The proposed 'fiscal compact' treaty currently being negotiated overly emphasises austerity and is insufficient to resolve the economic difficulties, says German MEP Jo Leinen. However the unprecedented attention brought to the EU by the crisis also presents an opportunity for European federalists to make their case to the public, he says.
Jo Leinen is a German social democratic MEP (Socialists & Democrats) and the new president of the European Movement International. He is also the chairman of the European Parliament's Environment Committee. He was interviewed by EURACTIV's Christophe Leclercq and Craig Willy.
To read a shortened version of this interview, please click here.
Mr Leinen, you have recently been elected president of the European Movement. You have previously led the Union of European Federalists. Is this a sign of rapprochement between the two organisations?
In fact the whole process of the convention for a constitutional treaty has brought the pro-European organisations in civil society onto the same line and objective. We recognise that the community method is the method to govern, to lead and to meet Europe's challenges.
The community method is ultimately a federal method where EU institutions have a special role: to be independent and to look for the common good in European affairs. European Federalists and the European Movement are today working closely together.
So that's a bit of a change for the European Movement which was not explicitly federalist.
Yes, there have been times when this more confederal thinking of a Europe of nation-states was very strong in the European Movement.
In the member organisations of the European Movement it was also recognised that the intergovernmental method has its limits and the community method should be promoted. Therefore from policy area to policy area we would look to the architecture of the community method through the existing European institutions.
As a new president replacing Pat Cox, you have a new style, perhaps a new strategy. What are your own objectives for the European Movement International?
Europe is in a crisis and Europe needs friends. The European Movement is a network of friends of the great historic idea of European unification. So we have to relaunch the European Movement in civil society by a better mobilisation of public awareness. [We need] civil society support to push the decision-makers towards better and more Europe.
There is this approach notably with the European Movement Network Germany to gather civil society organisations as opposed to having direct membership of citizens. Is it an approach you hope to use throughout the European Movement network?
The European Movement International is, like the European Movement Germany, an umbrella organisation of member organisations.
In fact, my strategy is to greatly enlarge our network because we need most of the pro-European organisations to be members of the EMI and then to have greater strength and a greater voice…
That is clear at the European level but at the national level is there an idea to roll out this civil society membership approach?
The traditions of our national member organisations are quite diverse. You have European movements of individual activist members as well as a mixture of organisations and individuals, or as in Germany, an umbrella organisation of pro-European civil society organisations.
It would be hard to have only one approach but clearly the European Movement Germany is a success story and there is best practice. Others should look more closely at how they have done it and try to do the same in their respective countries.
A number of people in European federalist circles have welcomed the launch of the European Citizens' Initiative but I have heard there is not an idea for a broad pan-European initiative supported by all the different organisations. Why is the tool of ECI not being used by the circles you are now presiding?
We are working on it and I hope that early next year we will come to an attractive and important topic where we want to mobilise citizens for their signatures and support. We have to be careful that the ECI is not hijacked by eurosceptics and other anti-European elements.
But this you cannot prevent, you can only do your own…
We would of course support ECIs that push for closer union and more Europe. We would ultimately look for a good topic where the European Movement International and its friends could also start an ECI.
What's your idea for such a topic, do you have a proposal on the table?
No, we have a few political issues, a few institutional issues where the European idea is reflected and promoted. There was an event at our congress in Warsaw in late November, when we collected 12 different ideas. I think the new board [of the EMI] should discuss and decide which is the best for us.
Let's shift topic to the new treaty that is to be agreed in the context of the eurozone crisis. It is an intergovernmental treaty which might exclude some member states and which puts a strong emphasis on fiscal controls that might make Keynesian policies impossible. How do you judge this treaty as a federalist and as a social democrat?
The new treaty is definitely only the second if not the third-best option that we could have. It would have been preferable to work inside the existing treaties and I have a few amendments to suggest to the existing treaties for the economic and fiscal union.
But whoever is guilty, whether its David Cameron, Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy, it didn't work. So a treaty outside the treaty with only 27 minus 1 is not optimal and poses a lot of legal and political problems.
Nonetheless I think fiscal union is one key objective, one key target to be achieved in the year 2012. I am happy that the Parliament has been involved from the beginning in the preparation of the treaty text. We definitely do not want only an austerity policy but also a policy for economic growth.
This proposal presented by President Van Rompuy is one-sided and lacks the other components of how we come out of an economic recession and how we can generate sustainable growth and new jobs. That is totally lacking.
