“For a European parliamentary union”

Faced with new social, climatic and geopolitical challenges, Europe has no choice but to reinvent itself if it wishes to play a useful role for its inhabitants and for the planet. It is in this spirit that a new organization, created in 2022, met on June 1 in Moldova: the European Political Community (EPC). The initiative deserves to be welcomed.

By bringing together 47 countries – from the United Kingdom to Ukraine, from Norway to Switzerland or Serbia – the CPE reminds us that the contours of the European Union (EU) with 27 countries are not fixed forever. Discussions and increasingly advanced cooperation must extend to the whole continent and beyond, if only to affirm and defend a minimum base of rules and common political principles, which is not nothing . However, it is quite obvious that the EPC includes such a wide spectrum of countries that it will have even more difficulty than the EU in taking decisions and gathering the resources to move forward and influence developments in the world.

This is why it is essential to supplement this multi-circle architecture with a hard core made up of a small number of countries really ready to go further in political union. To fix ideas, this hard core could take a name: the European Parliamentary Union (UPE). The UPE could rely on the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly set up in 2019 on the occasion of the renewal of the bilateral treaty linking the two countries, but by opening it up to all the countries that so wish and by entrusting it with real powers ; whereas this assembly currently plays a purely consultative role, which can also be considered as the beginning of a running-in period.

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Ideally, the UPE should, from its creation, include at least France, Germany, Italy and Spain, which together account for more than 70% of the population and gross domestic product of the eurozone. If this solution does not succeed, the UPE could also start with two or three countries. Ultimately, the objective is, of course, to convince the 27 EU countries – or even the 47 members of the CPE and beyond – to join this hard core. But this could take many years, essential for the UPE to prove itself and demonstrate to Europe and the world that it is possible, in the 21st century, to design a new form of social and federal union, transnational and democratic.

Meeting future challenges

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