Gipuzkoa irudikatuz

Urtea amaitzeko, Anthony Zacharzewskik udako ikastaroan partekatutako orainaren eta etorkizunaren ikuspegiaz hausnartuko dugu. Gi2030ean ikasitakoarekin bat egin zuten funtsezko 5 puntu nabarmendu ditugu:

• Erronka demokratikoak Europan:
• Kontrol eta agentzia pertsonalerako nahia eta alderdietan oinarritutako sistema politikoa bateratzea erronka handia da Europa osoan.
• Arazoa ez da konponezina, historiak botere-aldaketak erakusten baititu eskala horretan, eta demokraziaren printzipioarekiko konfiantza handia da, baina aldaketa positiboak babesten dituzten herritarrak eta mugimenduak izatearen garrantzia azpimarratzen da.
• Herritarren funtsezko parte-hartzea:
• Herritarren parte-hartzea funtsezkoa da, eta moralaren, estrategiaren eta panorama orokorraren ekarpena islatu behar du.
• Baliteke herritarrek eztabaida teknikoetan interesik ez izatea, baina parte hartzearen garrantzia aitortzen da.
• Erronka europarrei eta globalei, hala nola klima-aldaketari, erantzuteko, toki-mailan ulermen kolektibo eta demokratikoa eraiki behar da.
• Herritarren elkarrizketak batzea funtsezkoa da epe luzera adostasuna lortzeko.
• Integrazioa eta aldaketa prozesua:
• Azpiegitura demokratiko eraginkor bat eraikitzea Europako esperimentuaren zati bat da, desafioei modu kolektiboan aurre egiteko.
• Integrazio- eta aldaketa-prozesu bat espero da, sistema berri baterako trantsizio malkartsu baten ordez.
• Lankidetzazko gobernantza:
• Parte-hartze praktika barne hartzen duen gobernantza eraikitzeko beharra nabarmentzen da.
• Funtzionarioen, politikarien eta erabakien arduradunen prestakuntza funtsezkoa da ikuspegi horretarako.
• Etorkizuneko Europaren hautua:
• Etorkizunari buruzko hausnarketak premiazkoa egiten digu nahi dugun Europa definitzea, 2040an edo 2050ean ageriko aldaketak izango dituen prozesu luzea izango dela aitortuz.
• Nahi den Europa hau eraikitzea eguneroko hautua da, Gipuzkoan hasten den prozesua.

The future of Europe

Anthony Zacharzewski (2023-9-8)  

Thank you very much indeed and thank you for the invitation. I’m going to thank the interpreters in advance because I’m usually pretty hard on them, but I will try to speak more slowly than I normally do to make it a bit easy for them and for you.

They always say when you’re giving a speech that people remember one thing. I’m going to tell you the one thing now. So, if you have emails to do, you’ve got half an hour to do those.

The one thing is if we’re going to build a successful democracy in Europe, it has to start in places like this. It has to start in places where there are difficult, challenging conversations on culture and on history that are being resolved and are being worked on. It has to start in places where democracy is being experimented with and it has to start in places where the government and governing powers are fully engaged in that conversation rather than just watching it from the edge.

So that’s the starting point. Let me talk you through a few things from the way I see them. The first place I want to start is just explaining a few points, which I hope are pretty generally agreed. First, there is a general sense, and we saw it from Cristina’s [Monge] presentation, that the democratic institutions that we have are not meeting expectations. My former colleague Meg Russell at The Constitution Unit in London wrote a pamphlet called Must Politics Always Disappoint? And at the moment it is always disappointing.

There’s a response to the climate crisis that I don’t want to be too negative about because we’ve come a lot further than I thought we might, but there’s still an enormous challenge ahead of us. The most difficult parts are still to come.

We have increasing inequality. I was reading an article in this week’s Economist over breakfast, and it was just saying, as a matter of simple fact, there are 23 times more millionaires in India this year than there were 10 years ago. And it was presenting that as like a really positive thing, which of course if you are one of those millionaires, I think it’s probably is quite positive, but it’s not necessarily positive for the rest of Indian population.