We have inside the Lisbon Treaty the possibility of enhanced cooperation and this is in the community framework, where the Commission has a role and the Parliament has a role. I would like the Commission to be much more proactive, much more dynamic in legislative proposals for economic growth.
What should be in the treaty to allow this? Should it be something like eurobonds or changing the ECB's role to have a growth target as well as an inflation target?
Ideally it would also find its place in the treaty and I think a new balanced agreement for all would reflect stability as well as solidarity. You have the two pillars: the union of stability and the union of solidarity.
And the proposal on the table is only going for stability and not providing elements for solidarity: The eurobond idea of common bond purchases, a bigger role for the ECB as a lender of last resort, and a European Union budget which could promote investments and economic growth.
You have these three elements that are completely lacking. Somehow there must be a political deal in which this growth strategy and this solidarity strategy are implemented either in a separate treaty, by separate action, or even inside the Lisbon Treaty.
If you had to choose between the tax on financial transactions on the one hand and keeping the UK in the EU system on the other hand, what would you choose?
This is the wrong question. Cameron made perhaps the biggest mistake of his political career because he connected a question of the common market, of ordinary EU legislation, with a new question of fiscal union where Britain would not even be concerned because it would address the eurozone member states and those who would want to join this fiscal pact.
So I think he chose the wrong moment to ask for something which is disconnected from the matter at hand. Financial regulation is ordinary legislation on the common market. He lost all his power by this very mistaken manoeuvre.
Do you exclude some kind of compromise in the coming 2-3 months with the UK?
In common market questions it is not possible for France to ask for an opt-out on agricultural policy, for Germany to ask for an opt-out for automobiles, or for Spain to ask for an opt-out on fisheries policy. So Britain cannot ask for an opt-out on financial regulation.
Regarding the budget there was a precedent with the British rebate which was negotiated by Mrs Thatcher. Why not some kind of a compromise in order to keep the UK in?
If you ask me as a social democrat, I say clearly no. If you ask me as the president of the European Movement, I would like Britain come back to the table and find a solution that will not split Europe.
Not only into two-speeds, but into 'two Europes'. There is a clear difference between a two-speed Europe where everyone has to do everything, but it can come a bit later, and a two-Europes concept where some do not have the same commitments as the others.
So will the European Movement take some initiatives to bring the UK back to the table, perhaps with the European Movement UK?
This is a good moment to relaunch in Great Britain the European Movement and strengthen the network that wants to belong to the European Union, not as a second-class member, but as a first-class member. That must be the aim of the European movement. Of course the European Movement cannot accept unreasonable conditions that are put on the table.
Everybody knows that the City of London is a great economic asset for Great Britain and even for Europe. We want to have such a financial centre in our continent and not only in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York. It's good that Europe has a place where these capital flows and financial activities take place.
Maybe one can find a middle road where the City of London can further develop, and at the same time our experience of the crash in the financial markets has consequences for regulation and financial actors.
In 1948 there was a famous congress in the Hague where many illustrious speakers, including Winston Churchill, spoke of their European vision. What would the people of the Hague say if they were here today? Would they say you have made great achievements or that you have destroyed their dreams?
Already during the second world war and afterwards you had visionary people like Altiero Spinelli who always believed in a political union. You had Winston Churchill and others who believed in overcoming these hostilities and confrontations between European nation-states.
I think all of them would be really astonished at how far the European project has developed: no border controls, a common currency for many of these states, a common foreign policy in the making, a common market that is by and large realised, a European Parliament elected by the people with more and more competencies…
It took Switzerland [for example] 150 years to create a confederation.
My worry is that at the end of the second world war there was a political will to unite. Today, we are forced to unite because of external challenges. So it's not really due to political will but it is because of constraints and the pressure put on Europe that decision-makers have to unite more.
It was the case after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the introduction of the euro. It was the pressure of this historic moment. We have a foreign and security policy by the pressure of the Balkan Wars where Europe clearly showed its inability to act. We have now the pressure by the financial markets to go for fiscal union.
So we have pressure to go towards a common climate policy because of course no country alone could meet this challenge.
We should come back to a free political will to unite Europe and not act under pressure. I hope that the crisis will also be a chance. There has never been so much debate about Europe than in these months.
The European Movement and civil society have a big role to play to recreate the political will for the European idea: That it is a historic process to unite this continent after a thousand years of wars and conflicts.
