Europe is disintegrating while its citizens look indifferent around

This is the title of an excellent article published recently by the excellent journalist Roberto Savio in Other News and you can read the full text through this link.

I want to emphasize some paragraphs from it:

“We are witnessing the slow agony of the dream of European integration, without a single demonstration occurring anywhere, among its 500 millions of citizens. It is clear that European institutions are in an existential crisis but the debate is only at intergovernmental level.

This proves clearly that European citizens do not feel close to Brussels. Gone are the 1950s, when young people mobilized in the Youth Federalist Movement, with activists from the Federal Movement led by Altiero Spinelli, and the massive campaign for a Europe that would transcend national boundaries, a rallying theme of the intellectuals of the time.

It has been a “crescendo” of crisis. First came the North-South divide, with a North that did not want to rescue the South, and made austerity a monolithic taboo, with Germany as its inflexible leader. Greece was the chosen place to clash and win, even if its budget was just 4 percent of the whole European Union.

The front for fiscal discipline and austerity easily overran those pleading for development and growth as a priority and it alienated many of citizens caught in the fight.

Then come the East-West divide. It becomes clear that the countries which were under the Soviet Union, joined the EU purely for economic reasons, and did not identify with the so called European values, the basis for the founding treaties. Solidarity was not only ignored, but actively rejected, first with Greece, and now with the refugees.”

It is, therefore, evident that the union strictly monetary leads to the abyss. Let’s reflect urgently and, with great citizen involvement, let’s promote a political, economic and fiscal European Union based on the principles so clearly enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (2000) and, on a global level, the re-foundation of a multilateral and democratic System of a United Nations endowed with the moral authority of all kinds that enables the governance needed urgently throughout the world, especially in social, environmental and nuclear armament issues that can reach points of no return. It is obvious that neoliberal guidelines that have substituted the ethical values by stock markets and the United Nations by plutocratic groups (G7, G8, G20 ...) lead to disaster. Let’s change the direction before it is too late.