No, the Union is not in perdition. On the contrary, in the midst of the reefs, facing the wind, it is tackling new shores, seeking political unity after having created the common market and introduced the single currency. The Union is entering the third, most difficult phase of its History. This is why everything is rocking on board and will continue to rock, but it is a mistake to predict a shipwreck already, instead of seeing the promise of new lands.
So let’s get on with it. The Commission has made major mistakes in vaccinating Europe’s 450 million citizens. This is all too true, but who remembers that the treaties do not make health policy a common competence, that sovereignists and other defenders of national prerogatives and particularisms would not have accepted it to be a common competence, that the common institutions were therefore in no way prepared to take up such a challenge, that they nevertheless did it, and that their two great wrongs are paradoxically all to their full credit, since they refused to pay extravagant prices to the laboratories and to relieve them of any sanitary responsibility?
This virtue has cost us dearly, but thanks to grouped purchases, we have avoided a chaos of a completely different dimension than the delays we are suffering today. It is the absence of joint negotiations that would have really threatened European unity, and as for the “Sofagate”, this affair of Turkish armchairs, how can we fail to see that the basic problem from which the Union suffers is the overflow of presidents, because its institutions are no longer adapted to the growing immensity of its tasks?
So let us stop preferring to see the accidents along the way, however serious they may be, instead of the new roads that the Union is clearing and, above all, let us stop denying the evidence of the revolution underway in the Parliament, the Council and the Commission.
Not only are there no longer any taboos on common Defence, European sovereignty and common industrial policies, the pandemic has also undermined the dogma of the refusal of common European debt.
Ahead of the United States, the European Union has turned the page on forty years of Reagan-Thatcherism. Unlike the United States, it has done so without yet saying so and with intolerable procedural delays, but the fact is that it has begun to borrow jointly in order to invest jointly in technological innovation and the green transition.
The Union is becoming a public power. This is such a major change that its institutions are no longer adapted to this fanfare-less revolution. This is the fundamental reason for the seizures in its functioning, but the announcement of its death is premature at the very least.