And finally, there’s this sense of broad insecurity. You may be able to tell from my voice that I grew up in England, and we had this thing called Brexit. I don’t know if you remember it, a certain thing happened a few years ago, and the slogan for Brexit was “take back control”. And it was easily the best political slogan of the last 20 years because it didn’t say what they were going to do with control. It didn’t say, it didn’t make promises about how brilliant the world was going to be after control had been taken back. It was saying, you don’t have control, you don’t feel you have control here. Now you can have it. And of course, it was a massive lie, but still it worked. And that expectation of personal control, I think is really central to what we’re talking about here.

When I was in my twenties, the internet seemed like this amazing new place. I was at university that was quite technical. I had high speed internet in my room in 1992, which was very, very unusual. I saw some of those really early internet developments happening live in front of me. And one of the things I think was most interesting to me was how it allowed communities to break and reform so I could find people who really liked film online. And I could find people who came from my hometown even though I was at a university a long way away. So all of those communities were allowed to form and people felt like they had a more direct access to the people they wanted to talk to. And that kind of have it your way. Culture has been driven partly by consumerism, but equally by the internet and by the sense of personal agency that comes when you can choose your own communities, when you can choose the things you want to get involved in and when you can talk to people who are interested in the same things that you are. And that’s one of the reasons why I think political parties are having such a bad time. Now, I’m a political theorist as well as a democratic activist. I do both. And so the political theorist in me knows that political parties are essential in electoral democracy, because otherwise you’re just voting for some person. And there’s no real long-term accountability for the choices that politicians make. And yet it’s really clear that the deal that parties used to offer, which is “we are the party; that’s probably a bit like you; if you are willing to vote for 10 policies you don’t agree with, then you can have 15 policies you do agree with; and maybe in five years’ time, we’ll make things a bit better”—that deal doesn’t work anymore because all of the rest of the world and every other interaction you have is saying you can have it your way.

Right now, politics says maybe you can have it a little bit your way in five or 10 years. And that’s never ever going to get people excited, that’s never going to meet the expectations that they’ve been given about the way the world should work. So, you see the shift from mass parties towards protest movements, towards campaigns, towards things that are spun up very quickly to push a particular point.

I don’t want to use too much time, but here is one quick story. A friend of mine is a senior civil servant in the UK. She’s a black woman who grew up in South London and she goes back regularly to the housing estate that she grew up in to mentor other young women like her. I was talking to her a couple of years ago now, and she said, when I was young, you know, when she’s the same age as me, in the eighties and nineties she saw the institutions of the state, the civil service and local government, and she thought, that’s where the power is. That’s where I’m going to go. I want to work in those places and change them. And now she goes back and she talks to people on the estate who are very like her, people from poor families, people from difficult domestic situations. And they say to her, I’m not interested in any of that. I want to set up this particular movement. I want to set up this charity or this initiative that will do this one thing. And that’s obviously an enormously wonderful thing for that person. But as someone who runs a small NGO can tell, I can tell you it’s not an easy path. It’s as difficult in some ways to change things through small individual campaigns as it is to change them by being in the civil service or by working in politics.

I think we haven’t yet found the ways in which we can make those new desires for personal agency compatible with a political system that is still based on mass parties, even though mass parties are, you know, very much weakened, failing. And as we’ve seen in the UK and in the US, they are very easy to take over by the most radical factions within them. I don’t think though that it’s an insoluble problem. I’m an optimist because I work on democracy. If you work on democracy, you have to be an optimist.

There have been previous power shifts on this scale. You know, if you look at the transition of government from say 1750 to 1850, the period during which the Enlightenment produced the earliest forms of liberal democracy, you can see an enormous shift of power, an enormous shift of responsibility from traditional aristocrats to the bourgeoisie and urban classes. Now, I’m not going to say it wasn’t a little bit difficult; Louis XVI probably had opinions about how difficult it was. But at the same time, that power shift did take place and it took place more or less successfully with more or less disruption in different places. I do think that history teaches us lessons not so much about how do you fix AI, but it certainly teaches us lesson about how does the machinery of the state adapt and how do the people who are participating in it get opportunities to do things differently.

