In the new phase of world politics begun after the crisis of the unilateral system, dominated by the United States, Europe has to face two difficult challenges:
- to reposition the European economy in the new economic order that will emerge after the big disruptions caused by the economic and financial crisis;
- to position itself in the new security system set out for a difficult transition towards a multipolar order, hopefully cooperative.
The passage coincides with the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty.

There are three priority fields where the capacity of the European leadership to give the right answers shall have to prove itself, lest Europe be marginalized in the international arena; the international community, however, will not succeed, without Europe's contribution, in achieving a stable and thriving organization.

The economic answer
In order to get out of the current difficulties, Europe has to reach two goals:
- to implement the project of a sustainable economy, both in the environmental and the social fields, through actions on the supply side;
- to relaunch its productive capacity in the traditional sectors, through innovation and by stimulating demand.

To finance the project of a sustainable economy, the implementation of the plan put forward by Delors is crucial. The plan envisaged the issuing of Union bonds to support, on the one hand, research in the energy and environmental fields, and, on the other hand, to implement the necessary physical and technological infrastructures.

The budget of the Union must be oriented towards investments and it is therefore logical that there shall be a part in capital account – as was expressly envisaged for the European Carbon and Steel Community (ECSC) and Euratom – with the issue of European bonds covered partially by the self-financing capacity of the realized infrastructures themselves, and partially by an “ecological tax”, for what concerns research. The Lisbon Treaty offers, if a strong political will will emerge, an institutional framework sufficient to realize, at least in a first phase, such a policy aimed to supply European public goods.

To support the more traditional production, instead, it is necessary to act by developing research and innovation and by backing the demand side, but taking into consideration the fact that Europe, as all the other advanced areas, must strengthen its saving capacity. This situation is in our case worsened by the aging of the population, only partially mitigated by immigration, given the population density already present in the old continent.

The European integration process allowed to give, in the past, original answers to the Keynesian problem of adjusting demand to the productive capacity, through the enlargement of the market to neighbouring underdeveloped areas, little by little included in the development through the enlargement. This, in a way, re-proposed Ford’s idea that a development cycle would develop if purchasing power is given to the marginalized classes, like the factory workers.

The first case, in the Sixties, was represented by Italy, then followed in the Eighties by Spain and lastly in 2000 by the Central European countries, first of all by Poland. If it is not possible to use the enlargement to this end any more, it is nonetheless feasible to achieve similar results through the association of new countries.

The most relevant case is represented by Russia and the other ex-Soviet republics, in particular Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The “European economic space” once imagined for Great Britain and the other EFTA countries is the institutional architecture model that could allow to realize the integration of the Russian economy with the European internal market and, furthermore, stabilize the energy supplies needed by Europe through an agreement between the CIS and the European Union. This would allow to introduce in Russia the rules of the European internal market (as it is the case in Norway) respecting the economic rules also in the CIS area, with the guarantee of a common Court.

The second case relates to the Mediterranean Union where, together with an integration of the market, a cooperation is essential in the field of the new energies between the two sides of the Mediterranean sea, according to the projects worked out by the German industry that, however, require the creation of a sort of ECSC co-managed by Europe and the countries of the other side.

Both projects have relevant security aspects and are feasible only if Europe moves forward in this field as well.

The monetary issue
Without a stable monetary framework it would have been impossible to maintain, in the medium term, the European common market; hence the decision – for many inconceivable and impossible – to realize the euro.

The same is valid at the world level: without an adequate solution to the monetary disorder caused by the impossibility for the dollar to sustain any longer its role as reserve currency, the development of world trade is at risk, and can lead to a negative spiral of inflation and protectionism, giving to the economic crisis a disastrous outcome, as happened last century between the two world wars.

Europe has a primary interest in achieving a stable international monetary system, being the economy most dependent on international trade. Furthermore, Europe cannot accept that other states (the US and China) pursue monetary policies that lay onto the euro's exchange-rate the cost of adjustment. An agreement like a worldwide European Monetary System (1979), with the identification of a common anchor like the European-currency-unit basket, is the claim that Europe has to put forward in the international monetary circles, taking advantage of the availability expressed by the Governor of the People’s Bank of China Zhou Xiaochuan to use a revised Special Drawing Rights system to this end.

Therefore, Europe must unify its presence at the IMF, at least for the euro-zone countries, and negotiate a new Bretton Woods. The Lisbon Treaty offers all the procedures needed to obtain a single EU representation in order to speak, as already happens at the WTO, with a single voice.

The Euro-Group
The Lisbon Treaty, with its provisions on “enhanced cooperation”, offers to the euro-zone countries the legal possibility to put into effect among them, but using the Union's institutional structures, all the initiatives needed to have a “European economic government”, not only in the monetary field but also for the issuing of Union bonds by federal specialized agencies, to which special taxation rights should be given, especially in the energy and environmental fields, as it was the case for the ECSC.

