Don’t waste a good crisis

President Juncker pushes for heavy reforms

Wednesday Jean-Claude Juncker, Head of the European Commission, gave his much anticipated “State of the Union” speech. The topics touched varied from immigration to the Eurozone, from Brexit to the Parliament and much more, and in all this topics the fil rouge linking them together was the audacity of his proposal for an ever closer and more integrated Europe.

This avant garde position is already upsetting a few people around the continent. In particular, the critics believe the President is pushing the boundaries of his mandate and that a more democratic approach is needed. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny the fact that his proposals are rooted in the same principle: more EU. In particular he refused the idea of a multispeed Europe and envisioned a common path for all the member states and further harmonization in many key sectors, including defense, monetary policies and taxes. On the financial side, he rejected the French proposal of a Eurozone parliament and stated that in the future he sees all the member states adopting the common currency and thus leaving no space for a new and redundant institution. His reasoning was that

“If we want the euro to unite rather than divide our continent, then it should

be more than the currency of a select group of countries. The euro is meant

to be the single currency of the European Union as a whole.”

What he propose instead is an evolution of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) into a Monetary Fund, as wished by Berlin, and see the creation of a real EU finance and economy minister, which would have the task to coordinate reforms on a continental level and oversee financial troubles of the member states. To achieve this and more, Juncker calls for a revision of the unanimity rule which would allow for a quicker decision making process and to move away from the intergovernmental model and towards a centralized one.

The monetary future of the Union is not, though, the only target of this economical reform foresaw by the Commission. A common EU corporate tax rule, a stricter stance on foreign acquisition on strategic sectors, a push for more free trade agreement and other equally ambitious proposals find the national politics landscape fractured and wary of radical change. Divides between bigger and smaller economies, east and west, north and south emerges and every step could be a potential Pandora’s box for the countries most affected by this new plans.

But that’s what it means to be ambitious. It has become increasingly clear to the European governments, and to some extent to the general population, that changes in the Union are in order if it wishes to survive. These proposals, to be effective, must dare to venture into the unknown, like the founding fathers did. For what is worth, the European Parliament is supporting this push as the three major parties at least partially approved of the message from President Juncker.
The captain has set the course to seize the moment and not to let “a good crisis going to waste” and as he himself explained:

“The wind is back in Europe’s sails. But we will go nowhere unless we catch that wind.

Years from now we will be more disappointed by the things we did not do, than by the ones we did.”