The world Trump wants to create shocks us. His speech at the United Nations It will go down in history as a catastrophic milestone. In these circumstances, in which the leader of the world's leading economy and military power is proposing a worldview based on harnessing and expanding the power of the richest and those who are already the most powerful, democracies must react. For those of us in Europe, and in the European Union, it is essential to strive to ensure that unity provides us with the strength to resist the onslaught of Trumpism. However, the European Union is exasperatingly slow, weak, and impotent. Even worse: it is often incomprehensible. The European Union is complicated to understand, in its principles, its rhetoric, and its functioning. It is also frustrating because of the paralysis it leads to due to the principle of unanimity in decision-making. However, we must bear in mind that it is the result of long, complex and often conflicting national histories, and that states are little or not at all willing to cede sovereignty.
Fortunately, a book has just been published that, in a concise and clear way, offers us a clear explanation of what the European Union is and what it does. Under the title The European Union. A quick diveIn this book, the author, Mark Jeffery, embodies the recent tragedies of the Union: a British citizen, living in Catalonia, working for the European Commission (head of communications at the Barcelona office), a staunch European, but expelled from his job due to Brexit for being a British citizen. Despite his negative experience, the book is a reasoned defense of everything the European Union does and can do.
The author goes to the root of the facts. He asks what the European Union is and answers the essential questions as best he can: why the EU was created and why it still exists, who the main players are and what they do, what the European Union decides and how. It becomes a roadmap for EU citizens and non-citizens who want to get to know it. This is the bulk of his short book, always straightforward and easy to read. He focuses on what he considers the EU's main success: the single market. This is the Union's main strength. A relative force, which is very important for economic, business, and consumer purposes, but very ineffective as a political tool, and we must be aware of this: the EU is not a state. Progress based on the rule of unanimity guarantees slow and highly "depoliticized" progress. This is quite the opposite of the states the EU faces daily, which have highly centralized powers and strong authorities, as is the case with the United States, and even more so when the presidency controls both chambers and the Supreme Court, but incomparably more so in the cases of Russia and China. Compared to all of them, the European Union is a political and military "nothing."
The author does not shy away from the question of whether the EU will survive or whether it will be reduced to its initial formulation, which, we recall, was a European Economic Community devoid of any political ambition and limited to economic matters, as its name indicated. At crucial moments, the EEC's ambitions increased, and it transformed into the current EU. Since its refoundation more than thirty years ago, it has achieved some successes, but has always suffered from the lack of a unified voice. The author recommends, in his words, that "to preserve or advance the European Union, one must be simultaneously idealistic, critical, and realistic." But his idealism is one of the conviction that we must move toward greater integration, an objective that now seems more difficult than ever due to the emergence of forces, with growing parliamentary representation, that aspire to nationalize EU policies and that enjoy the active support of powers that defer to a weakened EU and dream of its dissolution. This desire reflects, in effect, that the EU has some power.
From this perspective—something between idealistic, critical, and realistic—the vision of someone who has personally experienced the rise of supporters of Britain's decision to leave the EU, how they achieved a majority in a decisive referendum, and the resulting costs for the British themselves, is a constant example of courage. It constantly reminds us of the achievements we have made and those that could be achieved, and how easy it is to get carried away by inflammatory rhetoric, which may be completely removed from reality but which appeals to some, given that it caters to the basest passions. As has been happening to us continuously since Trump became president of the United States, we are reliving the 1930s. We know why they were so disastrous, we can avoid it, and we have the tools at our disposal to design a better future.
