‘Jury’s out’ on future of Europe, EU doyen says
Mr Davignon (r) – “It’s clear that the world will not be the same after September 2008″ (Photo: europa.eu)
The financial crisis is likely to create fundamental changes in the EU. But the bloc is still at an early stage of formulating its response, Belgian industrialist and former EU commissioner Etienne Davignon told EUobserver. “It’s clear that the world will not be the same after September 2008,” he said in an interview on 12 March, referring to events last year such as the fall of Lehman Brothers bank in the US, which first put in the public eye what has since become the global economic crisis.
“How does Europe adjust to that change is the question. There is no objective reason to say that we will fail. There is not yet a clear indication that we will succeed in that test, so the jury’s out.”
The 77-year old Mr Davignon is vice-chairman of Belgian energy firm Suez-Tractebel and president of Brussels-based NGO Friends of Europe. In the 1960s he worked under EU ‘founding father’ Paul-Henri Spaak in the Belgian foreign ministry and in the 1980s was EU commissioner for industry.
Six months into the crisis, EU governments are at the stage of studying technical measures such as greater bank regulation and galvanising political will for future change, Mr Davignon said. But it will take another 18 to 24 months before the full effects of the crunch become clear.
In the current “grey period,” Mr Davignon expects the 19 March EU summit and the 2 April G20 meeting in London to generate goodwill for co-ordinated action, but not to come out with detailed agendas.
“These two meetings are going to be important because of what [the media] will say – is it a lot of jaw-jaw and everything will get worse? Or maybe it’s the beginning of a realisation that the world will no longer be the same and we are going to do something about it.”
A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group – an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by Mr Davignon – could also “improve understanding” on future action, in the same way it helped create the euro in the 1990s, he said.
“When we were having debates on the euro, people [at Bilderberg events] could explain why it was worth taking risks and the others, for whom the formal policy was not to believe in it, were not obliged not to listen and had to stand up and come up with real arguments.”