Participants in a 'shadow summit' hosted yesterday (8 December) by the federalist Spinelli Group said they were "fed up" with the secretive political deals of EU leaders and called for a convention to map out a new vision for Europe.
The shadow summit denounced the Franco-German ‘directoire’ and the two nation's initiative to cobble together a European treaty outside the EU framework.
Instead, it advocated a convention of representatives from the European and national parliaments, the Commission, civic organisations and heads of state.
The federalist meeting was attended by the European Parliament's liberal group leader Guy Verhofstadt, co-chair of the Green group Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and former Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Simitis.
The group adopted a statement which appears as a wish-list of economic measures and initiatives to strengthen democracy in the European Union.
In the economic field, the group calls for the creation of a European Monetary Fund, the introduction of eurobonds and for extending the powers of the European Central Bank.
Speaking before the announcement that the eurozone countries would establish a treaty outside the EU framework, Verhofstadt warned that this was "not a way forward".
"People are fed up with political leaders, but they still believe in Europe. What we need is an ‘agora’ where citizens have their say," Verhofstadt said.
Some of the statements made at the shadow summit may now sound naïve in light of the latest developments.
Andrew Duff, a prominent British MEP and spokesman on constitutional affairs for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), said that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was going to be "constructive" and not seek specific British opt-outs during the leadership summit.
In fact, eurozone countries embarked last night (8 December) on the less enviable option of a treaty among the 17 eurozone countries, open to others, after Cameron made "unacceptable demands" to exempt Britain from financial regulations, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said.
The debt crisis has highlighted the limits of inter-governmental cooperation in the euro zone. Attempting to manage a single currency with 17 separate economic policies is like squaring the circle, write Guy Verhofstadt, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other politicians at the Spinelli Group, which campaigns for a federalist Europe.
Guy Verhofstadt, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Isabelle Durant, Sylvie Goulard, Sergio Cofferati and Andrew Duff are co-founders of the Spinelli Group, which campaigns for a federalist Europe. This commentary is also being published in the FT Deutschland, Il Sole 24 Ore and Libération.
"With our fellow citizens increasingly astonished, concerned and agitated over Europe's inability to fight the crisis, the time has come for the European federalists in the Spinelli Group to bring the inter-governmentalist dreamers back down to earth: the euro is a single currency that cannot survive if each nation state continues to go its own way in terms of economic and budget policy.
The heads of state and government have been attempting to reconcile this impossible situation for months, without success. Their decisions are not stupid, but attempting to manage a single currency with 17 separate economic policies is like squaring the circle. Important decisions have indeed been taken since 2008, but with all the procrastination it was a matter of too little, too late – as demonstrated by the 21 July plan.
The euro zone needs tools for a genuine economic, budgetary and fiscal policy. Clearly, in the short term the support plan for Greece must be adjusted to include resources and objectives that are better geared to the state of the Greek economy. Getting Greece on the road to recovery will take time; its public administration still has shortcomings. To make the debt bearable, the burden will once again have to be shared with the private sector. A coordinated, transparent plan must be developed to recapitalise European banks in order to restore the interbank confidence critical to the financing of the real economy, and any such recapitalisation must be subject to responsible behaviour.
The construction of a modern Greek state will certainly run up against powerful vested interests that are currently exempt from taxes. The best way for the Union to support this process and ensure that everyone's interests are taken into account is for it to present a credible plan to fight fraud and tax evasion, with a special emphasis on banking secrecy and tax havens.
However, the Greek crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. The bond crisis involves several euro zone countries. The European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) is finally operational, after being held up by political squabbling in several Member States. But the events of recent weeks have shown that such a mechanism cannot continue being subject to 17 national procedures. The Union must be given the resources it needs to react quickly and it must have its own European Monetary Fund (EMF), with greater capital and enhanced lending capacity and in which decisions are taken by a majority.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that is why the Union must ultimately have a European bond market populated with eurobonds issued by a European Debt Agency. The eurobonds would be issued within the limits set out in the Stability and Growth Pact and would enable the pooling of 60% of the sovereign debt of euro zone countries. This considerable mass of liquidity should make it possible to obtain the best rating, whereas if a debt above 60% remained national it would be put under surveillance and would therefore be more expensive for the most extravagant states to refinance. That would force them to be more disciplined.
