European Union

"Robert Schuman, who was in a hurry to catch his train for London, so skilfully evaded the newspapermen’s detailed questions about the future of the plan that one of them exclaimed: ‘In other words, it’s a leap in the dark?’ ‘That’s right,’ said Schuman soberly: ‘a leap in the dark.’"

"We do not fear that the operations of time may never bring a united Europe, with a reunited Germany at its centre. We do not know how it will happen, how this unnaturally divided Germany is to become once again. It is obscure to us, and we must take refuge in the belief that history will find ways and means of overcoming the unnatural and restoring the natural: a Germany as a consciously serving member of a Europe united in self-awareness – not as its lord and master... Let us not delude ourselves over the fact that among the difficulties delaying the unification of Europe is a mistrust of the purity of German intentions, a fear by other peoples of Germany and of hegemonic plans that its vital energy may install into it, which in their view it does not conceal very well….It is for the rising German generation, for German youth, to dispel the mistrust, this fear, by rejecting what has long been rejected and clearly and unanimously announcing their desire: not for a German Europe, but for a European Germany.""

"The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed, it would have no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain."

"There are only two kinds of states in Europe: small states, and small states that have not yet realised they are small."

"A referendum on this matter consists of consulting people who don’t know the problems instead of consulting people who know them. I would deplore a situation in which the policy of this great country [the UK] should be left to housewives. It should be decided instead by trained and informed people."

"You know what they say about the average Common Market official? He has the organizing ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans and the modesty of the French. And that’s topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish."

"Here in Western Europe you have created a multinational democratic community in which there is a free flow of people, of information, of goods, and of culture. West Europeans move frequently and freely in all directions, sharing and partaking of each other's ideas and culture. It is my hope that in the 21st century, which is only 15 years away, all Europeans, from Moscow to Lisbon, will be able to travel without a passport; and the free flow of people and ideas will include the other half of Europe. It is my fervent wish that in the next century there will be one free Europe."

"The President of the Commission, M. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No."

"The European Union implies the notion of the ‘Minimal State’, the abandonment of mixed economy and of economic planning, the redefinition of the ways the expenses are arranged, a redistribution of responsibilities that reduces the power of parliamentary assemblies and increases that of governments, fiscal autonomy for local authorities, the rejection of the principle of widespread gratuitousness of services (and the ensuing reform of healthcare and of social security), the abolition of the wage indexation scale, the dramatic reduction of pockets of privilege, the mobility of the factors of production, the reduction of the State’s presence in the credit system and in industry, the abandonment of inflationary behaviour not only by workers, but also by the producers of services, the abolition of the norms that fixed administered prices and tariffs. In a word: a new pact between States and citizens, to the latter’s advantage."

"Europe began as an elitist project in which it was believed that all was required was to convince the decision-makers. That phase of benign despotism is over."

"If you cannot join them, beat them!""

"Europe was built in a St. Simonian [i.e., technocratic] way from the beginning, this was Monnet’s approach: The people weren’t ready to agree to integration, so you had to get on without telling them too much about what was happening. Now St. Simonianism is finished. It can’t work when you have to face democratic opinion."

"The two ideologies, of Communism and of Europe, have much more in common than they Euroenthusiasts] like to admit ... One had its apparatchiks, the other its Eurocrats ... Their respective credos come together [in many respects including their belief in] the inevitable withering-away of the nation-state ... Initiates in the secrets of History, the two schools are equally convinced that they know where History is leading – towards the Promised Land. For the first, its name is the classless society, for the second, it is Europe without borders."

"Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war."

"The big question today is 'Will globalisation allow democracy to survive?' On one side we have the multinationals, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. I want to help to redress the balance on the other side."

"There is more than a whiff of Oxford “high-table history” in this combination of quaint notions. It recalls the mid-1950s assessments of European integration by British elites, who viewed European unity as either a French geopolitical gambit or an idealist aberration."

"What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy."

"It is, in fact, a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt."

"In practice, as those running businesses had already been discovering for some months, the most obvious consequence of the Single Market was a huge increase in regulation. Far from being a "free trade area", the new Single Market was now the most highly-regulated economic zone in the world, to set up which had required the issuing of 1,368 EC directives."