Governments have reinvented themselves. I grew up in the UK. We have a House of Lords. The House of Lords was originally the place where the aristocrats who supported the king would be allowed to vote on laws. Now it is much like the Irish Senate, almost entirely made up of ex politicians who are appointed by their political parties to provide a revising chamber for legislation. Is it particularly democratic? Not really, but it’s certainly not as undemocratic as it was. And it’s certainly something that has changed its fundamentals, changed the core of who it is in a very deep way while keeping the same name and keeping the same constitutional role.

So those changes can happen, but it’s slow and it can take time. And the last thing to say is commitment to democracy as a principle remains really high. A lot of those trust questions are because people don’t trust those organizations or those institutions to defend or to serve democracy in the right way. And this is one of the reasons as well why politicians and political parties tend to be quite low on those trust rankings. Not because people think that they’re automatically bad, but because people think that they are, you know, in that process for their own advantage, which of course they are, they’re there to get elected. So, there’s some interesting statistics on the difference between trust in process and trust in principle. And the trust in the principle of democracy is still really high.

However, if we’re going to get where we need to get to, we really do need citizens and movements that are ready to support positive change. Without having seen Cristina’s slides until last night, I’m repeating a lot of the points that she made because it is really about creating a civil society that is able to act as an institution that forms opinions and that shapes the way in which decisions are made. And this is traditionally the role of political parties. You know, again, not to be too much of a political theorist about it, but political parties are machines for synthesizing preferences into coherent policy programs. Civil society at the moment is fragmented into multiple, multiple campaigns. We need to find the mechanisms to structure civil society conversations into coherent programs that can then be adopted by governments. We need political structures that can incorporate more political participation.

The question at the back—I wanted to stand up and, and applaud—it is absolutely the case that political participation has so far not really moved the needle on trust. But that’s partly because most of the processes have been run outside or to one side of government. And there’s very few examples—I would argue one, maybe two—of a citizen participation process that resulted in something happening that the government that commissioned it really didn’t want most of the time. The processes that run produced results, not that the government wants, but produced results that the government are either happy with or they take the bits that they’re happy with and they ignore the rest. There’s definitely a need for proper incorporation of those politic, those democratic structures into government.

And finally, you need to have government agencies and public services that can join that conversation with confidence. The training that civil servants and politicians have is based on the old world. It’s based on a world where the minister speaks to the public and just sells the line, and the civil servants do the work and shut up. I just don’t think we’re going to be able to live like that for much longer. You know, the people who are taking decisions need to be out there more publicly, in a more engaged and more open way. And that includes the people who are responsible for it within the government. That’s quite a shift.

I don’t want to talk for too long, but I do want to go a little bit into Europe because I’m here to talk about the future of Europe. And I think the future of Europe will be built in places like this, partly because it’s the only way you can fix some of the fundamental problems about Europe, about engagement in European politics.

The first problem it that Europe is not really designed for it, it was an intergovernmental structure designed in the 1950s to regulate steel and coal and iron. So it is a regulatory body, it’s not a service provider, it’s not present in people’s lives, or at least until relatively recently, it wasn’t even slightly present in people’s lives. Now you have the euro, you have European flags everywhere. You can see the benefits or see the connections that are coming through European politics increasingly, but the structures themselves don’t reflect that.

There is a really excellent TV series from Denmark from about 10 years ago, Borgen, and one of the episodes is called “In Brussels no one can hear you scream”. And the plot of the episode is that a politically difficult person in the party of the Prime Minister is going to be sent to Brussels as European commissioner because that way he’ll be out of the way and he won’t make any fuss. And that’s the way in which national politics still thinks of Brussels. This place over there where you can just be isolated a long way away, like being sent out to like Napoleon and Elba.

