Last week, in her yearly State of the Union address, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen appealed to the ‘spirit of Maastricht’ to overcome the challenges the European Union is currently facing. 30 years after the treaty that turned the Communities into a Union, however, the EU remains a largely incomplete project. And the rules that were forged 30 years ago have hindered the process of building the ‘ever closer union’ that the authors of those rules were dreaming of, rather than paving the way to it.
Yet, amidst the centrifugal forces that still trouble the Union and its member states, the lessons learnt in the recent past with the common response to the pandemic, and the spirit of solidarity that animated it, should not be lost. They offer the opportunity to break with those old rules, with a dysfunctional decision-making process, and to look for a further quality leap forward.
Waiting for the new ideas for the EU economic governance that von der Leyen promised in her speech, this new Progressive Post dossier focusses on some aspects of the EU construction that require urgent reform – reforms that have been postponed for way too long: the EU’s constitutional architecture, its economic governance, and its fiscal capacity to provide the means for strong welfare systems.