"What was now becoming uncomfortably clear was that, whatever the Community claimed it was trying to do, the result was invariably the opposite. A Single Market claimed to be a great act of "liberation" and "deregulation" had produced one of the greatest concentrations of constrictive regulation in history... At least on balance, it might be argued that Single Market must have achieved its intended purpose of stimulating economic growth and creating jobs. But even that was a mirage. In the three years preceding the launch, average EU growth had been an unimpressive 2.3 per annum, while average unemployment had been 8.5 percent. In the four years after January 1993, the growth rate was to slump to 1.67 percent – the poorest performance of any economic bloc in the developed world – while EU unemployment would soar to 10.9 percent, with nearly 20 million people out of work."

"In Europe, there exist no borders. The people I spoke to all agreed that their quality of life was enhanced in many ways after unification of the continent. We saw the amazing synergy effects of European union."

"In May 1949, the Council of Europe was established in Strasbourg, a body then devoid of effective political powers and charged only with «laying the foundations for the construction of a European federation». Thus in the act of its foundation. The following year - therefore, in C.E.1950 - that Council announced a competition of ideas, open to all artists, for a flag of the future united Europe. A then young Alsatian designer, Arsène Heitz, participated with a sketch, where twelve white stars stood out in a circle on a blue background. As he later revealed, the idea was not accidental: devoted to the Madonna, he recited the rosary every day. Just when he heard about the European competition and decided to participate, he was reading the story of Saint Catherine Labouré and – stimulated by that reading – he had decided to procure, for himself and his wife, a «Miraculous Medal», which he had not known about until then. The stars, therefore, of his plan came from there: and, there, they came directly from the Apocalypse and from the "Woman clothed with the sun" with the crown around her head. As for blue, it was the traditional color of the Virgin. Among the 101 sketches that arrived from all over the world, "inexplicably", as Heitz himself said (who had participated in the competition without too much hope, almost only to respond to an impulse given to him by the discovery of the Medal), the Council of Europe chose his. It should be noted, among other things, that the head of the commission that made the choice was a Jew, Paul M.G.Lévy, director of the Council's Press and Information Service. Therefore, no confessional motivations were at work [...] Furthermore, to confirm the singularity of the choice, Heitz's proposal was opposed by the fact that, if there were 12 stars on the proposed flag, not as many were then the States of the Council. In fact, in the face of criticism, the designer had to reply that the twelve represented a "symbol of fullness" (and this is, in fact, also in the Old Testament: twelve, among other things, the sons of Jacob , like the 12 tribes of Israel; and therefore twelve is the number wanted by Jesus for his apostles, meaning that the Church is the "new chosen people"). Having adopted this symbolic perspective, the community authorities, when Europe's member states ended up exceeding a dozen, officially established that the number of stars on the flag was to be considered immutable."

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"We are a very special construction unique in the history of mankind … Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire .. What we have is the first non-imperial empire .. We have 27 countries that fully decided to work together and to pool their sovereignty. I believe it is a great construction and we should be proud of it."

"… the European Union functions as a 27-member caucus (plus several associated members) and they have to agree on a statement before they can even say “good morning”."

"The odd thing about modern Europe is that, if you look at the borders, you might think that Germany had won the First World War... The European Union and the old Soviet states are associated with a Europe that feels as if it is run from Berlin. From Scandinavia to Turkey, lorries trundle back and forth with German industrial goods; the euro is mainly German, the Deutsche Bank dominates the eurozone."

"The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflict, are now one of the most important war assets of the U.S./NATO front. Many countries have also been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on."

"Da più parti si ricava un'impressione generale di stanchezza e d'invecchiamento, di un'Europa nonna e non più fertile e vivace. Per cui i grandi ideali che hanno ispirato l'Europa sembrano aver perso forza attrattiva, in favore dei tecnicismi burocratici delle sue istituzioni. (From many quarters there is a general impression of fatigue and aging, of a “grandma” Europe that is not fertile and lively. So the great ideals that inspired Europe seem to have lost its attractive force in favour of the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions.)"

"Europe is not old, haggard or barren. Europe is young, dynamic and vital. Our continent remains the best place in the world to live."

"No continent is as small and fragmented as Europe. Only Australia is smaller, yet Europe consists of fifty independent nations (including Turkey and the Caucasus, for reasons explained later). Crowded with nations, it is also crowded with people. Europe's population density is 72.5 people per square kilometer. The European Union's density is 112 people per square kilometer. Asia has 86 people per square kilometer. Europe is crowded and fragmented."