But Europe is also a policymaking body. So last Friday the Digital Services Act came into force, and if you haven’t heard about it, you’ll rapidly see the effects because Facebook will start asking you whether you want to be tracked. Facebook will start asking you whether you want to have your feed in a time order or in an order suggested by its algorithm. And lots of other digital services are going to start asking your permission for how they use your data in a much more detailed way. And that’s Europe, that’s the Digital Services Act. And it’s being created through a process that did involve citizens. There were various stages of consultation, but it was really a kind of standard policymaking process. So, it has that policy impact now, but it still has a huge distance from citizens. And I don’t think that’s a particularly European problem. I think if you stand here, Madrid feels as far away as Brussels. In fact, if you stand in most places, your national capital is just as far away as Brussels. I live in Brussels, literally in the city of Brussels. And “Brussels” still feels quite a far long way away on every level. It also deals with very abstract issues. In the Digital Services Act, the big debate was what is the threshold for declaring something a significant actor in the digital space? I don’t know about you, I guarantee I do not want to be in that conversation for six weekends of my life. In the Citizen assembly, there is a long-time scale for implementation and impact and you are dealing with some things that are quite high level. So, citizen participation in the classic sense of like get people in a room and get them talking needs to reflect the fact that citizens can provide the moral and the strategic and the bigger picture input, but don’t necessarily have the interest or the patience or the will to step into a very detailed, very technical discussion, which is what policymaking often is.

A good example of this is the conference on the future of Europe. Now for those of you who haven’t heard of it, and statistically that’s probably about 94% of you, the Conference on the Future of Europe was a process that lasted about a year and was set up by the current commission under president Ursula von der Leyen alongside the Parliament and the Council. To explain the process very quickly: 800 citizens were drawn at random from around Europe. They were from every one of the 27-member states, at least a man and a woman from each state. So there were two people from Malta, which is tiny, and then they were maybe like 60, 70 from Germany and then everyone else in between. They met over three weekends across Europe, first in Strasbourg, then a different place in Europe and then back in Strasbourg. And they discussed in groups the future of Europe. So it sounds like a really good citizen assembly, a good idea to have this kind of big picture conversation. And lots of it was good, I’m not saying it’s bad. In fact, you’ll see in on the next slide, I have some quite nice things to say about it.

But to start with some of the challenges: The conference on the future of Europe was far too big a question to handle over three weekends. If I said to you, what’s the future of the Basque country? You’ve got like six days to work it out. You would find it quite hard. And the people who were in the room also found it quite hard. And the consequence was that the recommendations were unfocused. They were “koala bear recommendations”, which is like, koala bears are really cute. So we’ll just do the nice things that everyone will agree with. That’s a challenge of time. You have to match the amount of time you have to the size of the question you have. And if you’re dealing with a question like, what is the future of Europe, which is absolutely massive, you need more than three weekends.

The political discussions curtailed the process. One of the reasons it was only three weekends is that the political arguments about who should be the chair meant that it was a much shorter timescale than they were expecting. They wanted to run it over two years, which probably would have been enough time as it was, but they had to run it over nine months and do lots of the processes that they had thought would follow each other in parallel. And that was because they spent a year arguing about who the political appointment should be for the chair of the conference, which is a really excellent example about how even something that is done, and I do believe it was in the genuine spirit of trying to get citizen voice in, resulted in a massive political row about one particular thing that held up the whole process.

As a result of that, the online tool, which was meant to collect ideas from the people out who weren’t part of this 800 people, just didn’t work. It was actually based on a tool called Decidim, which you may well know, which is used in Barcelona similar to the tool Consul in Madrid, and which is also used elsewhere in Spain, both of which are actually European products. They came from a European research program two cycles ago, framework program seven. The code base for them is a European code base, but it was done at too short notice and it was done too quickly. So even though there were some technical advances, it didn’t really work very well. And the broad and generalized recommendations in most areas, which did come out were accepted where the governments wanted to and were not accepted where the governments didn’t want to. And that was again, a bit of a failing. There was no kind of real follow through of something that governments didn’t want to happen.

