Author: Herman Van Rompuy
In a booklet of 143 small pages, the author tells how he sees Europe, and what he has done with it and for it. It’s a story of swimming through crises, as the need for a structural battle against systemic crises increasingly put pressure on leaders’ shoulders.
The biggest impression the booklet makes on me is the story of the debt crisis. While the world now predicts a Brexit, because things are going well, everyone was afraid of a Grexit a while back, because things were going too badly. What the booklet explains very well and in simple words is that the countries of the Eurozone are becoming increasingly intertwined, which causes more solidarity and brotherhood, and can bring about peace. The Euro lies like a large net over the zone: if a “country knot” is pulled, the whole net moves and adjusts its position. To this end, new structures had to be set up to be able to handle the next crises. And that is not always transparent to everyone from the news reports.
Another unexpected approach is that political leaders not only stand up for their own nation but want security, work, a home for everyone who is a resident in Europe. They want to give opportunities to small independents as well as large firms to arise, grow, conquer markets… For this, there needs to be control over banks in the nations, a central European patent office, an emergency fund,… Organizing all this in the middle of a stormy crisis is a strong example of leadership and is still ongoing.
The real value of the booklet lies in the fact that the author, in simple lines of thought, makes the complex tangle of intertwined crises of recent years transparent. It shows that Europe and the Euro deserve our trust. Until the next mega crisis tangle.