Successful unions result not from gradual processes of convergence in relatively benign circumstances, but through sharp ruptures in periods of extreme crisis. They come about, not through evolution but with a ‘big bang’. They are events rather than processes.
The PDU works towards a full Political Union of Europe.
Roundtables on European Order
The European Federalist Papers
Project: Exit Platforms
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Milton Friedmann
We are closer than you may think
If we are to form the United States of Europe or whatever name or form it may take, we must begin now.
Winston Churchill
The Pledge
Recognizing the dysfunctional state of the EU has been in, and the urgent crises and challenges Europes now faces, I hereby pledge to work as an elected official towards realizing the following steps necessary to bring real, effective, and efficient democratic government to these States of Europe.
- To establish common European citizenship, not linked to any particular member state, which guarantees equal rights and equal duties for all, based on universal human rights and the rule of law.
- To instate effective political authority through the establishment of a common Eurozone budget for common tasks and to mutualize existing member state debt so far as it was incurred in the pursuit of common Union objectives.
- To establish one common European external border and migration policy, policed by the Union as a whole.
- To establish a single European foreign office with the exclusive task of executing the common external policy and a common European Army with a single command structure and doctrine holding a monopoly of legitimate force projection for the common external defense.
- All these functions shall be financed by direct European taxation and common debt and will be subject to scrutiny and budgetary review by a sovereign and common European Parliament, which will have the right to initiate laws.
- To fold the Council of Ministers and the European Council into the upper chamber of the European Parliament, made up of representatives operating as a fully transparent and accountable legislative body.
- To re-establish the European Commission as a fully empowered executive branch, fully accountable to the European Parliament and the people of Europe.
I recognize the above as necessary measures which stand independent from any party political or policy goals. I call upon representatives of all parties to aid the effort to recreate space in which the contest over political ideas and the direction of the continent can take place and the popular will of the peoples of Europe duly expressed.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Antonio Gramsci