This is a possibility with a particular political significance, because it depends only on the will of those countries more open to the federalist perspective, that are therefore in a position to isolate the resistances of the more nationalist countries.

Security
The Lisbon Treaty establishes in the field of security and defence a system similar to the one envisaged by the EMS in the monetary field.

Consultative bodies are created (at that time the Governors’ Committee, now the Foreign Ministers’ Council chaired by the High Representative, assisted by an embryo of European diplomatic service), but there is a lack of intervention power. Foreign reserves remained at that time, with the EMS agreements, under the control of the national central banks, and only with the Maastricht Treaty did the ECB acquire the right to make use of them, even if they remain nominally deposited for the most part in the national central banks. The intervention powers still remain in the hands of the national governments, thus frustrating the real possibility for the Union to be listened to at the international level.

In the EMS framework there was, however, a point where national sovereignty was, at least partially, limited, and that was related to the countries participating in the exchange-rate agreement (the “monetary snake”), whereby no country was allowed to devalue its currency without the consent of the other participating countries: from 1981 to the institution of the ECB in 1999, the exchange-rate between the German mark and the French franc remained stable, overcoming ever more violent currency crises. This was possible thanks to the decision taken at Maastricht to proceed towards the common currency. Without this perspective, the EMS would have melted like snow in the sun.

In the Lisbon Treaty, the equivalent of the exchange-rate agreement is, in the security field, the “structured cooperation” in the military field. Without the starting up of structured cooperation, the perspectives in the foreign and security common policy agreed in Lisbon are bound to simply be non-existing, more than to resoundingly fail.

If a group of states, politically significant, decides to go ahead and implement the Treaty’s provisions, a difficult and stormy phase of international relations will begin, but if, as in the case of the mark/franc, the agreement between Germany and France holds on, a possibility will be created that, faced with the pressure of the security problems at world level and with the inadequacy of the Lisbon Treaty, an alternative will emerge, as happened at Maastricht, to move from a common foreign and security policy to a “single” policy, at least for a group of states.

In that context, the institutional conditions needed to manage such a unified power will be defined, taking into consideration though that these could not prescind from guarantees of democratic control (as happened with the European Defence Community project, 1950) and therefore from decisions of a constitutional nature.

What is to be done
The first step for avoiding the final marginalization of Europe from the building up of a new world order is therefore the activation of “structured co-operations”. The initiative, contrary to what is applicable to the economic and monetary sector, where the responsibility lies in the hands of the European bodies (Council, Commission, Parliament), here lies in the hands of the member states and in particular of France and Germany: in other words, we need to resume the project that France, Germany and Luxembourg launched on the eve of the Iraqi war, as an alternative to the alignment with the Bush-Blair position, which turned out to be a failure.

The decision to set up an “enhanced cooperation”, however, must envisage a first element of sovereignty transfer (as envisaged in the EMS agreement on exchange rates) that can only consist in sharing, at least among the participating countries, the permanent seat in the UN Security Council given to France at the end of the second world war, as a winner country.

As Germany had to sacrifice its own currency for the sake of the realization of the euro, likewise France must offer to Germany to finally close the inheritance of the second world war, and share its UN seat, as wisely suggested by the new German Government as an alternative to their nationalist position to claim a permanent seat for themselves.

If the Union will be able to make the needed, feasible steps in the economic and monetary fields, the confidence of the citizens in the European unification project will come back, as already happened after the different crises that marked the long path from Ventotene up to the present day.

The promise of one European foreign and security policy will not, most likely, be kept, but, in a moment of crisis, if the European citizens will gain again the confidence in Europe, it will be possible, starting from the agreement among the states that will activate a structured cooperation, to go forward with the decisive step towards a common sovereignty, giving Europe, after the “purse”, the “sword” too.

Monnet and Spinelli
European unification began thanks to the ability of Jean Monnet – with his proposal in 1959 of the creation of the ECSC – to seize the moment when a transfer of sovereignty from the national states to Europe was possible, and thanks to the political struggles of Altiero Spinelli, who was able to exploit the European Defence Community project to appoint the ad-hoc Assembly and launch the European Political Community, later rejected in 1954 by the French Parliament.

Mario Albertini, who was leading the European Federalist Movement after Spinelli, was able to unify the capacity of supporting pro-European initiatives: with his Campaign for the direct election of the European Parliament he enabled Spinelli to come back into action and resume the struggle with the project of a Treaty for the European Union, voted by the newly-elected European Parliament in 1984; and with the struggle for the European currency he enabled Robert Triffin to continue Monnet’s action, which ended in the Maastricht Treaty in 1991 and the coming into force of the euro in 1999.

The journey has been a long one, but we are at the final stretch: as everybody knows, the last meter to go is the most difficult.