For as long as I’ve been listening to it, I’ve asked myself the question: in the speech which every year, the President of the European Commission comes to deliver at the European Parliament, how likely is it that there will be something new?

The “newest” announcement that could be made would concern the priorities which the Commission proposes to give to matters that will be coming before it for discussion and decision. But it could hardly refer to the main political choices that have to be made or that have been already made. The latter would already be known. And the Commission’s political preferences regarding pending issues, though already well known, will still not progress as a result of what the President might tell the Parliament.  The clearest instance of this happened over immigration policy, but not only on that matter.

Now, the leading issue revolves around how Europe is gong to deal with the energy crisis it is expected to endure this coming winter. In the meantime, it has become  fashionable to complain that the Commission took too long to come up with solutions. I consider this to be hardly more than a smokescreen. Behind it, hide member states who were themselves late to consider the consequences of what was happening.

Occasions like the speech about the state of the union, to which both the Commission and the Parliament for their own reasons attach importance, help to reinforce the tactic deployed by member states to use the Commission as a screen.

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NUCLEAR WAR

While the Cold War ran its course, almost incessantly, a race proceeded to construct and develop nuclear armaments. The then two superpowers constituted a permanent threat to each other.

At the same time, one and all were scared that indeed, a nuclear war could ensue. Already with the technologies that had been put in place by then, that would have meant the total destruction or almost of the two sides, as well as of a substantial part of the rest of humankind.That fear acted as a brake on all conceerned. Almost to the same extent as for the development of nuclear weapons, diplomatic efforts were deployed – and they succeeded – to avoid the declaration of a nuclear war.

There was a general understanding that with the end of the Cold War, the threat of such a war would be totally eliminated. From what one can now hear and read, the scare is back with us. The brakes that existed during the Cold War have been partially lifted.

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INDEPENDENCE, FREEDOM

For long years, one of the political stand-offs that were maintained between the two major parties took the form of a contrast between Independence and Freedom. One had been “achieved” by the PN, the other by the PL. During the 1970s, when the then Labour government revoked the official recognition of Independence Day, this was transformed into a massive occasion by which to mobilise Nationalists and was celebrated on this basis for decades. Celebrations of Freedom Day stayed at a less politically fervent level, especially since in those days, Labour considered the first of May as its traditional top event.

Now that those controversies have cooled down, a development has been that the PN for its own reasons, reduced to practically nothing the fervour associated with the Independence celebrations it used to hold. I doubt whether that fervour can be restored and the commemoration of the Independence milestone, will probably become, as with Freedom Day, simply another political occasion.