“The refugee crisis in the Mediterranean has revealed, among other things, that the initial political design of the EU – the dream of a politically and economically integrated continent without borders – is still an unfinished project. This has had a negative effect on the public trust of European voters,” declared Nick Clegg, member of the British Liberal Democrats party and former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, during a talk organised by ESADE and KREAB and held on ESADE’s Madrid campus. The event also featured the participation of Javier Solana, President of ESADEgeo–Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics. “We mustn’t forget how young the European Union is,” added Mr. Clegg. “We therefore mustn’t be impatient or push the European project too hard, and pretend that we are a single democratic entity. We can eliminate external borders and keep the internal borders, or vice versa, but it is not viable to get rid of both. We must accept that the European Union is, by its very nature, a hybrid entity.” 

International liberal order

“Currently, our main concern is understanding where we stand today,” said Mr. Solana. “Last year – 2016 – was marked by two political events that changed the course of the world as we knew it: the US election and the Brexit referendum. The important thing is not just what happened, but where it happened. In the 20th century, the UK and the US were the leaders and guarantors of the international liberal order, free trade and multilateralism. In the 21st century, however, after the financial crisis of 2008, these two countries were the ones that decided to put an end to the international order.”

Integration or separatism

Mr. Clegg expressed his agreement with Mr. Solana’s remarks on the financial crisis. “It had a profound effect on Western democracies and led to the emergence of populisms, which the US and the UK were more vulnerable to than other EU countries such as Spain, France and the Netherlands,” he commented. “I worry, however, that we might be slipping into a sort of political conformism.” He added: “Faced with Donald Trump’s erratic protectionism and the rise of China and India as future leaders of multilateralism, the European Union has an opportunity that it must not squander. To avoid becoming complacent and to restore the stability of our democracies, we must focus our work on matters of substance, not symbolism: we must overcome the deep imbalances in the eurozone – between the creditor North and the debtor South – and we must move towards a new political, economic, financial and fiscal design.” Mr. Solana concurred: “If we split apart, we lose our enormous capacity to act together.”

The gathering – which coincided with a call by Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, for greater European integration through a new political agreement – took place as part of the presentation of the second edition of Public Agenda: Power and Counter-Power, a programme taught jointly by ESADE and KREAB. This programme provides organisations with conceptual frameworks that will enable them to better understand the political environment in which they operate and to analyse and plan their strategic actions in the context of public affairs. The event also featured remarks by Eugenio Martínez Bravo, Managing Partner at KREAB Spain; Angel Saz-Carranza, Director of the Public Agenda programme and Director of ESADEgeo; and Eduardo Madina, Director of the Public Agenda programme.