I am very happy that after six months of discussion, tomorrow we are to appoint a new Secretary General and the heads of the three OSCE autonomous institutions. I am confident that with a new highly competent and experienced leadership, the OSCE can focus on the challenges ahead.

The great presidential turning point and its limits

The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is excellent news for the whole world and, in particular, for the Europeans, in terms of both possible political convergences and common values: ....

A difficult year

2020 will become the year to be forgotten across the world; in the European Union and especially in the United Kingdom, the end of the year has been most difficult. In October, Scotland lost the most famous of her fellow citizens, Sean Connery, the Scottish James Bond.

The crises of various kinds and of an evidently planetary dimension in which we find ourselves (environmental (the more or less recent pandemics, for example), economic, social, political) offer particularly significant opportunities for reflection. Crises, as all our historical experience shows, certainly do not teach or guarantee anything for the future (just think of wars, which are stupidly repeated over the millennia despite their inevitably and literally suicidal, as well as obviously murderous, character), but equally certainly they suggest and nurture fresh views of the world.

Fifty years ago, on 8 October 1970, the Report to the Council and the Commission on the realisation by stages of an economic and monetary union in the Community^[i] was published.  It was also known as the “Werner Report”, named after Pierre Werner, former Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Luxembourg, who chaired the group responsible for drafting it.

“A spectre is haunting Europe”: which German leadership will rule the country after Angela Merkel’s departure in September 2021? After 16 years in power, the Chancellor is seen today as the guarantor of continuity of Berlin’s pro-European stance. Somebody saw her even as the most prominent European leader of the first twenty years of this century.

Last October, the Bundestag’s Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) working group on security and defence policy issued a working paper^[i] on establishing what it calls the 28^th Army: a European Army, in addition to national armies, under the control of the European institutions. This proposal takes the debate on equipping the EU with an autonomous army a step further, beyond the words of President Macron, whose proposal is critical.

Since taking office, the Commission chaired by Ursula von der Leyen has shown its determination to push Europe into a world of the future, accelerating Europe’s race to be (under the European Green Deal and then the Next Generation EU) the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. As the President said in her recent State of the Union Address, that “mission” must be at the heart of the Green Deal, not least because, despite the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the planet’s average temperature is continuing its perilous rise.

It has been clear in every speech: Joe Biden’s foreign policy will revert to multilateralism, will strengthen relations with its European allies, will restore the credibility of multilateral organizations. Yet, after the Trump treatment, nothing will ever be the same again. Biden’s approach to multilateralism will be new and will be defined first and foremost by America’s need to strengthen its economy and social fabric.

In Memoriam.

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa had an outstanding ability to analyse facts and situations, identifying the economic, political, and social problems that society had to tackle.
I have been his friend since the end of the 1970s, and have always shared his ideas and assessments, mainly on the European unification process from the federalist perspective. Here, I will limit my recollections to a few things where I have lasting memories of his fundamental contribution to the creation of the single currency.