The State of the European Union. The European states facing the reforms of the Union

THE STATES ON THE FUTURE OF EUROPE

alist

), in their statements or declarations as an

organised group they tread a non-conformist line

with regard to the traditionally more Europeanist

tendency (headed by France and Germany). For

example, the press release following the meeting

of the Visegrad Group on 2 March 2017, just a

few weeks before the European Council meeting

that was to celebrate the 60

anniversary of the

communities

-unanimous declaration of Euro-

peanist faith included- and with the

White paper

on the Future of Europe

already out there, con-

tained a more or less implicit expression in favour

of limiting Europe to the single market: “We

want reforms, we want to enhance democratic

and state control over the decision-taking pro-

cesses in the Union. At the same time, we want

clear equality of treatment by the Union of the

different interests of each Member State and, in

the future, the maintenance of the single market

and the Schengen area.”

To complete the summary of the position of

the states on the future of Europe, in

Chart 1

we recall the ideological orientation of the cur-

rent members of the European Council and de-

scribe what kind of Union functioning they

would prefer, also taking into account their differ-

ent attitudes towards Europe (more Europeanist

or more nationalist).

See for example the final debate of the second round

of the presidential elections of 27 January 2017 between

Miloš Zeman and Jirˇ i Drahoš. However, it is usually the

Prime Minister and not the President of the Republic who

defines European policy and takes part in the European

Council meetings and there are not infrequent differences

over European affairs between the two dignitaries.

See the

Declaration of Rome of the Leaders of the 27

Member States and of the European Council, the European

Parliament and the European Commission,

Available at:

https://europa.eu/european-union/eu60_en

Statement to the press by Polish Prime Minister Beata

Szydlo, 2 March 2017, following the Visegrad Group

meeting, retrieved from

Visegrad Group statement

. Our

translation.

The deliberative potential of the

White

paper

has been wasted by the states and

by civil society

The debate on the future of Europe in 2017,

then, was low-intensity -both among states and

in civil society- and short-lived, largely because

of the whole series of upheavals and emergen-

cies that flooded the European agenda as a re-

sult of the global economic and security crisis.

Yet from the strict point of view of the prin-

ciple of legitimacy, a debate on the future of

Europe (if the political will encouraging it is to

have it address unity and not -or not only- diver-

sity) must be unitary and focused in a suprana-

tional space (as the European Commission and

Parliament wisely saw in 2001, when it devised

the “Convention on the Future of Europe,”

which was capable of drafting a Constitution

for Europe), regardless of its degree of effective-

ness, that is to say regardless of the calculation

of risk.

In a very honest exercise in deliberative de-

mocracy, the five scenarios in the

White paper

started an adequate debate on the Union’s de-

cision-taking system. Incidentally, we must ac-

knowledge the merit of the Commission and its

President for the political effort involved in the

very preparation of the

White paper

for the fol-

lowing reason. Juncker had already raised

The global debates on the future of the Union that,

while they did not go by that name, suggested changes

both in the structure and in the functioning of the Union

as a whole warrant being described as historic milestones

of European integration. For example, the First Convention,

which gave rise to the Draft Treaty of 1984 and the

previously mentioned Second Convention (the

Convention

on the Future of Europe

) that finished its work in 2003,

or the initiative of the first Delors Commission that led to

the Maastricht Treaty, adopted in 1992, which consisted of

holding of two connected and parallel intergovernmental

conferences: one on the Economic and Monetary Union

and one on the European Political Union.