“According to a popular perception in Brussels the Union develops from crisis to crisis. If this is true we might be witnessing a huge upswing in the near future. Unfortunately, in the time being, we have to face the crises”, writes Karoly Lorant from Hungary.

We can just start with the EU constitution, which failed as a consequence of the stubborn stance taken by Poland and Spain. To tell the truth, even if the constitution is approved with some modification in the second half of this year, it would not provide a real solution because the federalist state that this constitution draws up, within the given circumstances in Europe, would hardly be able to work. It concentrates too much power and it has too little resources to be able to reduce – even gradually – the differences between the member states. While the most important means of economic governance will be in the hands of Brussels and Frankfurt (European Central Bank), the handling of the social problems will remain a responsibility of the (disarmed) national governments.

The stability and growth pact also turned out to bring neither stability nor growth. The ailing European economy challenged the ambitious goals of the Lisbon summit, which set the target for the Union to become the “most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the World by 2010”. It was an OECD study that drew attention to this lagging behind, suggesting at the same time a solution that incorporates ideas (further liberalization, further curtailing of the welfare state) that have already proven unsuccessful, being the reasons rather than the solutions to the crises.

There are problems also with the euro, which is becoming stronger and stronger against the dollar. This might cause some to feel proud, but it eventually weakens the competitiveness of the Union’s products, increases importation and, as a final impact, it acts against an economic upswing.

But as if all this would not be enough, even the European Mars probe failed while its American counterpart landed successfully on the surface of the red planet. One might think it was to a certain extent by fortune, while Europe had bad luck. But that is not the case. It is that Americans spend one order of magnitude more on space research than the European Union. For instance in the given case the American Mars probe cost $400 million while the European probe cost only $80 million. The difference can be, or rather cannot be, heard from space.

Within the accumulating crises the leaders of the Union are in urgent need of something that would strengthen their confidence. It might be funny, but the letter bombs sent by Italian anarchists could provide some remedy. As Romano Prodi, one of the recipients of the bombs, said in an interview with CNN: it is a bad experience if a letter bomb explodes in your hands, but it indicates that the Union (as a power which is worth to fight against) already counts a little bit.

Even if we appreciate the cool-headedness of the Commission President as he handled the letter bomb and several other matters exploding around him, we need some more positive ideas if we want the 450 million citizens of the enlarged Union to believe that crises exist only to cause upswings to follow them.

Karoly Lorant
Works for the EDD Group in the European Parliament in Brussels and writes regularly for the Hungarian press.
E-mail: klorant@europarl.eu.int

This article was first published in Hungarian in the daily Magyar Nemzet.