HumboldtUniversity – Berlin, 27 November 2007
"Resolving the long-standing issue of opposing visions of the European project.
Creating a new common political will"
1. A profession of faith in Europe
I am particularly pleased to take the floor in this historic University which has been a major forum in recent years for analysing and sending out important messages on the issues of the construction and the future of Europe.
In my invitation I noted a sign of acknowledgement of the role played by Italy since that long distant 1950, on the long road of European integration, and to a greater extent a mark of interest in the contribution that Italy can continue making in a new phase of reflection and engagement. But I should like to seize on this attention and these expectations at once to say that Italystill sees alwaysEurope as the natural place for her development and presence in the world. And I say this knowing – inmy present institutional position –that Iam expressing feelings and thinking rooted and widespread in the national community.
However, I believe that I can address myself to you – inthis home of study and unfettered debate – withless official and diplomatic arguments and tones, and on a more strictly personal level. I would therefore ask you to allow me to speak to you not so much as Head of State, as a convinced advocate of the European cause.
I hope that this profession of pro-European faith does not come as a surprise to you and that you will understand what it means. I fear that for some time now, people have ceased to feel the enthusiasm that had originally characterised the construction of Europe and subsequently made possible to overcome the difficulties and supersede periods of crisis. This enthusiasm must not be viewed as trite rhetoric;it was the result of a profound awareness of Europe's responsibilities, proudly claiming Europe's role, clear-sightedly acknowledgingEurope's mistakes and farsightedlylooking ahead to the new prospects to be opened up and pursued.
Today, however, too many politicians, and even the leaders of some European Union member states, appear fearful of identifying with the ideals of the Schuman Declaration, and the spirit, if not the letter, of the appeals for a European Federation, and that United States of Europe which enlightened thinkers and statesman had envisaged in the aftermath of the Second World War, if not earlier.
Yet it is important for us not to stifle thevery spirit that underlay the origins of European integration. And it is even more important to express a rightful pride in the endeavour that emerged from this – themost innovative and most tangibly successful political project that has ever been designed and pursued anywhere in the world in the latter half of the 20th century. The fact that in other continents regional integration objectives are now being announced, taking their inspiration from the European model, should tell us a great deal.
2. The “original spirit” and its abiding vitality.
The road along which we have been travelling here for over fifty years has been neither easy or linear, but has encountered standstills and ever-new developments, moving forward more expeditiously in certain periods than in others. Historians have quite rightly spoken about the "European adventure", but it has been an "adventure" embarked upon with wisdom and determination. And the essential purpose has been to preserve the leitmotif that has been called "the Community invention", namely, the decision to build up a united Europe by creating and consolidating new institutions, to which to entrust the hitherto untried task of managing shared sovereign powers and – withthe active participation of the nation states –implementcommon economic and social development projects, firstly in six countries, and then in all the others which subsequently subscribed that task as their own.
Underlying the "community invention" there was naturally the conviction that the Community represented a universe of values and historical experiences: no more and no less, that is to say, than European civilisation itself, in its loftiest expressions and with its greatest achievements, up to the establishment of the Liberal state based on the rule of law and representative democracy. There were no doubts, at the beginning, regarding the objective soundness of such benchmarks as a common European culture and identity, or the mission to which the integration project was devoted: to express European self-awareness in a potentially ever-widening area.
This forms the core of the fundamental convictions that we have to translate, today, into a new common political will which constitutes the true condition and guarantee for the effective consolidation and advancement of the Union, which has just emerged from a difficult and lengthy institutional period of stalemate. A strong enough political will to overcome the factors and risks of a more deep-seated crisis in the integration process.
I have certainly not drawn your attention to the persistent vitality of the original spirit driving this process because I am not already well aware of everything that has changed and still remains to be changed. Many of the goals have been attained, and others have since emerged and require fine-tuning.The motivations of previous periods in our history have to be supplemented with the requirements of unity dictated by the new international context. And these are powerful demands which are manifestly urging us on to continue in the same direction.
The primary emphasis must therefore be on appraising what has already been achieved, and which seems to have been virtually assimilated by the younger generations as a "gift of providence" rather than as the results of a project and a method based on the common political will which the leaders and institutions representing a growing number of European countries have succeeded in demonstrating. At the same time we must robustly draw attention to today's challenges that Europe is being called upon to address. They stem from changes and tensions in the international situation. The political leaders of the member states not only know these new challenges by name and substance, but they also acknowledge their scope which exceeds the possibilities of individual nation states to intervene and respond to them. But – andthis is the point I wish to make – there is a reluctance to draw the necessary conclusions from that, due to a lack of a common political will and old and new objections to opposition to essential aspects of the European project.
