Future Europe
We will have finally to accept it, and to abandon the territory irredentism on a identity reaction ground: the future Union will be larger geographically, it will be enliven by more people than today, and it will enjoy more competences which are nowadays national prerogatives, its expansive but voluntary non exhaustive ubiquity will continue to perpetuate the nation, commuting it timely in an integrated community.
The progression of what have been adhesions of nations and what is today the enlargement of the Union will have a geographical term, but not a conceptual one. The European Union is besides geographically much more extended than man’s considers, and rather interrogating existentially on if the candidate States are in Europe, it would be more judicious to remind us where is Europe in the world. Because it is today bordering Surinam (French Guyana), it is located in Africa (Ceita and Melilla), in the Antilles (Martinique and Guadeloupe), it is in the middle of South Atlantic (Falkland Islands, Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helen), in the Indian Ocean (Maurice Island), in the Arctic polar Circle (Svalbard), and near Antarctica (South Sandwich Islands), in North America (Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, Greenland), and in the Pacific (Society Islands, Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia). By going through the question of the territorial administration, the Union exists economically on each continent, explores scientifically the poles, the population-empty areas, the ground of oceans, the atmosphere, the space. This is because Europe is not restricted to Europe.
However, the successive integration of the different States having the right to in the European Union will end, and will subsist only the returns of the enlargements, always implementing a bit more Peace, stability, knowledge of the other, but also, more pragmatically, profitability of investments in entering countries, collective progression of social rights, driving of great technological projects, exponential increasing of the strategic levers of influence, invention of common norms, collective protection of the ensemble and diversification of the Union. It is the intensification of collectives ambitions (which are not built especially in internal or external opposition), and the permanent –because temporal– extension of application fields of our common governance which we will have to perform, quintessence of the European process, raison d’être of the Union, imaginative matrix of the Fathers of Europe.
But this Europe won’t be without the structural and systemic reconsideration of the actual needs that we recon future by inertia when it is well present. Between these ones is the dual question demography/immigration besides a rich and getting older population –the EU’s one– refuse its balanced or integrative partnership to the neighbouring, young and dynamic, populations –the Maghreb ’s one. Another question, partially linked with the previous one, and which needs its prudent and relative integration, is the one of the becoming of the work in a unique market where dominate the dematerialization, tertiary of services and quaternary of new technologies, in a morose and durable context of structural unemployment and of low growth despite the obvious economical assets (first commercial power, largest common market, consumption quite stable, low geopolitical risk, strong unique currency).
The debate on interior and exterior security (because it is no more question of considerate today interior security without the exterior one), has to concentrate for a maximum efficiency on the definition of a limit, adjustable but maintained into boundaries, between the liberties permitting an articulation of personal and collective wills and the protection of these ones. The interior security forces have to act discreetly to impeach the criminal impeachment as well to respect the functioning of democracies’ life that the forces have the security’s responsibility.
In order to lead to some positive results, the questioning of the exterior security forces, meaning what man’s call traditionally by Defence (it is understood that the risks are not any more to the military invading but to destabilization), has to progress actively. The communitarian development of these ones has to assure the greatest technological and strategic advance on the subject and the object of application of the force. As the European Union is a union of the pre-emption of the right upon the force, this one has to be precisely thought before being engaged in a way which is not the union’s one, which could not be regarding to its nature and to the one of its alternative solutions upstream of conflicts.
But the most urging point of our collective application to the resolution of common troubles is probably the tendency to the dissension and to the withdrawal, historical remainder of a time of physical confrontation in uncontrolled races going rapidly ahead toward the loose for all parties, very far from our territorial borders. In such a conjuncture which tends to be structural, it is important to remind us the spirit and the impulsion of the European project which has been invented precisely in order to counter these murdering rivalries gushing out the permanent squabbles. It has to be remembered that if the rule of law is a chance, Peace is a luxury that a great number of people do not know yet, and that the moral extension of our union is to back their effort to arrive to it, and therefore not to yield to the old demons, to the attributers of guiltiness, to the moralist populisms or to the national egoisms, which bring only the misery of a man limited as he makes itself obligingly by his partitive interests