Next Generation EU and the Rebirth of Europe. The Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan: Towards a New Renaissance? (Editorial)

Introduction:

Europe Day on 9 May was celebrated in a particular way. One week before the 71st anniversary of the declaration with which, on 5 May 1950, the then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman sparked the process of European integration, almost all the EU member states had presented their own plan, within the established deadlines, for the recovery of the social, cultural and production activities envisaged by Next Generation EU (NGEU). This was thus a first achievement for the temporary financial aid instrument worth 750 billion euros that the EU devised in order to stimulate the recovery after the terrible Covid-19 crisis. All this lies within a funding framework outlined in the long-term budgetary plans for 2021-2027 to rebuild Europe, and amounting to 1,800 billion euros, with the ambitious goal of making the EU more ecological, digital and resilient.

The peculiarity of the celebrations lies in the fact that after a decade of serious crisis of the Union, caused mainly by restrictive budgetary policies as well as sovereignist and separatist drives which were undermining its credibility and very survival (it is suffice to think of the great wound inflicted by Brexit), its institutional bodies – above all, the European Commission and Parliament – have shown that they consider each member state as an essential (and almost unalienable) constituent part of the Union. This is particularly evident with the unexpected boost of the aforesaid funding and the unitary management of the vaccination campaign. It is not the individual member states that will guarantee the loan of the 750 billion euros – as was the case only some years ago with Greece, which was forced to take on the entire burden of getting over her serious financial crisis of that time: a real abjuration of the institutional goals of European solidarity

This time, it will be the extraordinary power of the whole Union to guarantee the debt contracted with the markets. This is a political act moving towards a further strengthening of the EU’s internal cohesion and showing the world that the Union is still alive and kicking. Not only this, but it also shows that the trend of negative events, which to the powerless eyes of its citizens seemed to condemn the EU to break up in a sort of cupio dissolvi, has finally been overcome and, hopefully, for good.

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