Long live the Republic of Europe!

The problems that arise from the European Union’s contradictions are being renationalised, debt declared national debts, and nations forced to struggle to deal with them at the national level. How do these pragmatists want to solve the crisis? We can thank the citizens for legitimising those who created the crisis. They compel their representatives to mimic the voices coming out in defence of the nation and to turn away from Europe.

And the dreamers? They were and they are the true realists. To them we owe them the realistic and practical enforcement of the reasonable, the outcome that seemed utopian at the time, those consequences that had to be drawn from the experiences with nationalism and European political interests that had left the continent in rubble and ashes. The first President of the European Commission, Walter Hallstein, a German, said: “The abolition of the nation is the European ideal!” – a phrase that neither today’s president of the Commission nor the current German Chancellor would dare utter. But that declaration is the truth.

Today, we could have been thanking the dreamers for the solution to the crisis. The dream, the solution: the European Republic, the idea of a European Republic, in which the regions, without giving up their character, continue on in a free association within a joint legal framework, instead of remaining organised in nations. The competition from the nation state is not turning around the crisis – it is creating it.

The Europe we live in is unsustainable in its current political and economic framework, and it will implode because national democracy and the transnational economy are falling apart. We live in a currency zone yet act as if the economies were still national and must by necessity compete with each other. That is why Euroland needs a transnational democracy: a European Republic, with equal political, economic and social rights and rules for all.

* Read more on presseurop.eu.