3. The results of the June European Council
And I should like to emphasise this in the wake of the debate that led to the unanimous agreement at last June's European Council, and subsequently at the Intergovernmental Conference.
Let me make it quite clear that I share the general conviction that it is thanks to the wise and dogged commitment of the German Presidency that such a crucially important result has been achieved. It was impossible to allow the institutional stalemate to continue without serious risk and damage. In too many areas, there was a sense of alarm about a Europe that had become fatally stalled, incapable of rising up again, and this is what some hoped would happen.
As far as we are concerned, we had never forgotten the warning of Jean Monnet on the subject of the troubled path to European construction: "Nothing would be more dangerous than to confuse difficulties with failure". But there was no confusion. We knew the depth of the foundations of the construction of Europe and that there was no doubt about Europe's survival. We trusted that the stalemate following the failure to ratify the Constitutional Treaty by a major group of states, beginning with France, would be put behind us, and we hoped that an agreement could be reached without serious sacrifices.
It is therefore fair to say that the substance of the 2004 Treaty has been salvaged; according to the experts' "comprehensive" calculations, 90% of the innovations introduced into the Constitutional Treaty have been taken up again.
What does deserve serious thought, then, is something else. Not so much the specific consequences of the measures adopted to adjust the Constitutional Treaty which inevitably had to be accepted, but rather the stances expressed by refusing to ratify the Constitution and the demands to have it amended.
What was the significance of doing away with the name, the symbols, the words and the provisions that had a "constitutional flavour"? What was the meaning of the declaration which stated that the wording taken up again in the Reform Treaty on the common foreign and security policy "does not affect the competencies of the member states or their representatives in third countries and in international organisations"? What did it mean where it referred to deferring the system of the double majority vote on the Council for several years after its entry into force, or the repeated demand that national parliaments be able to block the legislative proposals of the European Commission?
There was certainly one, and only one, reason for all this pressure and all these reservations that we had to address in order to "salvage the substance of the Constitutional Treaty": to head off or curb the attribution of new tasks and new powers to the European institutions. This has once again raised an issue in the 27 member state Union which has emerged several times in the past, and has never been resolved: the coexistence and juxtaposition of different visions of the European project.
There is something in the positions adopted by some member states that suggests a harking back to the past. In some quarters,giving up the Constitutional Treaty is seen as a "return to realism", or even "to reason". But does this mean that between 2001 and 2004 Europe navigated in "unreality" or "unreason"? In the Laeken Declaration the decision to work for a Constitutional Treaty stemmed from the need to answer urgent questions about the future of Europe.
4. The rationale of the Constitutional treaty
We cannot forget that the simultaneous process of the "great enlargement" of the Union had suggested, first and foremost, the need to reaffirm and reformulate the principles, values, and objectives of the European integration project to which countries from widely differing ideological and international backgrounds, and with completely different national systems, were about to accede. The Constitution was seen as a unifying factor, and to a certain extent as an opportunity to re-found the European integration project which had finally been opened up to the whole continent.
Secondly, the decision to expand the membership of the Union to such a significant degree madeit essential to define new institutional arrangements and decision-making mechanisms to avoid paralysing or weakening the integration process.
This is how the plan for the Constitutional Treaty was designed. Those were the reasons for it and that was its ambition. The edifice of European construction had to be empowered to bear the weight of the "great enlargement" and adopt what was by now an explicitly Constitutional character, to crown its fifty years of incremental and de facto development.
The united Europehad to be sanctioned as a community based on the rule of law, a community of values, and increasingly as an original political entity. This is the prospect which we must be committed to keeping open, above and beyond any agreement juridically concluded at Lisbon.
That agreement made it possible to salvage the "innovative tools" – asPresident Giscard d'Estaing recently described them – draftedby the Brussels Convention (including a stable Council Presidency and the new post of Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Union, albeit under a different name). These have been scattered, according to Giscard d'Estaing, among three sets of amendments to the old Treaties, complicating and not simplifying the new Treaty to be ratified, making it more and not less legible, while the "toolbox" has remained the same as before.
