2020 completed, hello 2021! The drafting of Taurillon wish you a happy new year. May this be a bearer of hope for a Europe shaken by the current coronavirus pandemic, Brexit and the doldrums of intergovernmentalism. Will 2021 be the year when the renewal of the European Union will be clearly felt?
–
« The year 2019 closed a decade as rich as it was tumultuous for Europe. 2020 and the years to follow promise to be just as exciting “. The opening lines of our editorial published on December 31, 2019, exactly one year and one day ago, couldn’t sound more prescient. The year 2020 seems to have kept all its promises in terms of European news, between the establishment of the Green Pact for Europe (Green Deal), negotiations around the European budget, and especially the evolution of the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus disease pandemic, initially developed in China, but of which Europe and North America quickly became the epicenters.
All these events have had consequences for the European Union, forced to reinvent itself to adapt to a very chaotic start to the decade, forced to find its place in a world in the midst of a crisis (in the etymological sense of the term, it is to say in full paradigm shift), forced to reaffirm willing to involuntarily its values beyond its borders, but also on its own soil. Learning the lessons of 2020 will allow us to better understand this year 2021, which is as uncertain as it is promising.
The great paradox of European recovery in 2020
The past year has been as trying as ever for the European Union, already weakened by a decade of financial, economic, social and political crises. The arrival of the coronavirus from January in France and Italy, then the very disorderly measures taken by the Member States in the following months, completely upset the strategic priorities of the von der Leyen Commission. The EU has always been criticized, even vilified, for its lack of anticipation and slow action. The global pandemic would offer a test for the new executive team.
With a few months of hindsight, how to interpret European action to fight against the multiple consequences of the coronavirus? Numerous analyzes have been made on, jumbled up, the tumultuous European Councils, the Eurogroup rescue plan, the recovery plan Next Generation EU, negotiations around the European budget. However, one thing seems particularly interesting to point out, especially from a federalist perspective: the contradiction between the tools of European integration (common debt and redistribution in the form of subsidies) and the method used, intergovernmental and subject to the will of the European Council.
If this marriage federalization / intergovernmentalism was able to work in the context of the first months of a pandemic which seems to be registered over time, nothing says that this paradox is not the solution. to life everlasting, and especially not with a view to reforming the European Union within the framework of the conference on the future of Europe, this institutional chimera that has been constantly postponed since last May.
2021, new cycle for the European Union
2020 was the year in which the European revival was sketched. 2021 will be that of its effective implementation. This is all the more the case since today begins the new multiannual financial framework, definitively approved by the Parliament and the Council on 17 December last. With a value of 1,074.3 billion euros (2018 value), combined with the 750 billion euros of Next Generation EU, what is billed as an ‘unprecedented funding package’, however, represents only a very small percentage of the EU’s gross national income, even without the UK. This program is nevertheless essential for the recovery of the European economy, just as much as the decision on the Union’s own resources. Once is not customary, since the EU has implemented its recovery strategy more quickly than the United States, where an increasingly bitter Donald Trump refused to ratify the federal recovery plan a few days ago.
2021 therefore has the opportunity to be the year of sustainable recovery for Europe, driven by ambitious climate-energy objectives, in the Green Pact for in Next Generation EU. The digital transition will also have to occupy a central place, even if some point out the incompatibility between green and digital revivals. It is up to the EU to make the right choices to secure a position of choice in global geopolitics.
May 2021 be as exciting as 2020!
The year 2020 was also the scene of a second paradox, very worrying for the citizen dimension of the EU: while European news has been packed as rarely in recent months, the national media, in particular hexagonal, have shown, as very often, a lack of interest in these themes. A situation which exasperates part of the profession, since theAssociation of European Journalists, chaired by Véronique Auger, published at the beginning of November a forum / open letter with proposals for better media coverage of Europe, in particular with a view to the French presidency of the Council in 2022.
On its very modest scale, The Taurillon has done its best to follow all the European news, with enthusiasm and a critical sense. In this fifteenth anniversary year, our journal has also seen its self-sacrifice rewarded with very good statistics: nearly 570 articles published over one year, more than 2.56 million unique reads (a record), the milestone of 20 million reads since the creation of the site having been crossed last May.
Quantitative, but also qualitative success: many series of articles have been published on various themes (press freedom, historical female figures in Europe, cross-border cooperation, European literature, etc.); our partnership network has been strengthened thanks to Large European Format ; our federalist identity has been reaffirmed through our collaboration with theUnion of European Federalists (UEF); and the publication of multilingual European perspectives underline the importance of the work carried out with our different linguistic editions in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Romanian.
In light of all this, and motivated to start this new year on a similar basis, the drafting of the Taurillon wishes its editors and readers, as well as all those who follow us, a happy new year 2021, full of promise and hope.
–
