EUROPE: AS AN INSTRUMENT TOWARDS A WIDER ACHIEVEMENT
Valeria Sirabella*
The project that was launched 50 years ago, was not only a dream and hopeful vision of future: it was the result of a pragmatic reflection, it was the concrete solution to an immediate problem of peace that the exhausted countries of a torn continent had to tackle. Europe was born in a specific context, generated as a piece of the cold war. Maybe the visionaries that on that day met in Rome still were not aware of which successful journey was to be done by the project they conceived, neither, in the urgency of finding a solution that was deeply needed, of the potential meaning contained by that project.
Europe is now defined as “in crisis”, and the missing approval of the treaty should be the proof, as well as the decreasing electoral participation. Lack of capacity in involving citizens, lack of democracy, lack of confidence. But defining things as “in crisis”, on the other side, seems sometimes to be the real cause of problems, as it is a way to settle the issue. Data which show the so called “crisis” are real and clear.But what exactly is in crisis? Europe itself or the idea we have about it? Also the European project, as every human product, was in fact born inside a specific context which today, as inevitable, is different. However, quite amazingly, when the context changes it is not the project itself the thing that has to grow and to evolve in order to keep vital, but the interpretation we all have of it.
Europe has been, and still is, source of enthusiasm, of economic prosperity and of democracy.
So where did this successful project brake down? Sometimes the problem seems to lay inside the basis on which the European building has been constructed, basis that sometimes seems to be the same of that old palace that we all see as deeply in crisis: the old Nation State, whose rigid conception of Institutions does not fit with a “fluid” world and mobile society, where the dimension and composition of the problems and of the objectives are continuously changing. Probably we often try to read the sense of Europe through that old categories, and sometimes this is the way Europe itself tends to work. The wordy and maybe foggy Constitution could be an example.
But Europe also seems to say that the sense through which it wants to go on is another one, is a new one, as it addresses its own objectives around single projects life time, and it defines its achievements inside bounds that it draws following, and evaluating, specific needs.
So maybe the problem is not in the object of our glance, but lays exactly inside the way we look at it, the way we look at something that by ourselves has been created. And it is not a small issue, if the interpretation of existing things, and of the way we manage them, leads the behaviour of human society and their way of organizing themselves.
Could it thus be only a problem of interpretation? The questions that Europe still asks about itself, about its own nature and its internal way of working, keeping on the issues of its basic principles and origins, seem to unveil the nature of the impasse where the idea of Europe stops: the difficulty is related to the request, made by today’s changing world, of doing a big leap. The next big achievement that Europe is requested to address in fact is likely to be not more the internal integration to be completed, integration which can, has to be done by concrete and immediate choices. The challenge that is already issued is to play, as a unit, a new game in a complex, external framework: a globalized world which has to take part in the process of shaping Europe, and that is claiming Europe yet.
On the contrary, the debate that around the idea of Europe lives still seems to look at it as at the ending purpose, and not as at a means, an intermediate objective.
From this point of view, the call made by the Pope to the European Christian roots should be to us a useful example of the misunderstanding process that we all activate when we think of Europe, trying to solve the problems that to Europe are related. The Pope, in fact, only transfers to its own “field” the same scheme: the research for the origins that unveils a sort of lack of confidence, of self awareness which still makes Europe look inside itself, instead of trying to define the scope of its own identity, of understanding the role that in a changing and increasingly integrated world is to be played.
Maybe making clear the real, final scope that to Europe is already requested is the first thing to do: it is to be donein order to solve the concrete problems that are urgent and basic, and which concern what to do with that treaty that should contain the real meaning of Europe itself, and also how to spend the European budget, that means defining the way through which it has to run.
Than, it is to be done if we want to keep on the successful journey that Europe started, and that somehow is due to a super national entity whose conception seems to naturally fit with the era of globalization, of the inevitable brake of national boundaries, and through which our society move towards a direction that, under many aspects, seems to be the right one.
* Valeria is a native of Rome where she graduated from La Sapienza University in Mass Communication. She is particularly interested in the issue of the information global society.
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