Budgetary consolidation efforts are likely to weaken the European economy at a time when it is urgently necessary to put the crisis behind us and get back on the path of growth. Compared to Americans, Europeans tend to save more. These savings can be used to finance a wide range of pan-European investments designed to modernise and thoroughly transform the European economy.
Using project bonds, the Union could build the infrastructure for education, research, renewable energy, transport and telecommunications needed to ensure a more fair and sustainable future. This effort must be enhanced by a more autonomous European budget, endowed in part by the tax on financial transactions. Moreover, a Single Act for Growth must be enacted, setting out binding and ambitious convergence criteria on taxation, pensions, employment and wages. A good balance between investment and social cohesion will have to be found in accordance with the social partners, while at the same time we must be aware that finding real solutions to the problems facing young people is an urgent priority.
To successfully complete all of these projects, the European Union must have a solid, democratic economic governance powers. Only the European Commission has this kind of legitimacy and is in a position to safeguard the general interest. The functions of the President of the Commission and the President of the European Council could be merged. The President of the Commission embodies the general interest to a greater extent – if only because he is appointed by Parliament. The scope of the office will be enhanced in 2014. Consequently, the euro zone Finance Minister should be appointed from within the Commission. He or she will chair the Euro Group, will be advised by a group of Commissioners responsible for economic policy and will represent only the euro zone and its Member States in the international financial organisations.
The democratisation of economic governance is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Given the importance of the economic and social decisions that need to be taken, European decisionmakers must be held accountable. Only a cross-border public debate will make it possible to take the various interdependencies into consideration. Accordingly, entrusting 'economic governance' to the European Council would make no sense at all.
Some of the proposed reforms can be carried out under the current treaties. Others will require changes to the treaties, if only to arrange the necessary links between the federal core of the European Union and the countries that are one day be invited to join it.
This debate is difficult, but much less difficult than it was when we launched the constitutional treaty project 10 years ago. Today, the peoples of Europe are aware that the shortcomings in European governance threaten the euro and the Union, two things to which the vast majority of Europeans are attached. The federalists in the Spinelli Group want to use this expectation of change as a foundation on which to build a stronger, more democratic Union for the future of Europe."
In June the European Parliament is to vote on a major package of proposals to reform its composition and electoral procedure. Here the Parliament’s rapporteur, UK Liberal Democrat MEP Andrew Duff (ALDE) argues the case for change.
The following commentary was sent exclusively to EURACTIV by Andrew Duff MEP (ALDE; UK), rapporteur for the European Parliament on electoral reform and president of the Union of European Federalists (UEF).
"European unity is at risk. While the Lisbon Treaty greatly increased the competences of the European Union and the powers of its institutions, especially those of the Parliament, nothing much has been done to improve its popular legitimacy.
Turnout in European parliamentary elections continues to decline, from 63% in 1979 to 43% in 2009. Solidarity has been in short supply. Protectionism is too often the first reaction to crises of the euro zone, and to Arab refugees. Taking its lead from fractious governments, popular opinion is all too susceptible to militant nationalism.
When times get tough, the relative democratic weakness of Europe's system of governance is exposed. The European Union is run by elites. Most people freely admit to knowing next to nothing about it. The popular media remains narrowly national.
In tackling EU affairs, national parliaments are frustrated by ignorance tinged with jealousy. They and their political parties have stopped acting as a reliable conduit between public opinion and Europe, resulting in a serious dislocation between the EU's governments and electorates.
At the very time when the EU has become more powerful and more necessary than ever, so it disappears from the daily political lives of most of its citizens.
Limping democracy
The European Union is a unique experiment in building a post-national democracy. There has never been another democratic federal union of international states and citizens. The EU continues to evolve, not least in the field of fundamental rights, yet its political development is lopsided: the democratic leg limps.
It is essential that the reach of Europe's parliamentary democracy should match the scope of its government, which has surely transcended the nation state, of its economy, which is well integrated across national boundaries, and of its courts, which have long since recognised the primacy of EU law.
Unless politics catches up with the European reality, democracy is in peril. Urgent action at EU level is needed to repair a generalised absence of trust between the people and government. As the scale of European integration is now extending into new areas, such as fiscal policy and internal and external security, it is vital that the European citizen is able to locate who does what and why at the federal level.
Voters are often wiser than those who serve them. No intelligent European elector can believe the pretensions of national politicians, who claim to be able to tackle on their own the global challenges of finance, poverty, security or climate. European integration is the common-sense regional reaction to globalisation.
