The European Union must embrace “democratic debate” or else the dream of continental integration will “fail,” the head of the European Commission warned on Tuesday.
Former Portuguese premier Jose Manuel Barroso’s message also took aim at euro-sceptics who have polled highly in parts of the union of half a billion European citizens since the financial and debt crisis hit weak banks and governments in 2008.
“A full-grown European Union cannot do without a mature democratic debate,” the former Socialist leader told a conference on the way ahead for the EU and the recession and unemployment-laden eurozone.
“However difficult it may be to convince citizens in times of crisis, however hard it is to explain often technical and sometimes very unpopular decisions — there is no other option in a democracy,” he insisted.
“Europe will be open and democratic, or it will fail.
“We will not get away with half-hearted solutions any more — and half-integrated institutions will no longer do,” he said.
After eight years in the post, some sources say Barroso is angling for a new mandate in Brussels following European Parliament elections next year and he said structures introduced when the single currency entered circulation in 1999 “had indeed become out of date.”
Criticising a “Bermuda triangle of private imprudence, public indulgence and economic inefficiency,” the head of the EU executive said Europe’s leaders must “deal with this reality, or it will mercilessly deal with us.”
Barroso expended little time on the eurosceptics who question Europe’s post-World War II process of integration.
But his words carried resonance on the same day as the late Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister, Nigel Lawson, said that Britain should leave the EU. British Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that a referendum should be held in 2017 on relations with the EU.
Suggesting that Europe was at a critical moment in its political history, he insisted that “rather than relinquish the debate to eurosceptic (voices),” it was time to come together.
In a flagship article in The London Times on Tuesday, Lawson, said that the economic gains of remaining in the EU “would substantially outweigh the costs.” He said the bloc had become a “bureaucratic monstrosity” with the goal of “a federal European superstate … profoundly misguided.”
EU must embrace 'democratic debate' or 'fail': Barroso
