Roderick Pace, who succeeded you as lynch-pin of the European Documentation and Research Centre which you co-founded with Salvino Busuttil at the University almost half a century ago and has also been an outspoken critic of your views on the rejected European Constitution, recently co-edited yet another book on Europe. What do you think of it after having attended the discussion at its launch?
I agree with John Bellers, the author of the 1710 essay which Pace has edited together with Peter van den Dungen, that there is just “one thought” that was both original at the time of its proposition and has remained still relevant today.
It is “that Europe should be divided into 100 equal cantons or provinces, or so many, that every sovereign prince and state may send one member to the senate at least”.
I do not agree at all with Dungen’s pooh-poohing of the idea after he had given a survey of the many different interpretations of it offered by scholars over the past three centuries, and of his lauding of other sundry and scattered bits and pieces of ideas in Bellers’s essay.
The “one thought” is not only an anticipation of the idea of “Europe of the Regions” which I suppose would have rallied much support at the European Convention had it not been for the problem of what would happen to Paris if regions, rather than nation-states, were to become the constituent units of the European Union.
It is only in the case of Paris that the centralisation of functions in just one capital city within a nation-state has been carried to such an extent as to make impractical any thought of a return to regions (the cantons or provinces of which Bellers speaks) instead of nation states as the building blocks of a federation or confederation on continental scale.
On the “one thought”, Pace remarks: “Individuals would be represented in the international community on the basis of a constituency not necessarily coinciding with the state whose citizens they were. The creation of a supranational institution thus leads to a re-examination of the structure of states.”
This comment highlights the fact that in Bellers’s proposal, the atoms, so to say, of the envisaged Europe would be individual citizens, as they were also to be the smallest nodes in the network constitution that I proposed on behalf of the government to the European Convention.
However, then, our the convention president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, although listening very attentively on every occasion that I aired the network proposal, always kept ruling that it was not the convention’s task to innovate, but only to consolidate existing structures, except for necessary changes consequent upon the enlargement to 25 member states.
Was there any discussion of such issues in the massive two volumes on The European Mind edited by Henry Frendo, of the contributions to which you have only drawn attention to the considerable sections dealing with gender relations and the family?
By far the most ample development in the book concerns literature and philosophy, which is not surprising given that its sub-title is ‘Narrative and Identity’.
In fact, there are hardly two of the 36 ‘workshops’ or thematic sections (by my count) that deal with constitutional matters. Perhaps the most relevant essay is that on ‘The Open Method of Co-ordination’ in a section which turns out to be otherwise focused on Hungary. In it, the author, Stefan Okruch, shows “the necessity of political innovations” for the implementation of the 2000 Lisbon Strategy, intended to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth”.
The Lisbon Strategy included the adoption of “the Open Method of Co-ordination”. This meant that “national political ‘experiments’ are evaluated on the European level (‘benchmarking’), ‘best practices’ are identified, and policy recommendations are given to the member states”.
The Open Method of Co-ordination is one of the clearest manifestations that the real nature of the EU is that of a network, which is the only institutional political system that can adequately sustain the sort of knowledge economy set up as the goal of the Lisbon Strategy.
Okruch moves to the conclusion that the institutional competition implied by the Lisbon Strategy “is a discovery procedure, a ‘constitutional exploration, for the inventing of and experimenting with new solutions to constitutional problems’”.
How relevant do you think these constitutional issues are in today’s context when predominant concern is with the global economic crisis in general and that of eurozone members in particular?
The challenges presented by crises are generally the most opportune moments for the innovations Giscard deemed untimely at the convention.
I am positive that Foreign Minister Tonio Borg realises full well that the worst thing for Europe would be if it allows the problems of eurozone member states to obstruct continuation with the process of economic integration, even if mainly on the lines of the Lisbon Strategy. It should be Malta’s specific vocation not to allow the development of the two related policies, commitment to which was secured at the European Convention.
The first is the development of the holistic marine policy which followed upon the realisation that the sea territory of the Union was at least as important as the land territory from an economic point of view. It would indeed be a pity if this policy, including integrated coastal zone management, were put on a back-burner now that there is no longer a Maltese commissioner in charge.
The second is Mediterranean and Middle Eastern involvement, which Malta should insist is on the agenda of every council meeting.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.