On Thursday, 3 June 2021, the European Institute of Romania, in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, organised the online conference “What is the future we want for the European Union at home and in the world?”, on the occasion of the national launch and promotion of the debates held under the aegis of the Conference on the Future of Europe.
During the conference, our speakers and guests participated in an open and dynamic dialogue meant to map expectations from the Conference, as well as how citizens, the experts in European affairs and also the people who regularly and directly work or have worked with the EU institutions in Brussels perceive the European Union and Romania’s role in the EU.
The main aspects raised during the debate were the following:
- The citizens’ dialogue should be based on the lessons learnt during the current pandemic and our need to have a strong Union, capable of calibrating its action toolkit in such a way as to bring added value for its citizens;
- The prerequisites for the reflection process behind the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) include: interdependencies among Member States (including their outward expression during the sanitary crisis), transformative processes in society, strategic resilience both at internal and external levels, sharing the same European values and organisation of inclusive debates, engaging young people as active participants;
- The Conference on the Future of Europe has the potential to be a bigger success than initial debate formats, but we have to pay attention to populist political players who might call on citizens to promote Eurosceptic or even extremist ideas;
- This pandemic has highlighted, more than any other contexts, the importance of the principles of solidarity, cohesion and subsidiarity; in order to be properly implemented, they need to have common interpretations;
- It’s high time to start the discussion about widening the scope of EU competences to cover health, education and digital/innovation sectors;
- The four crises that might influence Europe’s future are: climate change, financial crises, sanitary crises and technology-driven turbulences;
- There is a European constructive movement (recent phenomenon, which started 2-3 years ago), i.e. people trying to understand what the European project is about, many of them willing to get involved in the debates on the future of Europe;
- One way to call more citizens into the core of the European debate is to talk about daily life topics / evolution of society / development of a European social model.
- It is vital to talk about the future of Europe, not only about the future of the European Union, in the CoFoE debates.
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