The EU brings values, structure and direction to European integration. Yet the EU is necessarily complex and, because of its size, distant: it is not a simple extrapolation of its member states. Familiar ways and means of doing things within states do not simply transcribe themselves onto the larger trans-national canvas.
New agencies and methods need to be found to ensure that Europe's federal experiment remains profoundly democratic and that those who govern the EU have, in equal measure, the capability to lead and the capacity to be held to account.
Rescuing the political party
Oiling the wheels of democracy is what electoral procedures and political parties are for. At present, both are failing in the EU. The electoral system results in 27 disjointed national election campaigns and renders MEPs distant figures.
Europe's political party system is failing to sustain the project of European unification in a democratic and efficient way. Even if they were willing to concentrate on EU affairs (which they are not), national parliaments, either singly or collectively, are incapable of exercising proper democratic control at the European level.
Europe's single political market needs strong political parties that can work effectively across the internal frontiers of the Union. In politics as in economics, the EU needs now to take action to correct market failure.
Political parties are an essential sinew of democracy, and at the European level that sinew is missing. Genuine European political parties are needed if the anxieties and aspirations of the people are to be well articulated and moderated at the federal level, and if the lively party politics within the European Parliament are to find a larger resonance in the public arena.
To be sure, the European political families have already created formal party organisations which broadly mirror the political groups inside the European Parliament: Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Liberals, Greens, Right and Left.
But these parties are pale forerunners of what they need to become. A major objective of the European Parliament's current package of proposals, therefore, is to galvanise the rapid development of truly European political parties.
The key reform is to introduce a pan-EU constituency in which 25 additional MEPs will be elected. The job of finding and selecting 25 candidates and ordering them on gender-balanced, trans-national lists will fall to these nascent European political parties. At least nine nationalities must be represented on each list. Each voter will have two votes: one for the current national or regional list, the other for the pan-EU constituency.
Campaigns transformed
The changes, if adopted, will transform the next European election campaign. The European dimension will become much more prominent as political parties address topical issues of EU politics and offer the electorate realistic choices about the shape and direction of EU government.
The public will get a more accurate view of how the Parliament works and what it does. Even the media may get engaged in reporting the story that political parties and personalities across Europe are competing with each other for ideas, votes and seats. Some of the champions on the trans-national lists will become well known across national borders. And from those lists might well emerge Mr Barroso's successor as president of the European Commission.
The Duff Report includes at least three other important matters. It seeks to update the EU's system of parliamentary privileges and immunities to better reflect the supranational reality.
It also triggers the negotiations with the Council which are necessary in order to re-distribute the existing 751 seats in the Parliament before 2014 to take account of migratory and demographic changes as well as the need to respect the treaty-based principle of regressive proportionality.
Lastly, it calls on the European Commission to initiate new legislation to make it easier for citizens living in an EU state other than their own to participate in European elections.
Taking the initiative
The Duff Report is the first use by MEPs of their new powers under Lisbon to initiate a revision of the treaties. The package will be sent by Parliament to the European Council, which will have to decide, by simple majority, whether to open an intergovernmental conference to install trans-national lists.
All the proposals, including the extra 25 MEPs (Article 14(2) Treaty on European Union), the revision of the 1965 Protocol on Privileges and Immunities and other changes to primary law (the 1976 Electoral Act), as well as the decision on the apportionment of seats, will require a consensus to be reached among governments and the final agreement of the European Parliament, followed by ratification in each national parliament.
There will be resistance, especially from Eurosceptic national leaders. But it ill-behoves those leaders, be they ever so powerful, to blame the EU for not working well (and holding the Parliament in particular contempt) while, at the same time, refusing to do anything to rectify the problems. Few heads of government can relish the prospect of a constitutional clash with the European Parliament.
Electoral reform is timely, cost-efficient and necessary. Those who care for the future of Europe should support it."
Original LINK
Leading MEP Andrew Duff has tabled "federalist" proposals to enable future EU treaty revisions to be made with a four-fifths majority of member states, in a bid to bypass the UK's 'referendum lock' on any further treaty amendments.
Duff gave a group of Brussels journalists a copy of a letter he sent yesterday (3 March) to European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, in which he calls for a revision of Article 48 of the Lisbon Treaty.
If Duff's proposal was to succeed, future EU treaty amendments could enter into force if a four-fifths majority of member countries ratify the treaty change, instead of all member countries as is currently the case. Before any treaty change, unanimity at an Intergovernmental conference (IGC) still remains essential.
