A group of MEPs drew up a blueprint for EU reform, proposals of which include a new EU programme to support households and businesses facing rising energy and food prices and a 5,000-strong European army.
The manifesto for a ‘Federal Europe: Sovereign, Social and Ecological’, seen by EURACTIV, has been prepared by the Spinelli group, which brings together influential federalist MEPs in the European Parliament.
The blueprint calls for expanded EU competences on health and tax policy, alongside constitutional changes to make the European Pillar of Social Rights legally binding.
It also calls for a Stability and Growth Pact, which sets out limits on government debts and budget deficits, to be revised to allow investment related to climate and environmental protection to be excluded from calculations.
Meanwhile, the requirement for decisions to be made by unanimity should be replaced with majority voting across a raft of existing policy areas.
“A great opportunity has arisen with the launching of the Health Union, including the common acquisition of vaccines and the nascent financial and fiscal union,” the blueprint states.
It proposes that a new European Assistance and Resilience Plan should finance “compensatory transfers” to households and small businesses in view of energy and food price increases, and for the EU Recovery Plan, which established a €750 billion programme of financial support for member countries to rebuild the economies after the pandemic, to be made permanent.
It also calls for a significantly beefed-up EU defence and security presence, including the setup of a 5,000-strong Rapid Reaction Force and EU military headquarters. It also adds that “the war in Ukraine must give Europe a union on migration based on solidarity and mandatory responsibility sharing”.
“The current situation shows that the initial aims of federalism are still timely,” Daniel Freund, a Green MEP and President of the Spinelli group, told EURACTIV.
“We need a strong Europe to solve the big issues of our time: climate, security, protecting democracy and our values. The European Parliament agrees, citizens agree and civil society agrees. Governments need to deliver,” he added.
Treaties: then and now
The Spinelli group has been one of the main drivers of European integration since the 1940s, when the so-called Ventotene Manifesto was written by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi during their time imprisoned by the fascist regime in Italy during the Second World War.
Ventotene nominated historical and moral capital of European values
The European Commission and the European Parliament nominated the Italian island of Ventotene the historical capital of the moral and intellectual construction of European values in a ceremony on Monday (29 August) held amid a seminar on European federalism.
One of the fathers of EU integration, Spinelli later became a MEP and European Commissioner, drafting a treaty that eventually led to the Maastricht treaty and creation of the EU single market.
Since the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, which emerged as the successor to the failed Constitutional treaty and came into force in 2009, there has been little appetite to re-open them.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the EU’s participatory democracy experiment, the Conference on the Future of Europe, have created new momentum.
The Conference agreed on 49 recommendations, including the scrapping of national vetoes in a host of policy areas such as foreign policy, new EU competences to coordinate health policy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and additional powers of legislative initiative and control for the European Parliament.
The question of scrapping vetoes on EU foreign, defence and security policy has emerged following the difficulties in agreeing on sanctions against Russia and military support for Ukraine in the wake of the invasion.
Most EU governments, including Germany, France and Italy, have said that they are in favour of treaty change. However, a substantial blocking minority of mostly smaller states from northern Europe and the Baltics, stated in a joint letter that they “do not support unconsidered and premature attempts to launch a process towards treaty change.”
On Monday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a speech that “even the European treaties aren’t set in stone,” pointing to the need to expand the EU to include countries from the Western Balkans and Ukraine, and for unanimity voting on policy areas such as foreign policy and human rights to be scrapped.
“The public wants an EU that delivers”, said Scholz.
[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]
Source: euractiv.com
