Chantal Millon-Delsol, How I conceive the exercise of my own responsibilities, as regards Europe?

To start with, I would like to say that I regret to see now Europe "badly divided". It seems to me that a lot of mistakes have been made, errors that we all share. We have created a vast community, we have wished, modelled on an egalitarian republic. The countries of the Commonwealth possess today more common laws than the cantons of the Swiss federation possessed in the beginning of this century; and that without a real political power. One could speak about a centralization operated by administrative means.

According to me, this is the worst situation, for the very issue of attaining one Europe will be the federal issue, which implies, inversely, a non-centralized political power. But we must not conceal the difficulty in promoting this type of institution: to realize one federation, it would first be necessary that the Jacobin and centralized countries of Europe transform radically their vision of sovereignty; that they forget the definition coined by Bodin to return to relative and divided sovereignty before Bodin. This is not a slight matter, because the question of mentality...

I want to say I am not a pessimist. Europe is a very old idea, we have been dreaming about it since Podiebrad. It can wait a while and will not disappear at the first failure. Let us persevere then.

Being an academic, I have attached myself to the cause of transmitting the European idea and developing it in front of young public. First, by creating a Centre of European Studies at my university, a Centre that comprises today students of the second and third years (a hundred of students), and a research group in which sixty university researchers collaborate, from both the central-east and west. Then by creating an association "University Without Frontiers", devoted to the cooperation with the Central-East and East of Europe in order to help the universities in those regions in reorganizing the disciplines devastated by dialectic materialism. Finally, by intervening in the debate of ideas, by publishing numerous works on Europe, two of which are on the principle of subsidiarity.

The most difficult task, and the scene of failure, has appeared to be the transmission of the principle of subsidiarity at all the levels. The European authorities have asked me to help in this matter; the highest authorities (in particular Jacques Delor whose judgement and courage I respect) have analyzed the stakes and noticed the dangers of current evolution. I have found myself, however, before an administration which sets subsidiarity against itself and used the idea in a contrary way to make it a Jacobin principle... As to the cultivated French elite it challenges instinctively the whole idea of this kind, concerning both the territory itself of a country (in which decentralization is unwelcome: a Frenchman is much more afraid about the reign of local tyrants than of the shadow of welfare state and denounces the errors of local communities, while tuning in with his indulgence for the etatist errors) and what concerns Europe. Federalism will mark the end of Bodinean sovereignty which has yet disappeared from the facts, but the idea to which we cling. It seems to me then that, in this matter, it is necessary to patiently persuade and give oneself time.

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