Duff, a UK Liberal Democrat MEP who sits in the Parliament's ALDE group, made it plain that his intention was to solve "the British problem," as he called it, and to counter the "referendum lock" that Britain put on any future EU treaty changes involving transfers of power to Brussels (see 'Background').
The leading MEP, who is a member of the Parliament's constitutional affairs committee and a well-known federalist, made no secret of the fact that his initiative was inspired by 'the Spinelli draft' – a draft treaty establishing a European Union written in 1984 by Altiero Spinelli, who is consided today as a "father of Europe" and a founder of the federalist movement.
Duff said he was well aware that many countries were alarmed that the UK 'referendum lock' could halt the incremental process which helps to build the European Union.
Asked if it were realistic to expect the UK to back treaty change of this kind, Duff said such a "miracle" was not impossible. "[UK Prime Minister David] Cameron is an intelligent man, who may say 'let's do this'," he said.
Asked by EURACTIV what role Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg might play, Duff said: "Nick Clegg understands my thinking of the matter very well."
Buzek is now expected to refer Duff's letter to the Parliament's constitutional affairs committee, which will produce a report. Duff said that as usual, he expected the EU assembly to be divided between federalists and anti-federalists. The proposal would then be sent to national governments, which may decide to hold an intergovernmental conference and change the treaty.
Duff said he would expect his proposal to be inserted in a package with other treaty amendments that would appear in the meantime.
EU heads of state and government will meet on 24-25 March to agree on 'limited' treaty change in order to enshrine into law a bailout mechanism that has already been used for Greece and Ireland.
In her book-project Florina-Laura Neculai, PhD student at the Catholic University of Leuven, explains European federalism in easily comprehensible terms. The project was supported by the Union of European Federalists (UEF) and is available in 14 languages.
Preface by Dr. Friedhelm Frischenschlager, Secretary-General of the Union of European Federalists:
The literature on federalism has now a short, simple and explicit text. A young author is trying to give an answer to the question: “What Would a Federal Europe Look Like?” to the young audience.
Conducting three fictional interviews with characters that are more or less taken from the European political reality, the author gives a note of originality and dynamism to the literature on European federalism. The author explains what federalism is all about with a very practical approach: the fictional interviews, conducted by a young team of a reporter and a cameraman working for the European Television for Youth, reveal that European federalism has deep roots in history and describe its evolution in time. The book gives precise examples of European policies such as education, employment, health and consumer protection, and tries to explain what would change if Europe were a federal state; and it also shows the strengths a federal European Union would have on the international scene. Furthermore, it gives good arguments for the many advantages of a federal European Union and still leaves it up to the young public whether or not they personally approve of this model or not.
Such initiatives coming from the young generation are more than welcome! Young people should be encouraged to get involved more actively in explaining the complex European issues and particularly the benefits of a federal European Union to the citizens. The federalist vision of a European Union needs to be explained in such a manner that the “man on the street” understands it. This is the main aim of this book and it fulfils this aim. But such an initiative should definitely go hand in hand with more political action.The European Union is currently in a crisis as quite a number of European citizens have lost faith in the capability of the EU to solve the most pressing problems they face today, such as unemployment for example. European citizens need to be better informed about European politics and they should be involved to a greater extent. The constitutional debate should continue and actively involve all citizens. All pro-Europeans and all that have voted in favour of a European Constitution – and the majority of the member states and of the EU’s population have done so – should jointly fight for a European Constitution.
The “reflection period” does not require silence, but more action. For the European project to go on, a synergy of action is necessary. The initiative of the European Commission to improve its communication with the citizens, the socalled “Plan D” (D for democracy, dialogue and debate) can only be a success if the citizens of Europe support it. On the other hand, it is difficult to involve citizens in such a complex process as European affairs.
However, through a greater transfer of power to regions and local authorities, citizens might get a better grasp of Europe and participate more actively in articulating the federal vision for Europe. The process towards a federal future of the European Union must involve the young generation. We have to make sure that they understand the many advantages a united Europe offers. As mentioned in its subtitle, the book “What Would a Federal Europe Look Like?” is a visionary exercise for the young generation, but it can be a very useful source of information and inspiration for all that would like to read a short and dynamic and yet informative document on how a federal Europe could look like.
The book-project is available on the website of the Union of European Federalists (UEF) in