The State of the European Union. The European Parliament faces its most important elections yet

THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 58 Kingdom has acted as a very powerful brake on progress towards political integration, also lead- ing others who in the current circumstances, devoid of that leadership, will perhaps put up less opposition. Now, with 27 members, is the time to tackle a difficult future – in which things are moving increasingly quickly, in which Europe is losing sway on the global stage, in which in- ternal differences are increasing – and explore taking a fresh step forward to strengthen the Union and counter the hostile internal and exter- nal forces that threaten to jeopardise the Union’s very existence. Looking to the future Concern about the uncertain future of the Union prompted much analysis and many pro- posals in the last European legislative term, both institutional and academic, seeking an improve- ment in the economic and political effectiveness of the European institutions, always moving to- wards greater integration. Among the former was the Five Presidents’ Report 1 of June 2015 on how to complete the EMU, measures that materialised at the euro summit of December 2017, though most of them have still to take effect. For its part, the Commission published its White Paper on the Future of Europe 2 in March 2017, proposing five scenarios from less to more integration and clearly backing the most ambi- tious option. Barely a month earlier, on 16 February, the Parliament had passed a resolution on Guy Verhofstadt’s paper on possible changes and adjustments to the current institutional 1   https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/ files/5-presidents-report_es.pdf 2  https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/ libro_blanco_sobre_el_futuro_de_europa_es.pdf setup of the EU 3 , an extraordinarily interesting document that clearly backs a federal structure and proposes the calling of a convention. More recently (in May 2017), French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leaders of the two most im- portant countries in the UE, showed their readi- ness to tackle the reform of the treaties. There are numerous analyses and studies on possible reforms in the academic or non-institu- tional sphere, but we shall mention just two re- cent ones. The Manifesto for the Future of Europe: A Shared Destiny 4 , drawn up by a group of MEPs and former MEPs gathered in the so- called Spinelli Group, in memory of the person responsible for the Ventotene Manifesto – a precursor of European federalism –, which is an excellent and detailed analysis of the reforms of all kinds required to relaunch the EU on federal foundations, though some might be considered timid or realistic, depending on one’s point of view. French economist Thomas Piketty, mean- while, drew up the Manifesto for the democra- tisation of Europe 5 , which has been endorsed by numerous politicians and intellectuals on the European left and also contains interesting pro- posals, though the most important, the creation of a new European assembly, could add more confusion to an already quite complex institu- tional structure. All the documents we have mentioned start out from the premise that the institutional framework and current functioning of the Union have displayed multiple shortcomings in the political and economic fields and have proven 3   http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef =-//EP//TEXT+TA+P8-TA-2017-0048+0+DOC+XML+V0//ES 4   http://www.spinelligroup.eu/article/manifesto-future-eu rope-shared-destiny 5   http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2018/12/10/manifesto-for- the-democratisation-of-europe/