The European Union June 12-13, 2004. What is the outlook? An “I” for Europe, the only way out The Resolution of the March 2000 Council of Lisbon offered the general policy guidelines to lead the European Union. Particular interests are obliterating these guidelines by Giorgio Vittadini Europe is running the risk of committing two historic errors. The first, and better known, is the approval of a European Charter that is empty, muddled, and pro-Masonic. The second, unknown to most, is the failure to enact a constructive and far-sighted document, the Resolution of the March 2000 Council of Lisbon, which is the true basis for a European Constitution, at least in economic, social, and environmental terms. The cornerstone upon which the document rests is the intention to center the Union’s economic and social policy on investment in human capital so that, by 2010, Europe’s economy and societies would once again be the most dynamic and competitive in the world. According to these program lines, Europeans should transform their lifestyle and, instead of abandoning compulsory education, should continue to learn throughout their entire lives. This continual investment in human capital should obviate the problems wrought by de-industrialization, becoming an incentive to invest in research and development. Social and educational interventions The documents of the following years delineated the interventions in the social and educational systems required to achieve such an ambitious program. In 2002, in Barcelona, the European Council proposed increasing investments in research up to 3% of gross domestic product, in order to close the gap with the United States and Japan. It suggested that the European education systems should become points of reference of quality in order to attract students and researchers from the rest of the world, as is now the case in the United States. These position statements agree that the European Union cannot experience economic and social development unless it has human capital capable of investing, and carrying forward research and innovation. As stated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a half point of the annual growth of the European Union countries in the 1990s derived from the increase of human capital, which thus contained the effects of de-industrialization. For the future, forecasts estimate that on average, a year more of study for each European citizen can increase economic growth by 5% in the long-term and 2.5% in the short term. Five main lines of action should be made operative by 2010: reduce to a maximum of 10% the students who leave compulsory education early; increase by at least 15% the number of those trained in the sciences; assure that at least 85% of 22-year-olds have finished middle school; reduce by at least 20% the number of students with unsatisfactory reading scores; and increase by at least 12.5% the rate of participation in permanent formation. Added to these intentions is the suggestion contained in the Draft Joint Employment Report of the European Commission, according to which the number of students who finish university studies must increase. Ideal motivations Only one key element is missing from this picture, and its absence is worrisome. It lacks attention to university masters and doctorate degrees, which constitute the true force of the United States, because they prepare the ruling classes and the intellectual elite of the world. However, this important gap aside, even investments in instruction would not achieve and do not achieve results, if students and teachers lack personal motivation. Without personal and collective ideal motivation, students learn less and don’t get the chance to experience that happening–education–through which cold notions become instruments to introduce students to reality. In order for the knowledge economy truly to affirm itself, society needs big ideal movements. Perhaps the vague and indistinct perception of this need led to the second far-sighted strategic line augured in the Lisbon document, when it speaks of partnership in the reforms. It affirms here that the promotion of social change cannot involve governments alone. The European Council exhorts member states to create partnerships for the reforms that involve workers and their unions, employers, civil society, and public authorities, in harmony with national praxes and traditions. This second line marks the beginnings of affirmation of the subsidiarity principle, in a horizontal–not just vertical–direction, among governments. But after this interesting document of Lisbon 2000, what has happened over these four years? Reforms have not lacked in the schools, in professional formation, and in the universities of many countries, but, for the most part, little or nothing has been done, and the situation remains substantially unchanged. Incompetent political class There are two reasons for this deadlock. First, the current European political class seems incapable of managing this change. Just think of a leader like Schroeder(bogged down in the welfarism of German social democracy) or Chirac(a statist, or believer in the state as the only source of law and as the highest power in economic and social spheres, in true Napoleonic tradition); think of the coalitions containing the radical extreme left, that oppose in Italy precisely what their very leader proposes in Europe; think of those hegemonizing cultural lines of theorizing intellectuals of nothingness and enemies of the development of the human person. In recent years, they have re-proposed the old statist system, the goal of which is not the increase of human capital and the appreciation and enhancement of the “I,” but welfarism on a mass-scale. They want to achieve balanced budgets without cutting structural spending, because they don’t want to disgruntle their electorate. Perhaps our current leaders’ lack of preparation has caused the other great discrepancy between the Lisbon intention and the reality of the facts, regarding international policy. In Lisbon, in fact, a document was approved for a strategic partnership between the Mediterranean European Union and the Middle East, which the current European Commission, praiseworthy as it is for its engagement with China, has almost entirely ignored. The emergency of terrorism has highlighted again its centrality, because the political and economic stabilization of the Muslim world, so necessary for the entire world, will be achieved not so much through exterior ecumenism and concessions to radical pacifism, but through this path. All the nations facing the Mediterranean, from Egypt, engaged in the post-Mubarak transition, to the countries of north-western Africa, would be interested in a kind of American and European Marshall Plan in collaboration with the Arab and Muslim world, aimed at permitting long-lasting development in this part of the world. This strategic-economic choice, which cannot be done without the United States, could give birth to new immigration policies and new opportunities for expansion and creating new markets. So, these are the lines of the Lisbon document that could mark the new Europe together with two other fundamental trends not yet described here, that contrast with the current hegemony of French-German nationalism. The entrance of the countries of Eastern Europe The first trend is that of the real integration of the countries of Eastern Europe, born during years of strong idealism, which, not by chance, has been relegated to silence in 2004. The European Presidency and the French-German axis are, in the facts, hostile to countries that today feel more aided by the United States than by the EU. Nothing has been done to promote their rapid growth, in order to avoid the multiplication of pockets of underdevelopment like those of southern Italy and the current East Germany, with devastating effects. Today’s European Union blocks the equitable distribution of agricultural subsidies and structural funds, and wants to penalize on the political level the decisional capacity of these countries. It does not extend to the East the Schengen customs agreements, and does not even mention monetary union. The stimulus and force of ideals are needed to overcome this division, which is still very sharp. The second trend regards Latin America. Europe’s behavior at the last World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun was scandalous. Agricultural protectionism blocked an accord with the Latin American countries, which were willing to create a free market in exchange for liberalization of agricultural trade. This could have been an opportunity to immediately find markets and environments in which the renewed knowledge economy of Europe could develop. But, in this case as well, those who can manage change cannot be bound to nationalisms and Third-World-ism that hide neo-colonialism; they cannot be the expression of coalitions with anti-modern no-globals, old Communists, Catho-Communists nostalgic for exhausted ideologies, or anti-Western radical pacifists. To give life to a new Europe, the current “ruling class” who are obliterating that intelligent document of Lisbon 2000 should step aside definitively.