Le rôle de l’Union européenne entre certitudes et déséquilibres dans le nouveau scénario global : quels défis ?

European states, following the Second World War, understood that only peace could enable development and well-being. Would the idea of an European Economic Community, in its foundation, based above all on the economy, which had to choose its own political orientation, lead to a common line, to unity? We know that between America and Russia, the Community, which became the European Union, had to expand, in the name of a continent which has perhaps never been truly united, but in which unity part of the common history and cultural roots. Enlargement took place towards the East but for what European political project? The Balkan question and Britain's exit from the Union seemed to have put aside the dream of the United States and Europe. Too many States, too different from each other historically and anthropologically, too weak to move towards a true unitary project. Instead, the combination of Brexit and the global pandemic has reignited the spark of a desire greater than economic union alone. In what, until recently, seemed to many Europeans the most difficult point in their individual history, Europe was able to find itself united in a certain way, and was able to give political direction to each of its members. A feeling of Pan-Europe, too often and for a long time used, wrongly, as a pretext to impose democratic Westernization. The war at the gates of Europe between Russia and Ukraine is, perhaps, the last element of a shock necessary to wake up. At the worst moment, the people, the citizens, of a truly united Europe showed themselves in front of the States that governed them. And here again, the sound of an imminent threat recalled the need for the Union to fill a geopolitical space to which it had abdicated for too long. Because obviously there are no sure answers to a situation that could, tragically or miraculously, develop. The objective is therefore to question the developments that the current situation of the war between Russia and Ukraine could generate, first of all, for the European Union in the light of all the troubled process that we have already known. The EU therefore has today the opportunity to precisely bridge this long-awaited political gap, but to complete this path, it is necessary for the Union to review its economic directives in favor of true cultural integration, which has never been been fully implemented, on the one hand within its own historical core, on the other hand towards the countries of the former Soviet Union (entries into the EU almost twenty years ago but never really integrated ), then deciding to really expand towards the Balkan region. Only in this way can it have the strength to play a real geopolitical role detached from historical dependence on other world powers (America, China, Russia) to which the EU has for too long delegated the political interests to external actors proactively influencing global dynamics, finding a common political orientation that leads the European Union to be interpreter and protagonist of international balances.