Book. Enrico Letta has made a long journey… For nine months, the president of the Jacques-Delors Institute, Italian MP, former president of the Council of Ministers (2013-2014) and former head of the Democratic Party in Italy (2021-2023), traveled across Europe, holding nearly 400 meetings and visiting 65 cities on the continent. Its objective: to write a report, “Much more than a market” (“much more than a market”), which he presented to the European Council in April. From this abundant experience, Enrico Letta also wrote a book, New ideas for Europe. With the men and women who make it (Odile Jacob, 240 pages, 22.90 euros).
This work, he says, is the fruit of“a great collective exercise”a dialogue with those who shape Europe in the economic, political and academic fields, but also exchanges with “passionate citizens and angry citizens”. The financial debacles of 2008 and 2011 put European construction under great pressure and this weakening was accentuated by a series of traumatic events: the migration crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the ensuing energy crisis.
For Enrico Letta, this succession of crises showed that Europe, as imperfect and criticized as it was, was “irreplaceable”but that it was necessary to rethink the Union and its central pillar, the single market. It is indeed the product of another era: in 1985, when Jacques Delors designed it, there were two Germanys and a Soviet Union, China and India accounted for less than 5% of the world economy. and the acronym BRICS [Brésil, Russie, Inde, Chine, Afrique du Sud] was still unknown. As for the fertile ground for development and growth that was, at the time, Europe and the United States, they defined the rules of the game – multilateralism, free trade and international cooperation.
You have 42.44% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
Source: Lemonde