“The European Union defines a ‘Brussels consensus’ by taking the opposite view of the mistakes made during the financial crisis of 2008”

Tribune. No, the Union is not in perdition. In the middle of the reefs, facing the wind, it only approaches new shores, going in search of its political unity after having established the common market and introduced the single currency. The Union is entering the third phase of its history, the most difficult, and that is why everything is pitching on board and we are already predicting the sinking instead of seeing the promise of new lands.

So let’s resume. The Commission made two mistakes in vaccinating some 450 million European citizens. This is not debatable, but who remembers that the treaties do not make health a common competence, that sovereignists and all defenders of national prerogatives and particularisms would not have accepted it, that common institutions were not in place. Consequently, they were not in any way prepared to take up such a challenge, which they nevertheless did and their wrongs are paradoxically to their credit since, on the one hand, they refused to pay extravagant prices to the laboratories and to free them from any health responsibility and, on the other hand, left for two months the possibility of exporting doses produced in the Union in the name of a vision of health as a global public good?

Read also: The policy of vaccine purchases by the 27 increasingly weakened

Who remembers especially that, thanks to group purchases, we avoided a chaos of a completely different dimension than the delays which we suffer today, and which moreover we are in the process of making up for? It is the absence of common negotiation which would have really threatened European unity, putting us in a situation of confrontation and permanent competition between our States and between our public opinions.

Let us therefore stop, however serious they may be, preferring to see accidents on the roads that the Union clears and, above all, stop refusing the evidence of the revolution underway in Parliament, the Council and the Commission.

Radical revolution

Not only are there no longer any taboos on common defense, European sovereignty and common industrial policies, but the pandemic has precipitated a revolution, admittedly silent but radical, because the Union is rapidly breaking out of its dogmas of yesterday. and considerably evolve its macroeconomic doctrine.

By not repeating the mistakes made during the 2008 financial crisis, by even taking the exact opposite, the Twenty-Seven are indeed defining a “Brussels consensus”, let us call it that, which takes over from the old Washington consensus, which was at the same time called into question by the United States itself.

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