Opinion
EU's
Strasbourg parliament should become a university
The
European Parliament's building in Strasbourg should be turned into
European University instead of the monthly "travelling circus"
of MEPs.
By Gregory Claeys
and Dirk Schoenmaker
BRUSSELS, Today,
09:24
During the
referendum campaign in the UK, the cost of the European Parliament's
"travelling circus" between Brussels and Strasbourg was
highlighted by some Brexit supporters as one of the 20 reasons why UK
citizens should vote in favour of leaving the EU.
Even though many
arguments used by the Leave campaign were greatly exaggerated and
some were outright lies, the remaining 27 EU countries should take
that particular criticism on board and use this occasion to reduce
the obvious overspend that is linked to the European Parliament
having more than one seat.
A survivor of
the Warsaw ghetto and an anti-communist dissident, Bronislaw Geremek
became a historian, minister and MEP. (Photo: Bronislaw Geremek
office)
For years, the
European Parliament has had to move 400 km south once a month. Almost
4,000 people temporarily relocate from Brussels to Strasbourg to
facilities that are only used four days per month. It is a situation
that is hard to justify to European citizens who have been tightening
their belts since the beginning of the financial crisis. The
travelling circus also provides fuel for euroscepticism across the
continent.
At the request of a
majority of MEPs eager to stop the circus to save their time and
taxpayers’ money, the European Court of Auditors in 2014 estimated
the additional cost of having two European Parliament seats at almost
€114 million per year.
It is finally time
for Brussels to be the sole seat of the European Parliament.
Positive, useful,
future-oriented project
Of course ending
this absurd situation will not be easy. Multiple attempts have
already been scuppered over the years. Strasbourg is the official
seat of the European Parliament according to a protocol attached to
the Treaty of the EU and consequently 12 four-day plenary sessions
per year must take place there, including the vote on the EU budget.
Changing this
protocol would require an amendment to the treaties, a process which
requires unanimity among member states, and that can therefore be
vetoed by the French government.
To avoid this,
France will have to be compensated somehow. It is essential to put on
the table a positive, useful, future-oriented project for the EU but
also for France and the city of Strasbourg.
Strasbourg was
chosen by the founding fathers of the EU because it made sense from a
historical and political perspective as a symbol of Franco-German
reconciliation.
However, France has
to understand that nowadays it has absolutely no interest in keeping
what is now nothing more than a symbolic seat of an EU institution,
and should try to obtain something more valuable on its soil for the
21st century.
No-one who works
closely with the European Parliament can seriously claim that
Strasbourg is the main or even the relevant seat of the Parliament.
It is therefore the
right time to revive the proposal made 10 years ago by Bronislaw
Geremek and Jean-Didier Vincent to create a truly European University
in the European Parliament buildings in Strasbourg.
Concrete benefits
This year also marks
the 40th anniversary of the launch of the European University
Institute (EUI) of Florence. This European postgraduate studies
institution that specialises in social sciences was inaugurated on 15
November 1976 after long negotiations between member states.
These discussions
were far from easy and lasted for almost 20 years, but ultimately
gave birth to what is considered by many academics as one of the
visible success stories of EU integration.
Every year, the EUI
awards about 120 PhDs in law, history, political science and
economics to carefully selected students from all corners of the EU,
demonstrating the valued added of European education and research
projects.
A solution for
Strasbourg could be to establish an undergraduate European University
there, modelled on the EUI. It would fill the Parliament premises
with students, professors and researchers from all over Europe and
would be financed by the EU budget.
The money saved by
the centralisation of the European Parliament operations in Brussels
would be, for instance, sufficient to cover almost entirely the
annual budget of a university such as Paris Sorbonne, which has more
than 20,000 students and 1,300 professors and researchers.
This project would
offer concrete benefits for young Europeans and would be in line with
one of the key priorities highlighted in the French-Italian-German
initiative set up after the Brexit vote to improve the EU quickly by
focusing on ambitious youth programmes because, as the declaration
rightly states: “Europe will succeed only if it gives hope to its
young people.”
'We must now build
Europeans'
This new European
university should be named after Bronislaw Geremek, a survivor of the
European atrocities of the 20th century and a symbol of the
reunification of Europe after the fall of the iron curtain.
He grew up and
survived in the Warsaw ghetto to become a respected historian, a
founding member of the Solidarity movement (‘Solidarnosc’), a
political dissident under the communist regime, and ultimately a
foreign minister of Poland after the fall of the regime and a MEP
from 2004 until his death in 2008.
He wrote a few
months before his tragic death that “after building Europe, we must
now build Europeans. Otherwise, we risk losing it".
Opening a European
University in Strasbourg named after him and showing that the EU is
able to listen to the legitimate criticism of its citizens and take
action to make a better use of its resources would be a tremendous
first step in that direction
Gregory Claeys is a
researcher at Bruegel, Dirk Schoenmaker is a Senior Fellow at
Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank
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