So mixed success, but certainly there were elements of success. If you had said a few years ago, a we can get 800 Europeans in a room and they’ll all be able to deliberate really easily. Most people would’ve said, “oh, I don’t know, it sounds pretty difficult to me,” but it worked really well. And that’s credit to the designers, it’s credit to the people who were putting the structures in place. It’s also due to the interpreters because there were lots of voluntary interpreters who were being used in the buildings of the parliament in Strasbourg. And if the deliberative process, although it wasn’t long enough, had it gone on longer, it would’ve gone deeper. You would’ve got better results. Also, they were all real citizens. People who were a genuinely random selection of European citizens did have a genuine discussion on European issues.

To some extent they, they focused too much on Europe because it was called the Conference on the Future of Europe. But there was very little discussion around “well Europe shouldn’t do anything, it should just be left to governments, it’s just left to local councils.” There was a real European scale conversation going on. I thought that was much more than I expected. That was a positive surprise for me. But most importantly, everyone in that room expected exactly the same things of Europe as they expected of their local governments and of their national governments. They expected access, responsiveness, transparency, and participation. And that in some ways is the biggest victory for the European Union it could ever have. Because for years it’s been a policy question, should there be Europe? Should there not be? And now suddenly it’s become a level of government for this kind of rising generation. So I think that was a, a marker both of a benefit that people are now seeing Europe as this solution, but also of a massive challenge because Europe is not in any way ready to do the levels of participation and citizen engagement that the national and local and regional governments are totally natural and everyday and normal. So that’s a big development point for it.

There are also developments in digital tools. There has been, as a result of this conference, a set of citizen panels which are like mini conferences on particular policy areas, which again, could do with more ambition. There’s a good Bertelsmann Foundation report yesterday about how they needed to go further and to do more. But they are in the process, they are being embedded in that way, and they’ve normalized citizen participation at the European scale. It’s now not completely inconceivable that there will be another Conference on the Future of Europe, one that is better designed, one that is given more time, one that is given a clearer question maybe in two- or three-years time. And that is a huge positive development for participation at European scale.

I was asked to talk about the future of Europe, and like I said, if six weekends isn’t enough, 30 minutes is certainly not enough. But it’s a combination of two things. Europe has always been and will always be intergovernmental. You know, fundamentally nation states are here, they are not going anywhere. They may change in their response, their, in their responsibilities. They may to some extent start a process of to some extent having their powers distributed between regional and local and European levels. But fundamentally, the unit of action is still for now, probably for the next 15-20 years, the nation states, the member states.

The intergovernmental aspects of the future of Europe will include reform of the treaties to allow the Western Balkans and Ukraine to join and not totally break the governance system. It will need geopolitical work to make sure that Europe isn’t just looking in on itself and is actually understanding how it can work in its neighborhood and how the power that it has can be used for the best diplomacy. There’s going to be a lot of internal diplomacy needed. We are already seeing the problems that the current system is creating with Hungary and with Poland and the ways in which they’re able to block certain decisions. So there’s definitely scope there for a different approach, but it’s going to require a huge amount of diplomacy internally and externally.

And finally, like Cristina said, the military level, which is which in which Europe has been an economic giant and a military dwarf for many years, to use a phrase that comes from an American Secretary of State. And I think that that’s something where we are seeing a shift, but it’s also something that a lot of countries—Austria, Ireland for example—are really uncomfortable with. And so those sorts of shifts and strains and stresses are at the nation state level.

But the other part which I find most exciting is that we need to build the Europe of citizens. So that’s about understanding and creating a narrative of shared responsibility. The previous European development narrative was about structures, about the euro, about common foreign and security policy, about common defense policies. This is much more about common responsibility and European solidarity. And you’re already starting to see it with the response to the crises, the response to covid, the mutual unemployment insurance scheme that was temporarily available during covid. And people are talking about bringing back these, allow a European response to economic and social crises that don’t involve German taxpayers writing a check to someone in Greece, but do involve effectively that transfer happening through a European scale.

