Europe's dilemma

Over the last 30 years, globalization has shaped our societies for good or bad. We may be discontent about it and try to limit its adverse effects on wages and social protection. Technology has also shaped globalization; the emergence of new economic powers has conferred a new political structure. Those countries which will not have a continental dimension will become politically irrelevant. Like in a chess game, the pawns can move one step at a time, in one direction, but against them the knights, the towers, the Queen move in all directions .Imagine if Europe transforms into the United States, it would become a tower.

Europe is the richest continent of the world, technologically advanced, more populated than the United States, Russia or Brazil, but lacks political power. The paradox is that it does not seek for more powersmainly due to its internal divisions. Yet it cannot by itself provide economic stability,  resolve migration issues, bring legality and peace in our Mediterranean confines and to turn into a federal governance in order to address the problems increasingly posed by globalization. 

Those who want and fight for the United States of Europe know that there is no other way in the global economy if it wants to bring much needed stability and security to its citizens. Last June, an open   letter signed by more than 200 academics was forwarded to Heads of State and government. It indicated some of the necessary reforms to make Europe work better, in particular the completion of the eurozone governance and called for a " clear roadmap and timetable to complete the banking union and to reach the fiscal, economic and political unions by the end of the European legislature .

Citizens need a vision and a way forward to a Europe based on democracy, solidarity and subsidiarity. Nothing else can win back their trust towards the Union. The alternative is the spread of the social perception of an inevitable and irreversible decline, which fosters the rise of populism, nationalism and xenophobia. Leadership implies responsibility towards the citizens of today and tomorrow"

To be or not to be, that is the question. Hamlet chose not to be and had the end that Shakespeare has told us. We, Europeans are making the wrong choice and if we do not remake our Europe we'll have the same end.  Yet, Europe has the potential to shape its economic and political future as it did in the aftermath of WWII.