Time Is Ripe to Take Action
Since long there is a broad discourse over the appealing urgency for a different Europe with the European Union as the engine to shape a new paradigm capable to bring fundamental change to the old Continent in all aspects: economic, financial, military, social and health care among others. This urge has become the worry of the day as the unexpected severe health crisis has brought above surface fully naked the deep cracks of the worn-out European edifice. The pandemic and its multidimensional repercussions have spared no country, wealthy or poor, founders or newcomers of the Union, and the state of things is compared at random to the aftermath of the Second World War. The one-year pandemic ordeal has convincingly proven that the old formulas and consumed solutions are no longer effective. Time has arrived to take action not only for the EU's future but also for ‘Global Europe’!
Back at the time after the end of the World War II the wise statesmen of the old Continent put their heads together and thanks to hard imaginative and unselfish work standing high above their own nationalistic interests Europe was reborn from the tragedy of the war to triumph. But along with its rapid multidimensional prosperity taking its place as one of the most powerful and authoritative powers in the world as time has kept passing, the configuration of the world has changed; it is a process still in progress. Europe has been experiencing new social, economic and political challenges as the people, particularly the youth, have become more demanding. In addition, the balance of power on the world scene has dramatically changed with some burning problems calling for pragmatic solutions. The past Cold War is over, but its shadow still looms.
Against this background the EU has realized that it is high time for an energetic restart of building a new Europe trespassing the frontiers of Brussels through concrete actions, legislative changes, and even treaty changes without losing time. The enlargement of the Union towards the Western Balkans cannot be neglected and kept in the drawers of bureaucracy as it is a time when no vacuums can be left empty for long because people throughout Europe are more demanding in their vital needs, but ambitions, too. Feeling excluded in the heart of Europe is disheartening!
Taking into consideration all these and many other ‘headaches’ the task set to the Conference on the Future of Europe, a proposal of the European Commission and the European Parliament, announced in the end of 2019 and a concept first floated by French President Emmanuel Macron, has become a challenge that could not be left aside anymore.
On March 10, 2021, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Parliament President David Sassoli and Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa, whose country holds the Council of the EU’s rotating presidency, sealed the plan for the conference, slated to begin in May 2020, in a ceremony held at the Parliament’s Brussels hemicycle.
Von der Leyen, Sassoli and Costa put their signatures on a “joint declaration†after months of delays because of the pandemic and bickering between EU institutions over who should be in charge. If it is summed up in a few words this historical endeavor aims at seeking and agreeing how the Union should reform for coming generations of its member countries and of other parts of Europe.
“It’s a special day for European democracy,†Sassoli said in his remarks on the occasion. “Finally, we’re off!... What we know we have to do is now to establish the basis for a new European social contract.â€
“This conference has to go beyond Brussels,†von der Leyen said. “We want to reach what some call the silent majority.â€
The EU cannot “lose more time,†Costa added. “It’s time to deliver, it’s time to start building our future together.â€
The idea of the EU’s need to engage in bureaucratic soul-searching is nothing new as at the start of the millennium, former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing presided over a “Convention on the Future of Europe†from 2002 to 2003. The goal of the gathering was to reform the EU’s treaties in preparation for the bloc’s 2004 enlargement - which brought in 10 Central and Eastern European countries - as well as to produce a constitution for Europe. “The adventure ended on a sour note, though, when France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed constitution,†said political analyst Maia de la Baume writing for Politico on March 4, 2021.
It is true that the EU has also tried numerous ways to respond to Euroskepticism and improve its engagement with citizens in the last decade. The Commission and some European countries set up “citizens’ dialogues,'' inviting people to share their views in town hall-style meetings with officials, MEPs or civil servants. Macron himself in 2018 launched the idea of establishing citizen debates or conventions citoyennes on several topics, including on the future of Europe. “His convention on climate was a beautiful idea,†declared Philippe Lamberts, the co-leader of the Greens group in the European Parliament, as quoted by the portal Politico.eu.
The impulse to hold wide discussions on how the EU should be reshaped also emerged around the 2019 EU elections, after a failed push to elect the Commission president through the Spitzenkandidat system, which its supporters argued would give voters more of a say in who takes the EU’s top job.
Multilingual digital platform to be launched on April 19
But the first solid step which will reportedly put moving the project seems to be the multilingual digital platform enabling all European Union citizens to participate in the Conference on the Future of Europe which will be launched on 19 April. This was announced by the EU institutions. According to what is said about this ‘multilingual digital platform’ is that it will enable citizens from all over Europe to give their opinion on any topic they consider important for the future of the EU, present their ideas, comment on the ideas of others, create and participate in events to discuss the future of the EU, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU, of which Portugal is currently presiding, the European Commission said in a statement.
The platform will be the central hub of the Conference, a place where all contributions will be gathered and shared and will have a feedback mechanism that will aggregate and analyze the key points raised so that they can be taken into account, in addition to a list, and a map, of the events, organized at local, regional, national and European level.
(The Conference will have TheFutureIsYours as its official ‘hashtag’)
The decision to launch the platform on 19 April, even before the formal launch of the Conference on the Future of Europe - scheduled for 9 May, Europe Day in Strasbourg - was approved at the second meeting of the executive committee, co-chaired by representatives of the three institutions: Secretary of State for European Affairs Ana Paula Zacarias, Commissioner Dubravka Suica and MEP Guy Verhofstadt. The ‘multilingual digital platform’ will be the launch of the target to be accomplished by the Conference: to discuss and collect views from EU citizens on what matters to them about the EU - whether it’s the EU’s Green Deal and digital transition, or the way European elections should be designed. Those views will dictate the conference’s reform recommendations.