Citizen participation is going to be absolutely essential in that. If this is just done at a European level by like 150 people meeting in rooms in Brussels, it will never be able to build the long-term consent that is going to be needed for some of these big changes to take place. Europe will always be the bad, the bad actor over in the corner that local politicians blame for all of the difficult decisions that they don’t want to take or don’t want to take responsibility for. So we have to understand how we bring those citizen conversations together. And part of that is growing a European society. Erasmus is celebrating I think 25 years this year and a million Erasmus babies. You know, Erasmus is something that has been bringing people together at youth level for a long time. And we’re now seeing non-university Erasmus, people who are working in non-university sectors being offered some of the same opportunities.

“Local to Europe” and “Europe to local” is the other point here. Because if you aren’t able to see how Europe is working at local level and feel like you can influence it, and if you aren’t able to see from European level what localities look like, then you’re not going to be able to make the right choices. One of my projects at the moment is something called Net Zero Cities. European Union is funding 112 European cities, of which nine are in Spain to do a program of work to reach net zero by 2030. It’s a hugely ambitious target, not all of the cities will reach it, but the aim is to build a sense of an understanding of how that work can happen at local level in a collective, open, and democratic way.

That’s a very local response to a Europe wide challenge, to the global challenge of climate change. And one of the things that we are finding most fascinating is that using that collective action, we are able to see how Zaragoza can work with Sarajevo, how Malmo has lessons to learn from places in Greece. And I think that those kinds of connections between governments and between civil society organizations are also helping to build that common European narrative about not just the challenge, but also the solution. And in between all of those, we need to, in, in the margins of solving the climate crisis and remaking Europe, we also need to fix democracy.

Democracy is a multifarious word. I run an organization called Democratic Society, which I thought was a really smart name when I came up with it 17 years ago. And is a very complicated name because everyone has their own view of what democracy is. Is it representative, is it participatory? Is it deliberative? Is it about the service user democracy? “Nothing about us without us”, the idea that if you receive a service, you have to have a say in how it’s, in how it’s run and how much is it individual? The sort of the Republican ideal of the single voter making this single choice? And how much is it really about collectivities and communities? The answer is, all of these things.

The mix that you create for democracy is a personal and a political choice, but fundamentally no form of democracy is inherently illegitimate. We have to work out how we change the system to bring different aspects in. At the moment, we are in a democratic system, which is very much based on representative democracy, very much based on the inheritance of monarchical states where top-down money flows and top-down decision-making flows, sometimes allowed some powerful localities, but not really that much.

We are starting from that position and we have to change from there to something more open, to something more engaging, to something more participative.

We have a set of core values. I said democracy is very well supported. 70-80% of people think it is the best way of running a country. And we have common characteristics of success. We understand that trust is really important. We understand that a feeling of personal agency, that you can make a difference, is really important. And of course you have to have effective, efficient public services that are supporting the poorest in society and are protecting, are creating that security for Europe that Cristina was talking about.

There’s going to be a process of integration. We are not just going to stick with how we are, but we’re also not going to jump all at once to some new system. You know, the pathway is around changing, developing, integrating approaches like the ones that we’ll be hearing about today, like the ones that are happening right now in this region into the way that governments work. And sometimes that’s about creating new institutions.

I’ve been working with Naiara [Goia] at Arantzazulab, which is a fantastic new institution. And those sorts of institutions are interesting because they sit a little bit to the edge. They are insider outsiders and they are outside insiders. So they can talk to both, they can talk to the community in a different way from government, but they can talk to government in a different way from a normal lobby group or civil society organization. So some of those hybrid institutions are being created and sometimes existing institutions just need to change.

In Brussels, where I live, the regional parliament has got a standing citizen assembly on climate change now. So as well as the climate change committee and as well as the parliament itself, there’s now a standing citizen assembly that’s looking at some of the bigger strategic questions about how we’re tackling climate change in the Brussels region. Those sorts of mixes will look different in different places. There isn’t going to be a single solution that fits everyone, but the common European experiment is to understand how we can build those pieces of democratic infrastructure together effectively, cheaply, and in ways that is that ensure that people are able to step into those spaces and to be included in those spaces. Not just because they are articulate and they’re rich and they’ve got access, but because they are citizens and they feel like they have the, the opportunity to act as citizens.