The Constitution, moreover, so painstakingly negotiated over two and a half years was not only a "toolbox", confirming that the institutions are not only means, but also encompass ends, the sphere of goals. And it is precisely the question of goals, ambitions, the shape of integration that has emerged blurred by the failed ratifications of the Constitutional Treaty and by the discussions preceding and following them.
But there can be no return to the past, whether for serious or for trivial reasons of dissent. The European Community has been able to live and develop so long as it has looked forward, avoiding becoming bogged down in provisional compromises that could ultimately paralyse it, or lingering on - as President François Mittérand said in a previous phase in the life of the Community in 1984 – a few"obsédants contentieux"and"querelles dérisoires".
5. Relations between the Unionand the Nation States
The issue of the relationship between the European common interest and national interests, and in more general terms the relationship between the Union and the nation states is – aswe all know – asold as the European Community itself, in the sense that it has been present throughout its history. Indeed, it is natural for there to be an ongoing dialectical relationship between the Union and the member states, to strike a fair balance on a case-by-case basis. But there is a limit which must not be exceeded, to avoid thwarting the plan for a Europe as a project that is not merely for cooperation between sovereign states but for effective and incremental integration which is ultimately bound to lead to political union. A tendency is now emerging to deny the validity and topical relevance of the very notion of "intergovernmental drift"; yet this is a recurrent risk, a risk of tippingthe balance – inrelations between the Union and the nation states – whichis compatible with the nature of the European project as an integration project. It would be naive or evasive to refuse to admit that this risk has become increasingly more serious since the signing of the Constitutional Treaty and is in contradiction to it.
An "intergovernmental drift" will inevitably lead us further away from the ultimate purpose of creating a strong Europe which is capable of taking forward effective common policies and establishing Europe as a global player on the international stage. The more grudgingly we attribute powers and resources to the European institutions, the more we demonstrate a lack of support for these ends and goals. In June 2005 one of the most committed pro-European leaders, Jean-Claude Juncker, ending the Luxembourg six-month Presidency, reported to the European Parliament on the controversial outcome of the negotiations on the financial perspectives of the Union, in the following terms:
"We have seen two confronting conceptions of Europe: a conception that relies solely on the virtues of the market, which is incapable of producing solidarity, and a conception that relies solely on more extensive political integration"; between "those who believe that Europe as it is now has already taken a step too far, and those, like myself, who believe that it must go much, much further."
It is now essential to clarify these substantive issues, above all through a more open discussion between the supporters of both these conceptions. No one, at this present moment, will benefit from deliberate pretence.
We have to be more candid in the debate between the partners of the Union and between the different visions which they hold, and be more frank in the dialogue with our citizens.
6. The idea of the European Federationand the institution, in 1974, of the European Council as the locomotive force behind the construction of the EuropeanCommunity
The idea of the European Federation was a fundamental source of inspiration for embarking on and developing the community, and subsequently the Union. It never entailed bringing about the natural death or the deliberate emptying of the nation states, and it certainly not be exorcised by brandishing the spectre of a EuropeanSuperstate! This unidentified object which is causing the Eurosceptics so many sleepless nights is the exact opposite of the idea of a Federation, which, by its very nature, is incompatible with the elimination of differences.
It was Jacques Delors who suggested the "Federation of Nation States" formula, in order to overcome the error of seeing a contradiction, but certainly bearing in mind the readiness of the member states to decide to restrict their own powers in some essential fields, and helping to strengthen the exercise of shared sovereignty at the supranational level.
From the beginning, the "founding fathers" had emphasised that the Council – asthe forum for representing the nation states – was"the meeting point between two sovereignties, one national, and the other supranational", with the "paramount task not of safeguarding the national interests of the member states but of promoting the interests of the Community". These were the words spoken by Konrad Adenauer in 1952, while on the subject of relations between the Council and the Commission, Jean Monnet spoke of an "authentically federal balance". Many years later, in 1974, following the informal summit meetings between the Heads of State and Government, the European Council was established. Once again, Monnet was one of the great advocates behind that decision, believing that it was necessary "to return to the sources of power" in order to give Europe the authority which the Community institutions, as they existed at that time, were unable to guarantee on their own, and to open up the path to move beyond the economic union, and to "a more complete and deeper union – whetherfederal or confederal, I wouldn't know". And this led to the establishment of the European Council, and the simultaneous decision – ofobvious major significance – tointroduce the direct election by universal suffrage of Members of the European Parliament.