Europe is living a critical moment. And the future isn’t made of vain words, or illusionary realities. It’s made of will, of imagination. It can even be made with ease, if we just follow the paradigms dictated by justice. If we look to ourselves to fight the crisis, we must look to our own absurdities – and Europe has absurdities.

The absurdity of underusing technologies which serve the aim of political function: information and communication technologies could give more publicity to the European institutions and bring more proximity to their relations with peripheries. Institutional publicity on TV, for instance, was simply forgotten. Also, there isn’t yet a parliamentary channel which could show the faces and the debates at the European Parliament.

The absurdity of European Parliament’s internal dynamics, limiting ideological competition in the name of systematic negotiation and consensus: the tendency to reduce the number of parliamentary groups and the rooted negotiation practices between big political groups, not disclosing the political game, aren’t the answers to the needs of European democracy, they don’t help solving the representation deficit which throws Europe from crisis to crisis. European Parliament’s expansion can’t make it shift from a democracy to a negotiated order.

The absurdity of a Common Agricultural Policy which limits the production in many cases, when there’s a world of starvation and misery, and when an emerging energy policy is looking at bio-fuels as alternative. European unity is far from achieving its most pressing effect, an integrated and transversal perspective of its own policies. The absurdity of an immigration policy which in part still rests within the remit of Member states, with no internal solidarity and no questioning of its causes: Europe’s solution for immigration must lie beyond its geographical limits; It must bring an interpretation to what’s causing the pressure on its borders. It must be an immigration policy and a development policy.

The absurdity of harmonisation criteria in Europe’s legislative mandates: Europe legislates too much on too many secondary issues, creating unnecessary uniformity, creating a bureaucratic blockage. But it doesn’t make the slightest harmonisation on tax policy, doesn’t grow as a defence body, and doesn’t build common standards on criminal policy, just the one that protects its constitutive values. European legislation’s criteria are waiting for a revolution, a revolution of priorities and simplification.

The absurdity of the chaotic European policy towards strategic powers like China and Russia: bilateral relations are blocking the progress towards a European world policy.

The absurdity, sometimes, of the fundamental rights discourse – the substance of Europe’s beating heart: because so very often it is a speech “colonised” by political correctness, when some topics always prevail above others;  because, much too often, it’s not a speech combative enough, able enough to beat Realpolitik in world affairs.

Europe must create its own system of justice if it wants to assume its exemplarity, if it wants to be a model of civilisation. The model that generates the feeling of Europe, the one that prevents the “no’s” of the crisis.

Maria da Assunção Esteves
President of the European Movement in Portugal
Member of the European Parliament