Time to Make Europe Understandable

It could be said that people living in border areas are Europeans by instinct. For all of us who grew up after the war in this part of the world where Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium meet, in this microcosm of Europe, borders decisively shaped our outlook. For all of us, nearby borders, marked by wooden barriers, were a part of our everyday lives. Long queues formed at these borders when people wanted to cross over at the weekend to go shopping or visit relatives on the other side. Sometimes these borders were closed because of a football match. We all know how restricting borders can be and how liberating it can be when they are opened.

To my mind, hardly anything so perfectly embodies the achievements of European unification as open borders. At the same time, we should remember that the lifting of the barriers which the borders represented was only the culmination of a lengthy process of overcoming other barriers – cultural, economic and linguistic. We overcame what divided us in order to create something that unites us. That is Europe's message:  overcome divisions in order to create unity. That is why I will vehemently oppose any attempt to take away this freedom! Those who try to reinstate borders, try to separate us again!

For many years, I was Mayor of Aachen’s neighbouring town of Würselen, and so I had the enormous privilege of experiencing Europe as a daily reality. At that time, the firm conviction grew in me that political decisions must always be taken as close to the people as possible, that politics needs a human face, that politics must be both relevant to people’s lives and readily understandable. As a European politician, however, I have often found that ordinary people simply don’t understand the European Union. They equate ‘the EU’ with faceless institutions, far removed from their daily lives, the Brussels spaceship, a bureaucratic monster.

That is Europe's message:  overcome divisions in order to create unity.

It worries me that people are becoming increasingly alienated from Europe, that they are turning their backs on it and that they no longer feel at home in the House of Europe. Having said that, the idea on which Europe is founded – overcoming what divides us by means of cooperation between states and peoples across borders – is not in question. But fewer and fewer people associate it with ‘the EU’. The question now is: do we give up on the idea, or do we make the EU easier to understand and more effective?

There is no guarantee that our way of life will last forever. It is foolish, therefore, to think that there is no alternative to the EU. Of course there is, and we should spell it out: the alternative to the EU is renationalisation. That is why we face a choice: do we want to stand alone and divided, or stand together in defence of our social model and our competitiveness in a globalised world?

Blinkered nationalism encourages a return to an idealised vision of the nation state as an Island of the Blessed and suggests that there are easy solutions, such as ‘close the borders’ or ‘abolish the euro’, to the highly complex problems facing the world in the 21st century. But using national approaches and instruments to address what have become European problems – that is a recipe for failure. I am convinced that if Europe collapses into its constituent parts, it will sink into irrelevance. Together, however, we Europeans form a strong community of states and peoples that guarantees the rights of its citizens – rights for which people elsewhere in the world are forced to demonstrate and even risk their lives.

Anyone who wants access to our market – the richest market in the world – or who wants to trade and do business with us has to accept the rights and standards we uphold.

Elsewhere in the world, after all, there is child labour, torture, the death penalty; strikers are shot at by the police; and access to the internet is cut off when people express views which displease the regime in power. But if the countries where these things happen are more competitive than us Europeans, precisely because they fail to uphold fundamental rights, then once again we are faced with a choice: we can either become like them, or we can bravely declare that anyone who wants access to our market – the richest market in the world – or who wants to trade and do business with us has to accept the rights and standards we uphold. Our economic strength derives from the internal market, a grouping of economies which are strong precisely because they are interconnected. From this position of strength, we can defend the values on which our society is based.

This, then, is the challenge facing Europe: internally united and thus stronger vis-à-vis the rest of the world, to safeguard democracy and the rule of law and social and economic justice in the 21st century. Anyone who dares to question this project is playing fast and loose with the prospects of future generations. Each generation inherits certain things from the previous one and bequeaths certain things to the next. My generation inherited the House of Europe from the courageous men and women who made up the founding generation. Those men and women decided, in the light of our tragic history, to bind our interests so inextricably together that war would be impossible and to create the sense of common purpose that would enable us to meet the challenges of the post-war era together. That we Europeans should have succeeded in this aim has been, in my eyes, the greatest achievement of our European civilisation since the Enlightenment. This bold decision has secured us 70 years of peace and democracy in Western Europe, and finally brought the same peace and democracy to the whole of Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.

Europe needs that courage and vision again now, and policies geared to the long term!

What my generation must now do is make sure that we do not bequeath this great House of Europe to our children as a ruin. In order to safeguard the European unification process for our children, we need to regain the trust we have lost and at long last create a Europe that ordinary people can understand, give Europe a face that they can recognise. The process of nominating ‘Spitzenkandidaten’ (leading candidates), a German term that has rightly found its way into many other languages, was a step in the right direction. For the first time, we saw candidates setting out their policy programmes in order to campaign for votes in the run-up to the 2014 European elections. For the first time, the Commission President was democratically elected. At national level this is a standard procedure – in Europe it is an exciting new development. The European Parliament will never give up this hard-won right!

But should be much easier for us today than it was for the founding generation in the aftermath of the Second World War! Bringing about reconciliation with German neighbours who had wreaked unprecedented devastation and havoc throughout Europe – that took courage and vision. If, back in the 1950s, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak had had their eyes fixed only on the latest opinion polls and the next elections – as my generation of politicians has today – European unification would never have come about.

Europe needs that courage and vision again now, and policies geared to the long term! Enough of the crisis management of the past few years, characterised by shorttermism, cautious manoeuvring, muddling through from one last-chance summit to the next: it is high time that we called a spade a spade, tackled problems head on and came up with lasting solutions.

Stop blaming Brussels for everything that goes wrong and for every intractable problem and claiming every success as a national achievement!

Lest we forget: many of the great political projects of the past were initially greeted by contemporaries with scepticism. To give just two examples, Konrad Adenauer’s policy of anchoring Germany in the Western camp and Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik were as controversial as they were far-sighted, but proved successful in the end. European added value is more than just the sum of the national interests of 28 Member States. But there certainly is such a thing as the European public interest and our task is to maximise it. What we need, therefore, is closer cooperation in Europe.

If we stick together as Europeans, there is so much we can achieve. In our response to the Ukraine crisis – this war in our own backyard – over the past few months we have achieved an unprecedented degree of common purpose in our foreign policy. National governments have put aside their individual interests, selfishness and vanity and agreed on a common European approach. So far no Member State has budged from that common approach. That is a success in itself. If everyone pursues their own interests, we are weak; if we stand united, however, we are strong.

In our European House many different families live, and some new ones have recently moved in. The atmosphere is lively, and sometimes even a bit rowdy, but never violent. We inherited this great House from our parents, and now it is starting to show its age. For that reason I say: let us renovate it, so that its true colours shine for everyone to see. I hope you feel as I do: I am grateful for the privilege of being a resident of this house.