Building consensus

The unification and the building of Europe is a long and complex process that requires patience and understanding towards the partners and the neighbours that are part of this process. The serious crisis that has hit the European Union brings related difficulties to the fore. The risk of giving up and relinquishing all hopes that the endeavour will succeed is real and it is expressed in a growing diffidence on the part of the public opinion. To counter these temptations and convince others that it is worthwhile to persevere with faith and trust on what has been recognised as the right path, it must be remembered that the value system underlying European unification, expressed in the Founding Fathers’ commitment in the Nineteen-fifties and in the founding Treaties of the European Communities an of the EU, is substantially Christian ethics. Examining the establishment of the European Community at the beginning of the Nineteen-fifties, it’s easy to identify the determining values and principles of peace, reconciliation, solidarity, justice, freedom; values recovered after the terrible war waged by unrestrained nationalism and by a totalitarian ideology that scorned human dignity. These principles represent the backbone of the ethical consensus on which reposes the European unification building and its most significant concretization: the European Union. The establishment of peace between States was a necessary condition for the progress of peoples and societies that had to be rebuilt after the devastations of the war. Peace had to be grounded on facts and works, and it had to be guaranteed in time by institutionalised supranational cooperation. Reconciliation of ex enemies was the ‘conditio sine qua non’ for peace, which required considerable effort in order to understand and accept the “other”. This learning process was promoted by the work for the creation of an organization for the joint administration of coal and steel in the involved countries. Solidarity between European nations was a pre-requisite for the establishment of the joint project, namely, of the European Community. Such solidarity was sought and found in the common action and in the common solution to common problems. Justice was an indispensable feature for a living solidarity supported by all the stakeholders. It had to be based on treaties, which reorganized relations within the community, establishing rules for cross-border coexistence, concretized in Community policies. Lastly, freedom was critical to the development of human dignity, for the establishment of all these principles: in political action, across society and in the private lives of individuals. Today, in the light of present and future problems, we are called to reanimate such principles and draw the consequences for the present developments. And indeed, for the European Union, these principles cannot be renounced as they once were for the European Coal and Steel Community and for the European Economic Community. In the framework of the ongoing challenges, these principles must be implemented fully, since what is at stake is no longer the peace between European states and peoples, but rather – because of globalization and of its consequences – world peace, threatened by striking differences between rich and poor continents, by fanaticism and by terrorism; as well as domestic social peace, threatened by poverty, marginalization and by the loss of social cohesion. Thus today reconciliation is strongly needed, along with the recovery of solidarity within European societies and within “world society”. In order to overcome social injustice and the related fragmentation of society, it is necessary to reaffirm the rule of law as the foundation of peaceful coexistence at all levels, also, and in particular, at the level of “our only world”.Beyond the traditional principles underlying the European unification project, in today’s different circumstances new values stemming from a new understanding of political and social responsibilities act as the guiding principles of European politics. For example, sustainability understood as the responsibility towards the next generations takes on a very special value in our awareness – and therefore also on the political agenda. Or subsidiarity, that acts both as a political subsidiarity that takes place amongst communities, regions and member States’ leaders, and as social subsidiarity conveyed in the autonomy of the protagonists of civil society, in the different areas of responsibility. Also in the future, the European Union, in order to preserve its cohesion, fulfil its politics and in particular, to overcome the crisis, will have to be guided by these values, which represent the moral code of European unification.