Through concrete proposals that I hope will be speedy, we need to overhaul this sovereignty to allow our Europe to rise above its petty divisions and build, over the next decade, the terms of its sovereignty. Not for those of the past, but for you, young people.
We who are leading Europe today cannot pretend nothing is happening. We still have that luxury. But in ten, fifteen, twenty years, what Europe will we leave to the next generations?
I do not want to write your future, but I want to say, quite simply, that you can choose, that you have that same luxury we have had, that you can make choices that are, of course, sometimes difficult. But choices nonetheless. That is what European sovereignty is about. That is what will allow you, young Europeans, to write your own future. That is what means that what we have experienced in the last decade is not, in any case, equal to our history! Because what have we promised to Greece’s young people? What have we given them in the last decade? For half of them, austerity and joblessness! What have we offered them? A bright future – if they were prepared to go to Berlin or Paris, for example. That was not the initial promise. The initial promise was that of a sovereign Europe where people could succeed at home, in a wider, stronger space than mere nations. So that is what we need to rediscover. That is the heart of European sovereignty, your sovereignty, as young people, to choose!
That sovereignty is the ability of nations to decide their own destiny. What is that worth, if it is not the people who decide the course that we follow? And how can we not see that Europe’s failures over so many years are also failures of democracy?
Through its scale and the expansion it saw, through the diversity it adopted, the European project suddenly encountered, some ten years back, a refusal from the people, from its peoples. What happened in 2005, in Europe, in France, in the Netherlands, was that peoples among the founding States suddenly decided that the project was not for them anymore. Did we listen? No, we did not. Those who led Europe at the time decided not to respect their choice. They pretended nothing had happened, and sought compromises aside from the people, so as to continue a method that for decades had worked so well: building Europe a little to the side and explaining it afterwards.
What happened in 2005 is that a page was turned and we did not realize straight away that Europe could no longer move forward without its peoples. It could no longer continue towards the destiny it had chosen itself, desired and therefore explained, driven by the peoples of Europe together. What happened a few months ago in the United Kingdom is not a whole different story: suddenly, the people of that island rose up against choices often supported by its own leaders and said “this Europe is not for me. I do not have my place here, and I no longer understand it. These rules have become absurd. Look at this Europe where I am losing my own rights, and where I am expected to make more and more effort to live less well.” That is what the British people said last year.
So yes, these ballots have brought an end to an adventure in which Europe had always moved forward as if sheltered from our people’s will. And when I fight the sometimes bureaucratic excesses that mean that Europe seeks to move forward through rules its citizens no longer understand, that mean that Europe moves forward by controlling every detail of daily life because it has lost its grand purpose, it is to rediscover the zest of this European democracy. When I fight for a revision of the posted workers directive, I fight against a Europe that has ended up producing absurd rules where our peoples are no longer able to understand the societies in which we want them to live.
