaborate the vision” of Europe delineated in the Lisbon Treaty. To the eurosceptics who deny that the European project has any solid foundations, Jonathan Jones (The Guardian – London) replies by presenting the “community culture” that “Europe has constructed for at least a thousand years” (C for culture). “The first European union – he writes – was called Christianity, and in the eleventh century it gave rise to a common artistic, architectural and philosophic style, able to transcend the frontiers of the fledgling nation states”. According to Jones, “believing in Europe is not idealism”; if we look “at history and its vivid colours, we cannot fail to acknowledge how profoundly European we are and how deep are the roots of our common identity”. Writing in the Parisian monthly “Philosophie Magazine” of which he is editor, Alexandre Lacroix (D for decline) warns that the demographic and economic decline of the continent cannot be defined solely by “statistical criteria”. More than the content of statistics, what worries Lacroix is the fact of adopting almost exclusively “a financial and book-keeping interpretation” of Europe, which risks making us forget “the intense spiritual life” at the basis of the “founding project” of “European humanity”.Balkans and new geopolitics. The negative portrait of the Balkans as “south-eastern powder keg” is, according to Andrei Plesu “one of the most widespread stereotypes in Europe”. In the Bucharest daily “Adevarul”, the former Foreign Minister (B for Balkans) recognises “the Balkan pride” whereby “each country considers itself the real centre” of the region and which is the cause of a “ferocious struggle for leadership”, but maintains that “Brussels has neither time to understand nor patience to listen”. This gives rise to the provocative question: “What values would be lost with the failure of a Balkan policy?”. The “neighbourhood policies” that Russia, Turkey and the EU “are formulating” to “dominate their respective spheres of influence” in the Balkans, in Eastern Europe, in the Caucasus and Central Asia are discussed by Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard in the London daily “Financial Times”. According to the two analysts (G for geopolitics), in response to current scenarios on which “the prospects of a unipolar European order are dissolving”, the EU “ought to plan a ‘tripartite colloquium on security'” with the two “powers that will prove decisive in the twenty-first century”. What’s needed is “a new strategic approach” with the objective of “creating a trilateral rather than tripolar Europe”, which, they explain, “does not mean exorcising a conflict between European powers, but helping them to live together in a world in which they increasingly find themselves pushed to the margins, and where a bordering country close to take-off could reveal itself as more to be feared than a world power”.