"Much of the left campaigned against entering the when Margaret Thatcher and the like campaigned for membership. It would threaten the ability of leftwing governments to implement policies, people like my parents thought, and would forbid the sort of industrial activism needed to protect domestic industries. But then happened, and an increasingly battered and demoralised left began to believe that the only hope of progressive legislation was via Brussels. The misery of the left was, in the 1980s, matched by the triumphalism of the free marketeers, who had transformed Britain beyond many of their wildest ambitions, and began to balk at the restraints put on their dreams by the European project."

"The left's pessimism about the possibility of implementing social reform at home without the help of the EU fused with a progressive vision of internationalism and unity, one that had emerged from the rubble of fascism and genocidal war. It is perhaps this feelgood halo that has been extinguished by a country the EU has driven into an economic collapse unseen since America’s great depression. It was German and French banks who recklessly lent to Greece that have benefited from bailouts, not the Greek economy. The destruction of Greece’s national sovereignty was achieved by economic strangulation, [...] this was all about crushing a rebellion."

"Let’s just be honest about our fears. We fear that we will inadvertently line up with the xenophobes and the immigrant-bashing nationalists, and a "no" result will be seen as their vindication, unleashing a carnival of Ukippery. Hostility to the EU is seen as the preserve of the hard right, and not the sort of thing progressives should entertain. And that is why – if indeed much of the left decides on Lexit – it must run its own separate campaign and try and win ownership of the issue."

"The European Union as a whole, but also Germany, needs to recognize that this is our alliance, our common alliance, our transatlantic alliance, that we have to step up our engagement. Because, in the long run, we will not be allowed to accept this imbalance as regards the contributions we give to this alliance. And we have understood this message, and we have started to react."

"When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice."

"We’re in a mess but we should put things into perspective: The EU is constant crisis management. You move from one crisis to the other and, at the end of the day, it’s just a question of the size of the crisis and who gets hit the hardest. I have always believed the EU advances in three-phases: Phase no. 1 is crisis, phase no. 2 is chaos and phase no. 3 is sub-optimal solution, and that’s very much the nature of the beast."

"Europe’s political stability, social cohesion, economic prosperity and security are more threatened today than at any point since the Cold War, Russia is destabilizing the Continent on every front. Indigenous factors – whether long-extant nationalism, design flaws in the Eurozone, lack of a common foreign policy, or incapability at assimilating immigrants – certainly lie at the root of these crises."

"Only as the Cold War was coming to a close did US hegemony begin to sit comfortably on a global scale. The Cold War was therefore about the rise and the solidification of US power. But it was also about more than that. It was about the defeat of Soviet-style Communism and the victory, in Europe, of a form of democratic consensus that had become institutionalized through the European Union. In China it meant a political and social revolution carried out by the Chinese Communist Party. In Latin America it meant the increasing polarization of societies along Cold War ideological lines of division."

"In order for European citizens properly to exercise their democratic right to participate in the EU’s decision-making process, and hold those involved to account, legislative deliberations must be sufficiently transparent. In order also for citizens to be able to hold their governments to account for the decisions they make on EU laws, they need to know how their governments positioned themselves during the legislative process. Making such information public would also oblige Member State governments to assume greater responsibility for this legislation and discourage them from ‘blaming Brussels’ for EU laws they themselves helped to shape and adopt."

"Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU. In their accounts Brexit will appear as merely an early symptom of the crisis. Their argument will be that a massive Völkerwanderung overwhelmed the project for European integration, exposing the weakness of the EU as an institution and driving voters back to national politics for solutions."

"The reality is that, since the fall of Rome, no power has come near to ruling this continent. Charlemagne did not do so, nor did the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, nor France's Napoleon, nor Germany's Hitler, nor yet the commissioners of the European Union. If history teaches anything, it is that all attempts to straighten Kant's 'crooked timber of humanity' will fail. Europe's peoples will not be put in bondage to a superior state, however liberal its intentions."

"“Peace is not mere absence of war, it is a virtue”, wrote Spinoza:“Pax enim non belli privatio, sed virtus est”. And he added it is “a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice”. Indeed, there can only be true peace if people are confident. At peace with their political system. Reassured that their basic rights are respected. The European Union is not only about peace among nations. It incarnates, as a political project, that particular state of mind that Spinoza was referring to. It embodies, as a community of values, this vision of freedom and justice. I remember vividly in 1974 being in the mass of people, descending the streets in my native Lisbon, in Portugal, celebrating the democratic revolution and freedom. This same feeling of joy was experienced by the same generation in Spain and Greece. It was felt later in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Baltic States when they regained their independence. Several generations of Europeans have shown again and again that their choice for Europe was also a choice for freedom."

