The institutional architecture of the European Union is undergoing a thorough review in response to the structural shortcomings revealed by the financial and euro crisis. Although the banking union project is the most advanced and representative, it is far from being the only one needed—if not indispensable—to ensure the euro’s long-term survival.
These reforms also represent an urgent response to citizens’ growing disaffection with the European Union (EU) project, whose most dramatic expression has been the success of Brexit in the UK referendum. The European Union must make a considerable effort not only to improve how it functions, but also to explain to European citizens that the European Union brings a direct benefit to their lives, and that overcoming today’s difficulties—the legacy of a dreadful economic crisis, the harshest and longest of the last seventy years—requires more Europe.
It is particularly worrying that this new europhobia—expressed through populist, xenophobic and re-nationalising movements of very different political persuasions—has taken root among younger people, who see the Union as a cold, bureaucratic entity with political power that lacks democratic legitimacy.
It is therefore essential to win back younger generations and bring them into the European project, since it will fall to them to refine and complete the project of European unity that their grandparents began sixty years ago.
But not everything can be attributed to political factors: we would be making a fundamental mistake if we viewed the problem only through that lens. It should be remembered that the re-nationalising movement began, first and foremost, in the markets and among major economic players following the outbreak of the international financial crisis in 2007, and later among governments themselves, whose decisions gave rise to the sovereign debt crisis. As is well known, in times of crisis it becomes a case of “every man for himself”, and this was no exception.
José María Roldán, Chairman of the Spanish Banking Association
