After nearly 61 years, who are we ?
Two centuries ago, famous men like Guiseppe Mazzini, a fighter for a unified Italy, Carlo Cattaneo, an Italian philosopher, and Victor Hugo, a French author, dreamt about what they called the 'United States of Europe'. These United States of Europe were described as the best way of achieving a world of peace after centuries of war. This message remained a message, and we all know about the worst wars in history which followed the 19th Century.
On 9th May 1950, 101 years after Victor Hugo's declaration during the second International Congress of the Friends of Peace, Robert Schuman delivered the speech that launched the European Coal and Steel Community. He was supported in his will by man like Winston Churchill, Jean Monnet, Paul-Henri-Spaak and Richard Nikolaus de Coudenhave-Kalergi. The idea was that we needed concrete acts in order to form an understandable Europe. The European Dream was that of a Europe of Peace, and in the context of the American Marshall Plan which many European countries depended on, it provided us with a way of ensuring our independence.
In 1958 after the failure of the European Defence Community and the Western European Union, some countries wanted to engage in a more ambitious Europe and signed the Treaty of Rome in order to build the first European Union, close to the one that we know today. We know that the rest happened with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993 and the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, with progressive enlargement to reach the 27 countries which form the current European Union.
These are historic facts, but what about 'human facts'?
The reality is that in spite of all this history the majority of the citizens of the European Union feel that it is not a 'European's Union'. There are numerous reasons for this and everyone has their own opinions. We're not here to debate them, and we prefer to concentrate on only one of them: sometimes referendums and elections are not enough to make amitious political plans. Moreover when these plans concern citizenship, identity, and peoples hearts, and when we're talking about the European Union, we're first of all talking about 500 million lives. Life is hope, everyone pursues their own dreams and this is evidence that a country or a union of countries needs to allow its citizens to make a success of their lives. That's what we call liberty.
Nobody is capable of summing up their reason for existing with a simple vote. You need a blank sheet to put your dreams down on. And to think we never gave this sheet to Europeans, yet how could we build a new group of nations which correspond to these dreams if we only know what we want to know through elections and statistics? We really think it would be impossible if we limited ourselves to these 2 methods.
The European Dream project is the blank sheet. We don't claim to have the 'solution' but we believe that by inviting thousands of Europeans to write the draft of a film scenario we will find a way of changing European history.
