Europe needs to speak in a unified, powerful voice<\/p>\n
Today, 9 May, Europe celebrates its birthday.<\/p>\n
Seventy
\n years ago, when \u2013 following the horrors of World War II \u2013 Robert
\nSchuman envisioned the common space of peace, security and cooperation
\namong peoples, he may not have believed that, over the course of the
\nnext 70 years, the European Union would become the only Creation of its
\nkind in political history.<\/p>\n
During these seven decades, it created
\n a single market with a population of over 500 million \u2013 the
\nsecond-largest economy in the world \u2013 launched its own powerful currency
\n and unified a continent of considerable political, economic and
\ncultural differences.<\/p>\n
However, the \u2018Fathers of the Union\u2019 would
\nno doubt have serious concerns about the handling of the successive
\ncrises of past decade (financial, refugee, Brexit, populism). And they
\nwould perhaps be even more disappointed by the response to the
\ncoronavirus pandemic, which is on the verge of becoming a crisis of
\nidentity and solidarity.<\/p>\n
Clearly, the current crisis is like none
\n that came before it \u2013 in terms of neither magnitude nor intensity nor
\nthe breadth of its looming impact. Millions of people will feel this
\nimpact, and most national economies, including the strongest, will be
\nweakened and vulnerable, with no recovery visible on the horizon.<\/p>\n
And
\n the usual conventional and more or less conservative tools brought to
\nbear so far will not be able to meet this enormous collective threat. We
\n need innovative thinking, bold initiative and a powerful political
\ndecision. For the time being, Europe appears to be wasting time and
\nresources on endless disagreements and short-sighted internal divisions.
\n The destructive trenches of the \u2018North\u2019 and \u2018South\u2019, \u2018East\u2019 and \u2018West\u2019,
\n \u2018planners\u2019 and \u2018slackers\u2019, \u2018frugal\u2019 and \u2018ambitious\u2019 should have no
\nplace in the European dialogue.<\/p>\n
It has to be made clear, in the
\nheart of every European, that we are stronger within the Union than
\nwithout. Upward revision of the European budget will be in everyone\u2019s
\ninterest.<\/p>\n
Europe must apply the lessons of the euro crisis and
\nstrengthen itself as a supranational actor. It has to ask itself the
\nquestion Konstantinos Karamanlis put to the European Parliament in 1983:
\n \u201cDo we or do we not want the Union of Europe?\u201d<\/p>\n
Because if we
\ndon\u2019t secure this essential cohesion, the \u2018unification experiment\u2019 will
\nfail. If not now, then in the next crisis. In the future, ever more
\ncomplex and unforeseeable problems will test Europe\u2019s collective
\nreflexes.<\/p>\n
Climate change and increasing migration flows are
\nalready here, as are breakneck revolutions in advanced technology and
\nartificial intelligence. How will Europe react? With what tools, what
\npolicies? How will it fund solutions? How many different institutional
\nvoices will we hear? How will it fortify itself to become a Union that
\nis sustainable and resilient in the face of crises?<\/p>\n
Years ago,
\nDimitris Tsatsos called our union a \u201cEuropean Confederacy.\u201d Perhaps now
\nis the time for this description to be borne out through common cause,
\ncooperation and co-creation among the member states.<\/p>\n
Happy birthday, Europe!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Europe needs to speak in a unified, powerful voice Today, 9 May, Europe celebrates its birthday. Seventy years ago, when \u2013 following the horrors of World War II \u2013 Robert Schuman envisioned the common space of peace, security and cooperation among peoples, he may not have believed that, over the course of the next 70 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-embassy-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mfa.gr\/cyprus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}