"I will never forget Rostropovich playing Bach at the fallen Wall in Berlin. This image reminds the world that it was the quest for freedom and democracy that tore down the old divisions and made possible the reunification of the continent. Joining the European Union was essential for the consolidation of democracy in our countries. Because it places the person and respect of human dignity at its heart. Because it gives a voice to differences while creating unity. And so, after reunification, Europe was able to breathe with both its lungs, as said by Karol Wojtiła. The European Union has become our common house. The “homeland of our homelands” as described by Vaclav Havel."

"Our Union is more than an association of states. It is a new legal order, which is not based on the balance of power between nations but on the free consent of states to share sovereignty. From pooling coal and steel, to abolishing internal borders, from six countries to soon twenty-eight with Croatia joining the family this has been a remarkable European journey which is leading us to an “ever closer Union”. And today one of the most visible symbols of our unity is in everyone’s hands. It is the Euro, the currency of our European Union. We will stand by it."

"Of course, peace might have come to Europe without the Union. Maybe. We will never know. But it would never have been of the same quality. A lasting peace, not a frosty cease-fire. To me, what makes it so special, is reconciliation. In politics as in life, reconciliation is the most difficult thing. It goes beyond forgiving and forgetting, or simply turning the page. To think of what France and Germany had gone through …, and then take this step … Signing a Treaty of Friendship … Each time I hear these words – Freundschaft, Amitié –, I am moved. They are private words, not for treaties between nations. But the will to not let history repeat itself, to do something radically new, was so strong that new words had to be found. For people Europe was a promise, Europe equalled hope. When Konrad Adenauer came to Paris to conclude the Coal and Steel Treaty, in 1951, one evening he found a gift waiting at his hotel. It was a war medal, une Croix de Guerre, that had belonged to a French soldier. His daughter, a young student, had left it with a little note for the Chancellor, as a gesture of reconciliation and hope. I can see many other stirring images before me. Leaders of six States assembled to open a new future, in Rome, città eterna … Willy Brandt kneeling down in Warsaw. The dockers of Gdansk, at the gates of their shipyard. Mitterrand and Kohl hand in hand. Two million people linking Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius in a human chain, in 1989. These moments healed Europe."

"But symbolic gestures alone cannot cement peace. This is where the European Union’s “secret weapon” comes into play: an unrivalled way of binding our interests so tightly that war becomes materially impossible. Through constant negotiations, on ever more topics, between ever more countries. It’s the golden rule of Jean Monnet: “Mieux vaut se disputer autour d’une table que sur un champ de bataille.” (“Better fight around a table than on a battle-field.”) If I had to explain it to Alfred Nobel, I would say: not just a peace congress, a perpetual peace congress! Admittedly, some aspects can be puzzling, and not only to outsiders. Ministers from landlocked countries passionately discussing fish-quota. Europarlementarians from Scandinavia debating the price of olive oil. The Union has perfected the art of compromise. No drama of victory or defeat, but ensuring all countries emerge victorious from talks. For this, boring politics is only a small price to pay. Ladies and Gentlemen, It worked. Peace is now self-evident. War has become inconceivable. Yet ‘inconceivable’ does not mean ‘impossible’. And that is why we are gathered here today. Europe must keep its promise of peace."

"The very construction of the EU, from the beginning, was based on the implementation of the principle of state sovereignty."

"I am afraid that I have seen enough of both the governance of science, and the political operations at the European Union. In these three long months, I have indeed met many excellent and committed individuals, at different levels of the organization of the ERC and the EC. However, I have lost faith in the system itself."

"In the 19th and early 20th century the issue had shifted from religion to nation. You had mixed ethnic populations throughout Europe, and as Europe began to reorganize itself on a national, or a cultural, or an ethnic basis, you had two bloody... World Wars that... undermined the magnificent European civilization of the 19th century... Liberalism was called upon in the aftermath... to enable Europeans to live together in ethnically diverse societies. That was the origin of the European Union... an effort to move beyond nationalism, to a new form of ."

"Today, on this stage, receiving this high amazing award for my father, Aleksei Navalny, I thank you and through all of you I welcome the Europe of ideas and principles. The European Union is an incredible miracle created by nations whose whole history is an endless war with each other. Despite all the difficulties and problems, however, the EU has encountered and will encounter, I believe that in its future one day my country will become a part of it."