My plan for Europe

The European Union has languished and become enfeebled — and we are all to blame. There is a noticeable paucity of ideas and methods. The whole system has capitulated and is at a standstill. Summits bringing together heads of state and of government have become a parody: getting together behind closed doors, repeating lofty principles, changing a word or two in a statement so that it sounds slightly different from the last one. The system is cut off from the world and from real life. What did the Breton farmers I have met in the past few months think? They did not say that they were against Europe, or against the Common Agricultural Policy that is so important to us. But they explained that they were against over-regulation, against over-zealous bureaucracy and against interventionist policies overseas, so far removed from their real needs.

The founders of Europe believed that political union would be a natural consequence of union in the economic domain, and that a European state could be created from a single market and a single currency. Half a century later, reality has dispelled that illusion. Political Europe has not happened. Any hope of it has been sorely diminished, and it is the fault of us all.

It was our own desire to weaken Europe. Heads of state and of government have done everything they can in the past few years to put in place a weak leadership to run the European Union. They decided to create a commission with 28 commissioners. This is not workable, and the organisation of the European Commission clearly needs to be changed if we want to go back to its efficiency and truly collegiate nature under Jacques Delors.

Gradually, the European Union has abandoned its vision in exchange for official procedures, confusing the aim — to unite Europe—with the technical, monetary, legal and institutional means for union to be achieved.