Europe - the Ever Growing Union

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A web page about Europe, European Union, Integration, Enlargement, Globalisation , War, Peace, Trade, Economy, Development, Society, History, Geography, Culture, European Coal and Steel Community, European Economic Community, by Neytcho Iltchev

Time is ripe, I feel, to go on further and to bring Europe to an higher level of cooperation, building-up a political union as strong as our economic and monetary union and including the many, not only the few. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany and the fall and disintegration of the former Soviet-Union, for the first time since 1914 Europe is back on the map. On this map the European Union is the best placed actor to take the lead and to forge a peaceful and an open but also a thriving and a challenging Europe.

Our European schemes, Ladies and gentlemen, do not separate us from the outer world and certainly not from our North Atlantic allies and our partners in Asia and anywhere in the world. On the contrary, we feel born-again Europe to be in a pole position for even more world economic cooperation, prosperity and growth. Along with our American allies and our Japanese friends, we see a great responsibility for global economics to be balanced by global politics, so we can make a better living for all. In fact, the European Union, the United States and Japan stand for the biggest part of world economics, world trade and world finance. Whatever we do or refrain to do, world economy first of all depends on what happens into this global triangle. Let's face this challenge, without any precedent in world history. Let's take up our responsibilities by going futher, not by sitting down.

In this respect Europeans and Japanese have a major asset in common. For about twohundred years Americans could invent economic liberalism and political democracy in a new world, not hindered by ages of authoritarian rule. Europeans and Japanese had to reinvent modern politics in a very different political and social environment, deeply hostile to any idea of revolution or break. While Americans in 1776 embarked for a future based on an unbroken democracy, the French Revolution of 1789 was followed by a hundred years of European turmoil, leading to the two World Wars based on inter-European warfare and dramatized by a Cold War that shook the world but first of all the European continent, up to 1989.

For Japan political and economic change even took a more radical way. After the first Portuguese sailors in their quest for China set foot in Kyushu in 1542 and after initially fruitful economic, cultural and trade contacts, Japan in the late 16th century closed down its frontiers. For about three hundred years, your "shoguns" withstood nearly all foreign contacts and chose for the most radical isolation of your country, even forbidding fire-arms that were instrumental in their rise to power.

Only in the late 19th century, Europe and Japan in so different parts of the world were moving into the same direction. Compared with the American frontier, we both had to invent political democracy and economic liberalism in an already existing world, taking into account the best of our cultural and social traditions. That's why traditions both in Europe and in Japan are not to be underestimated. Sometimes they may cross our political and economical plans or refrain our resolve to move faster. But in other aspects I feel that tradition makes democracy richer, not poorer, permitting us wisely to move faster, not slower, making us stronger, not weaker.

The time is ripe that Americans, Japanese and Europeans, should unite in a new trilateral effort and in a new spirit, standing together but turned to the outside world, as we know that not all states and peoples enjoy the benefits of living in the same global world. Recovered from the wounds of the 20th century and close to one another, Americans, Japanese and Europeans together can do more to save and guarantee freedom and prosperity on a global scale. For me, this is our greatest common challenge for the ongoing century, fostering us all to find or enlarge paths to global politics, next to economical and commercial globalism.

Economical, technological and commercial globalisme is with us to stay. I do not believe this can be changed in the foreseeable future. What can be changed and must be changed, I believe, is politics, so we can find political solutions for the many problems uprooted by social and economical change. As the great Peruvian political writer and novelist Vargas Llosa repeated last month. "Liberalism is also a question of fairness". As I understand him, he meant to say that liberalism is also a question of politics. Of course we will not be the only ones to make global politics work. Given our economic and financial strength and our political resolve, I feel, however, the European Union, the USA and Japan to be the most paramount political forces in the world today.

European and intercontinental matters never lowered our ambition, and first of all to renew our country in the way we want Europeans and Americans to renew. That's why my government last year embarked on an ambitious journey to revitalize its political, social and economic tissue and to modernize public services by combining the most advanced information- and communication technology with the most dynamic ideas of creative and performing management.

This effort is both broad and deep. It covers the most sensitive public areas, as the department of Justice and the modernization of police forces, the way public services function inside and outside and the introduction of e-government. But in the same time we focus on all citizens and on global society, willing to "activate" any citizen, creating jobs and reducing unemployment, lowering taxes and social costs and fostering a knowledge-based economy.

By doing so we are determined to turn Belgium and the European Union into the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by the year 2010, come closer to full-employment than ever before in European history and fight poverty more effectively than any other region in the world. Already ten years ago Harvard-professor Samuel Huntington noticed that the European Community - as it was named then - has the population, resources, economic wealth, technological, and even actual and potential military strength "to be the preeminent power of the twenty-first century" on one condition, that the Community - now the Union - "were to become politically cohesive". Ten years later, I can tell Professor Huntington that our political cohesiveness is growing every day. Europe is back. Thank you for listening.