European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso yesterday addressed the European Parliament in his first ever US-style State of the Union address.
It was a very different format to what Europe is used to. European leaders normally convene around the President and the message from the top is then filtered down to national assemblies and the general public by respective EU leaders. The case is the same with Malta, and inevitably, something always gets lost in translation and leaders normally pick and choose what they want to pick up on to be spoken about at a national level.
This is why the EC President decided to deliver his address to the EU lawmakers, that is the members of the European Parliament. The reasons why Mr Barroso chose this forum are rather perplexing. He wanted to deliver a speech about the general state of the union which would be more readily available to citizens of Europe, in tune with the EU’s manoeuvres to ‘bring Europe closer to its people’. But we ask, was this the right forum? The vast majority of people do not even follow what is going on in their own national assemblies, let alone what is going on in the hallowed halls of Brussels. If the European Commission thought this move would make Europe more relevant to its citizens, it has made a gross mistake.
The world is dominated by perceptions. And despite the work that is carried out in the EP, most people around the continent believe that MEPs are on the gravy train. This perception is also strong in Brussels, where there were threats of fines for MEPs who did not turn up, and confirm that they had listened to the whole address by having to press a button to show they were in attendance; three times.
If this is not an indication that the forum chosen was a wrong one, then Brussels is truly more detached from its citizens than everyone already believed.
During his presentation, Mr Barroso focused on the issues of employment, economic recovery, financial regulations and an exit strategy. He said that recovery in the bloc seems to be better than expected, but warned that it is fragmented and not unilateral. Countries such as Malta, with the “late in late out” of recession trend are an example of this.
He said that Europe needed to shift its efforts to make more out of its internal markets. This is true. There is a lot of potential that is not being tapped – but in order to do so, countries need to be on a more even keel. He pointed out that every euro spent in tapping European markets would yield more than every euro invested in a national market. How very true. But we pose another argument; each euro spent in Malta to tap the internal European market will not yield as much as a euro spent to do so in Germany or France.
What the EU desperately needs to tackle is the huge divergence of standards of living within the EU. What you can buy with a euro here, does not equate with what it can buy you in Italy, or how much work it took you to earn that euro in comparison with an Italian. Unless the gaps in standards of living are bridged (and they are a lot wider than most believe), then Europe’s markets will always diverge. An economy which is not as developed as another will, in a crisis, be more at risk than others, it will also struggle more to be competitive and it will take longer to emerge from recession. Unless Europe tackles this problem across the board, then national economies can never converge.