“Today more than ever, Europe is called upon to face the challenges of our time with a renewed vision of the future. In these difficult days, marked by the tragedies of armed conflicts, growing polarisations, the impacts of migratory flows and the great environmental, digital and demographic transitions, we need a look towards tomorrow. The same look with which Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, seventy-four years ago, on 9 May 1950, laid the first building block of what was to become the European Union. Prosperity, peace, security, solidarity. A universe of values and also a common historical experience with which “piece by piece, sector by sector” - as Schuman said - the process of European integration, which has seen our country among its main protagonists, has developed. Thus from individual national states we have moved on to a community of destiny.

European construction went on by stop-and-go. We have extended our borders, but enlargement has not been accompanied by sufficient deepening. Widening without deepening. Europe struggled to find shared responses to the economic crisis, but then regained momentum during the pandemic, tackling a common debt programme for the first time and finding the key to success in a “Hamilton moment”. What is needed today is a new reformist incentive, capable of issuing European debt to bear the costs of transitions and protect the weakest, capable of building a common defence system, capable of relaunching the “Monnet method”, that community method that has been, and must still be, our guiding star, as a synthesis between national and collective interest of European citizens. Long live Europe! Best wishes to us all”.

This was stated by the President of the CNEL Renato Brunetta, on the occasion of Europe Day.