Bai EUROPAri!!!
Whether we vote or not today, May 25, in the European elections, we are committed to Europe. In these times of acute economic crisis and collapse of values, we bet on Europe. Even if we have to reinvent it or we have to rescue it from its moral vacuum. Although there is still so much to do or its ideology has been perverted.
We bet on Europe because, despite the sorrows, it is our best shield against tyrannies, populism and lack of culture. Despite all the regrets, the common European institutions are the greatest exercise of internationalist co-responsibility on a planetary scale ever carried out. And the challenges that move the world today are planetary challenges: climate change, research and knowledge, the competitiveness of companies, urbanization, education or democracy.
To help free it from all its defects and all the birds of prey that fly over it, we bet on Europe. It is, above all, our ethical homeland. It is also our coexistence project and it is that imaginary of freedom, equality and fraternity in which we Europeans of good communion.
Europe began to take shape many years before the European Union was written in capital letters. Many years before the bureaucratic apparatus of Brussels began to weave common rules for all Europeans. Many years before any Treaty of Lisbon or Maastricht, decaffeinated Parliaments or para-democratic leaderships of the great chancelleries. Many years before the Troika appropriated its political instruments through interference and undue interventions of popular sovereignty. Long before its southern border tore at the skin of other eager citizens, it got caught in the fences of Melilla or dyed the waters of Lampedusa red. Long before all that seems terrible to us today, other citizens were building the foundations of our society. And they did it in front of the lepens, farages, wilders or voxes of their time.
The “citoyens” of the barricades of Paris brought us the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”, which 150 years later inspired the European Convention on Human Rights, signed in Rome on November 4, 1950. The ” British citizens” were configuring their solid system of democratic culture that has inspired that of dozens of countries in the world. The German “staatsbürgers” were building their complex federal system of autonomous states and free cities that serve as a model of territorial management for Europe. And the Nordic “medborgars” provided the benefits of a social and legal system, public schools and universal healthcare.
A cultural and civic legacy of centuries of much sweat and much blood that we do not want to fade away.
Whether we vote or not today, May 25, in the European elections, we are committed to Europe.