La Unió Europea front la crisi econòmica, l'Iraq i l'ampliació

Resum

The European Union is enlarging with the membership of ten new countries in May 2004 and two others in 2007. Probably in a near future other European countries will also be members of the enlarged Union: the Balkans, Turkey? But the current Europe is already showing a lot of disagreements among members and further enlargement would not contribute to ease these disagreements. The first disagreement is connected with the approval or not of the American intervention in Iraq. Spain even lead an initiative to support the Bush/Blair/Aznar initiative to intervene against the ideas of the UN Security Council, France and Germany included. In the economic field a basic disagreement refers to the respect to the Stability and Development Pact to avoid excessive budget deficits of countries participating in the euro. Here again France and Germany are over the permitted 3% deficit allowed by the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability Pact. On the other hand some members of the European Union are in favour of reducing the burden of the EU budget while most of the new members and the net receivers from the group of 15 are for increasing the budget in order to support farmers and develop underdeveloped regions of the enlarged Europe. In this context Europe can only overcome the current disagreements with a new ambitious Constitution going to a real One Europe beyond the low level ambitious European Constitution drafted by the European Convention established by the Laeken European Council.