“The warning of Wolfgang Schäuble and Jacques Delors on the nationalist danger remains valid”

2024-01-22 13:07:07

Europe is not just about treaties. Above all, it is men and women who keep it alive. Also this year, January 22, the anniversary of the signing of the Élysée Treaty in 1963 (and the Aix-la-Chapelle Treaty in 2019), will take on particular significance: the European family gathered in Berlin to honor a great European, Wolfgang Schäuble, who died at the age of 81. The President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron will speak in the Bundestag. By the coincidence of life, one day after Wolfgang Schäuble Jacques Delors died, aged 98.

These two great political figures symbolize the generation which carried the European project, assuming, in their respective countries and at the European level, an immense responsibility for the fate of European societies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wolfgang Schäuble headed the West German delegation which negotiated the internal aspects of unification; Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, supports the process.

Responsibility of France and Germany

Other names from the same generation, which contributed decisively to bringing Europeans closer together and to community building, could be associated with them. The deputy in the Bundestag Karl Lamers who wrote, with Wolfgang Schäuble, a visionary project which integrated the geopolitical upheavals of the world in 1994. To move the European Community forward, in 1994 they proposed a demanding “hard core” around France and Germany (“Kerneuropa”).

Or, to name just two of the best known, Simone Veil, survivor of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz who became the first president of the European Parliament elected by universal suffrage. With the whole of Europe as their horizon, they believed in the particular responsibility of France and Germany, in the need for compromise between these two countries, in the general interest. This generation had a “super-ego”: to avoid war. Despite sometimes divergent views, they knew that, as François Mitterrand said in his last speech to the European Parliament, “nationalism is war”.

Simplistic solutions

This warning remains valid. At a time in history marked by multiple crises, which makes many citizens doubt the way forward, at a time when nationalists are back and promising simplistic solutions to complicated challenges, it is good to know what that we owe to this generation.

If today we can live in a large common space, enriched by the diversity of its cultures, languages ​​and traditions, but unified by fundamental freedoms and the rules of the rule of law, it is thanks to these men and courageous women. It is our responsibility today not to waste the political and human capital that they were able to bring together. It is our duty, strengthened by their successes and our values, to dare to take the next steps.

Asking the question of enlargement

Let us first finish what their generation started: deepening and improving the economic and monetary union; perfect the common employment market; stabilize solidarity mechanisms in times of crisis; adapt our trade policy instruments. Let’s be lucid and admit that the EU today weighs less globally than when Schäuble and Delors were in power. The world is not waiting for us, it is therefore urgent to act to provide the EU with its own diplomatic and defense resources which will strengthen the Atlantic Alliance.

As after the fall of the wall and the Soviet empire, the question of enlargement arises acutely today: how to promise accession to Ukraine, Moldova, the Balkan countries, Georgia, without prior debate on what we want to do with the EU and how to reform it in depth? Unique of its kind, voluntary, cooperative, the European project cannot finally succeed without the support of citizens.

It is a question of democracy and also of mutual knowledge. Elected from a border constituency, close to the Rhine for more than half a century, Wolfgang Schäuble has always advocated exchange, contacts, the sharing of experiences between Europeans – just as Jacques Delors invented the Erasmus program to accelerate mutual knowledge of young European generations.

Let us be worthy of the legacy that this generation has left us. Let us be serious in our analyzes and courageous in the conclusions to be drawn: if we want to preserve our fundamental freedoms, our ways of life and ensure Europe has a certain influence in the world, then we will have to dare to have more Europe.