The more that we can understand how we can create that strong democratic infrastructure and the more that we can understand how to include the maximum number of people in it, the easier it is going to be to handle some of the challenges that we’re facing. It will be easier to handle the rise of AI. It’ll be easier to handle climate change. It won’t be easy, it’ll be easier because this is really about building the structures for long-term experimentation and societal consent. If you built the perfect system participation system tomorrow, it would not solve climate change. It would not even necessarily make every single decision easy because some decisions are just really difficult to take and they have lots of trade-offs that just have to be thought through. But it would certainly make it easier to talk to the public about it.

So, what I think we should be working on? To send you away with some homework, we really need to think about how we build governance that integrates participatory practice. In other words, how do we train civil servants, politicians and decision makers in corporations and elsewhere, to think about participation and to think about involving the communities that they’re affecting. If we’re going to involve those communities, how do we build the civic and associative structures that we need to so that we can hear voices in their proper proportion, in their fair proportion, not just the loudest voices. If we are going to do that at local level, when local level is contained by all sorts of rules and regulations that come from regional, national and European level, how are we going to get that multi-level governance working? How are we going to create new institutions at a time when public budgets are squeezed? How are we going to have the conversation with institutions that need to change or even close to do that in an elegant, calm way that doesn’t create disruptions around power, conflict and anger? And finally, how do we create a politics that works for people who hate politics?

I’m really conscious that when I talk to audiences like this and when I talk to people in my daily work, I’m broadly speaking to people who are pro-democracy, pro participation, broadly speaking, liberal, not always necessarily liberal with a capital L but still. And there’s a group of people about 20-25% in most European countries who hate that stuff. They’re authoritarians, you know, they have authoritarian mindsets. They want strong rules, they want central control. That’s not incompatible with democracy, right? Every democracy has those, has those voices in it. We have to work out. Some people are like genuinely anti-democratic, actively hostile to democratic process. But those are very small numbers in between. There are people who have an authoritarian or a controlling mindset and who need to be brought into our democratic processes and feel their voices are being heard. Because if we just build a democracy for the people who want to participate, the people who don’t want to participate will not feel that they’re in democracy anymore.

Those of you who know your European history will remember that Monet said that Europe will not be built all at once or to a single plan, but by actions that first create “de facto solidarity”. Now, I think the last five years, for all they have been extremely difficult, have demonstrated the “de facto solidarity” of Europe. There was no conception in the last five years that one of the countries in Europe would try to kick out another country from a rescue mission like Germany did with Greece during the Euro crisis. You know, it’s not perfect. There are plenty of people, like in any political system, who don’t like spending money. There are people who want to keep the money for themselves, but the “de facto solidarity” is achieved. But now it’s going to have to handle the long-term pressure of climate change, digitization, and the need for Europe to become a military actor. We mustn’t get stuck in the idea that a treaty reform is going to fix this. Treaty reform might be important, but if we get stuck in legalism and in process, then we won’t get anywhere. This is about a legal and a treaty process going alongside a social shift. I think it’s also worth saying Europe is not inherently progress or liberal oriented.

The price that we are paying for Europe being a political space is that those actors that rejected Europe in the past are now embracing it as a narrative that they can use for reducing the apparent racism of an argument that says Europe should be white and should be Christian and we should keep out everyone else. So there are plenty of people in my country, in Belgium, in Poland and Hungary who see Europe as “capital E” Europe meaning white Europe, meaning put up the walls, meaning keep out the rest and that’s it. That’s a European narrative that exists and we’ve got to work with it and we’ve got to fight it.

It is not an inherently progressive thing to say that Europe will be built. We have to choose the Europe that we want to build and it will be a long build. It will be a build that will take us to the other side of the climate transition in 2050. You know, 2040, 2050, that’s when we’ll start to see the outlines of it. Because it isn’t going to be an easy shift. It takes decades to make these changes happen, but it’s a choice that we have to make every single day. It’s action that we can take every single day. And it’s something that we all can make together. Thank you very much.