The rescue plan adopted by the European leaders on 9 May of this year, as they teetered on the brink – history throws up these little moments sometimes – did not simply mark the beginning of the end of the financial crisis which had been rumbling on for nearly three years. It is now up to us to make the most of the unexpected boost it is giving to European solidarity by rolling out a new project which may prove every bit as momentous as that launched by the great Robert Schuman sixty years ago.
The Monnet method, enshrined at the time in the Schuman Plan, entailed the creation of a new dynamic in the form of very specific,
de facto
solidarities. The first step was to establish the European Coal and Steel Community, which entailed a pooling of the chief energy source and the most widely used raw material at the time. In essence, the plan of 9 May 2010 boils down to a new process of ‘financing pooling’: the Member States of the euro area have pooled their borrowing capacities. The next step has to be a ‘budgetary pooling’. Because measured against the ever-greater powers given to the European Union by the treaties, and the ambitious plans its leaders are drafting as part of the Europe 2020 strategy, the EU has only a tiny budget, equal to 1% of the combined GDP of its Member States: this is 20 times less than the total value of all the national budgets together. Not having its own resources, the EU is funded by contributions from the Member States.
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