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Where did all go wrong?

Taking a look back to 2007, things have gone from bad to worse for European unity. As little hope was then left to convince the European leaders to be ambitious about reforming Europe and fight off populists, as little has unfortunately been achieved. The institutional deadlock has survived longer than most pundits would have said back then and it had a significant backlash.

Tuesday 18 September 2007 by  Marko Bucik | 0 comment |

Unable to move on jointly, several groups of countries have started to move away from the original EU of 27 and created small core intergovernmental “clubs of the willing”, where secret negotiations prevail, parliaments have little insight and people feel as detached from politics as ever. “We agreed to disagree,” is a common statement at the press conferences of the remaining intergovernmental structure of the EU.

Bogdan Bogdanovski, the European Commissioner for Enlargement analyzed the reasons and developments taking place around 2020’s: “With the old structures, the then EU, composed of 30+ countries slowly started to dissolve into a chaotic integration of overlapping circles and coalitions,”

“The European political parties found it more and more difficult to prepare concrete programmes, the EP became almost irrelevant.” Direct elections to the European Parliament were deemed unnecessary after the elections in 2019 brought only 5% of the EU citizens to the polling stations.

When Italy, France and Germany broke the budget deficit criteria for the 10th consecutive year in 2015 without punishment, a group of Nordic countries grew fed up and broke away from the large part of the Single Market, including the competition rules. The EMU was dissolved in 2019. The monetary union was unable to function without a political dimension combined to monetary steering. The European Court of Justice was ridiculed several times for immense delays and was deemed as irrelevant already by 2016, when the EU legal framework was recognized by the EU Law Monitor as “a combination of political mish-mash, patched European regulations, and forced opt-outs.” According to the same source, such a system was simply “unworkable”.

By 2050 the EU had broken up into the European Free Trade Zone, encompassing 6 member states: France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg and Spain, “Octet” soon becoming a “Niner”, EU10 and other smaller co-operation groups. They all imposed visa restrictions based on inner security and health clause; closed their borders to goods imported from Turkey, China and India in fear of effects of globalization. The GDP of these states dropped to a mere third of the GDP of Turkey, which today forms the most dynamic region in the world, Occidental Federal Union with Middle-East and Asia.

Marko Bucik is a 78-year-old historian and has written a book on the “Blessings of Direct Democracy at EU level”. Mr Bucik strongly engaged himself for the transformation of Italian political culture through federal reform in the 2020’s. He moved to Iceland after growing disagreements with his publisher in Italy and started moderating a real-time weblog on macro-level social psychology.

This article was initially published in the European decline version of the Daily European. See the entire newspaper in pdf format here.

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The Daily European newspaper was beamed to Brussels from the year 2057. Ironically, there were two versions of the newspaper: one from a disintegrated Europe and the other from a flourishing Europe in 2057. Whichever one of the two versions will be reality in 2057 very much depends on the path chosen in 2007: Constitutional ambition or European decline?

Image: Disunity, taken from Google Images

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