To illustrate the immediate urgency to establish the pillars for a new European social contract which does not leave anyone behind it seems meaningful an excerpt from a commentary by Herb Bowie carried by the portal medium.com on April 8 this year: “Ernest Hemingway supplied two of his characters in The Sun Also Rises with a pair of memorably terse lines. ‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ Mike’s answer has been quoted endlessly since then, probably because it seems to perfectly encapsulate a recurring modern sensation of having things firmly under control, then seeing them start to slip slowly from our grasp, and then the next minute realizing we’ve lost hold completely.â€
With what is happening and it is in progress in the EU institutions and member states at the outset of 2021 it seems that the Union is determined to avoid the downwards trajectory of abrupt bankruptcy of Europe. The first moments of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and the ensuing crisis could not be forgotten easily, rather they should be a constant reminder for each and everyone at EU headquarters and leaderships of the member countries.
As the Conference has started to get steam with the first expected event on April 19 this year Albanian Daily News asked some ambassadors and political analysts which are their expectations from such an historical event for the future of the Union closely linked with recovery from the pandemic as well as the enlargement perspective towards the Western Balkans. Below are their contributions:
Croatian Ambassador Zlatko Kramaric
There is no doubt that we live in a time when the EU has to face issues relating to its future. And that confrontation must be extremely serious. We are witnessing the world around us changing dramatically. And these changes require adequate reactions, answers. Old formulas, old solutions are no longer effective. We live in times of new social, economic and political challenges (migrant crisis, warning and dramatic climate change, negative demographic trends in Europe, where Europe's population is getting older, more comfortable, more demanding, and when we look at all these elements in the context of this pandemic, which has no end in sight ...), it is required exceptional responsibility and imaginativeness from European politicians, because it is more than obvious that the old, worn-out paradigm cannot solve all these burning problems.
In other words, EU politicians should be asked to behave responsibly, change the governing perspectives significantly, existing priorities ...
Of course, the countries of the Western Balkans are in an even more difficult position, feeling that this stay in the European waiting room is not only too long, but the waiting time is extremely uncertain. The EU is on the move. She is the one who has to say what her vision of the 'new Europe' is! and that answer must be:
a) known to all;
b) must be unambiguous and
c) must become binding on all members and non-members
Of course, its implementation requires a radical change of previous EU policies, both those of political strategies (some of them also refer to the EU enlargement project), but even more those that refer to current economic policies. Here, first of all, we think that the institute of 'solidarity' should become one of the fundamental postulates of this new European policy.
It should be said that Europe has faced similar challenges in the past. Thus, in 1935, the famous German philosopher E. Husserl gave a lecture in Vienna on the relationship between Europe and the crisis. And that intelligent people were aware that the idea of Europe must be constantly questioned.
It is a time of growth and flourishing of both right and left totalitarianisms (fascism, Nazism, communism, Stalinism ...), which threaten to annul any idea of humanists. But the clever people of that time (T. Mann, G. Orwell, A. Einstein ...), wise politicians (Churchill ...) managed to convince the world public that freedom and democracy have no alternative. They simply knew how to recognize true values, understood what important priorities were, and dedicated their lives to solving them. They did so in a calm, rational way.
Spanish Ambassador Marcos Alonso Alonso
The Conference on the Future of Europe represents a great opportunity to place the European citizen at the very heart of the future of the EU. The Covid pandemic and its terrible effects have shown how much the destiny of Europeans is interlinked together as well as the importance of acting at EU-level, being the EU recovery plan a good case in point.
I believe that the Conference will send a message of hope and confidence in our common future, which should be fairer, more inclusive, greener and more digital.
The Conference on the Future of Europe is designed to be an open, transparent and inclusive process, and thus I am convinced that it will strengthen European democracy as well as the notion of European citizenship.
Finally, the Conference should reaffirm the EU's values-based global role, and hence our commitment to support our fellow Europeans – particularly those in the Western Balkans - who have chosen to be part of us, bound by our shared European values and are fully committed to pursue the necessary reforms.
EFB Director Aleksandra Tomanić
The Conference on the Future of Europe could be indeed a new chapter, for the EU itself, but also for the de-facto dead enlargement process. It could be the much needed proof that the future of the Western Balkans lies within the European Union and was not only lip service.
First, it is about the future of Europe, not the EU, and wants to treat topics such as “a global Europeâ€. This is credible only if you find ways to include more than your own member states, but also enlargement countries, already surrounded by EU member states. This should especially be important to a Commission claiming to be a geopolitical one.
Second, topics such as environment and climate change cannot be credibly addressed and even less solved without the Western Balkans, where the biggest polluters of the continent are located. And a “European Health Union†without looking at the whole continent is impossible, as we have just witnessed over the past year.
There are structures of regional cooperation, knowledge in think tanks and energy in local movements that could meet the requirements and deliver.
ECFR Head of Sofia Office Vessela Tcherneva
The Conference for the Future of Europe is practically a response to the spreading of anti-EU populism among Europeans. It aims at bringing people closer to the EU, which sometimes feels distant to them because of its heavy bureaucratic nature. The goals of the CFR are ambitious, and it is unclear whether the deficiencies within the EU will be successfully addressed in a year. It is important to point that the outcome is highly dependent on the developments in Germany in the fall - and will become part of the election campaign in France next year. The potential success of the initiative will positively affect the attractiveness of the EU itself for the countries from its neighborhood.
In the meantime, the Western Balkans will not be on the top of EU’s agenda but there will be a number of investment and recovery post-pandemic opportunities aimed at boosting the economic growth of the region. It will be up to the WB countries to take advantage of them, no need to wait for the accession to start fixing things. The unfortunate Bulgarian veto of North Macedonia demonstrated that blockages can appear from unexpected places and it is better to just stick to the own course. At the end of the day the Western Balkans will be judged by their own efforts in making the countries a better place for the citizens.