Last Friday morning at the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague, Mr Pat Cox, President of the European Movement opened the celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the Congress of Europe. This event commemorating a fundamental moment in the process of European integration is resolutely facing into the future with the participation of some 500 delegates of organisations representing civil society, drawn from over forty different countries and invited to find ’60 ideas for Europe’.’Our generation is entrusted with continuing on’ explained Mr Cox, former President of the European Parliament, opening the proceeding in the presence of Prince Constantine of the Netherlands. A clear continuity was signalled by the presence of the head of the Dutch royal family given that the Congress of 1948 was attended by Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard.In his introductory message, the President of the European Movement, Mr Pat Cox, reminded the delegates of the principal message of the Congress of 1948: “Europe is under threat, divided, and the greatest threat comes from its very divisions”. From this message, the Council of Europe was born shortly afterwards: “The time has come to take an action commensurate to the dangers”; in other words, to unite the European peoples because ‘Europe’s destiny and world peace depend upon it’.In the subsequent sixty years, much has been achieved, explained Mr Cox, and the European dream of The Hague has solidified in the legal, democratic and institutional fields. Nonetheless, there is more to do : the time has come, the EMI president explained, for Europe to take root in the area of civil society – not only in the political, economic and intellectual elites – in order that citizens may adopt the European dream and shape the Europe of the future that they desire. On this point, Prince Constantine recognized the work achieved by the organisations active at a civil society level, where ‘pragmatic integration’ takes place, showing that on the European level ‘a lot goes on outside Brussels’.”We the people” must become the catalyst of the European idea and the ideal it still represents, concluded Mr Cox, while getting the work of the European Civil Society Forum underway. The Forum will run until Saturday evening, and sixty good ideas for the future will be decided on the basis of the participants’ votes.

Michel Theys
The Hague, Saturday May 24th 2008