We Europeans are tied with invisible and binding threads: memories of the periodic destruction of freedom and peaceful coexistence, and of political projects that have tried to open a path to cooperation. Today, we cannot fail to call ourselves Europeans. Yet today more than ever, Europe is a ground not of cooperation, but of competition. The kind of Europe that we of Agora Europe want is not the Europe that old and new nationalists want.
In this conflict of different and opposed visions of collective life lies both the challenge of our time, and a testimony to the fact that the concerns that haunt our countries are not merely national and cannot be adequately conceived outside of the continental frame. The challenge of the present times is to understand current political issues as not merely national ones. For many current issues the solution cannot remain at the national level, the level of the nation-state, but they require that we ascend to a transnational level. Additionally, the European Union promised to be an augmentation of member-states’ sovereign power, not a reduction. Based on this promise, the peoples of the old continent can commit to recognizing themselves as actors of a European integration project.
Now more than ever, it is necessary to create opportunities for a transnational public debate to think collectively about how to reorganize the European political space and strengthen our integration. Beginning with Étienne Tassin and Étienne Balibar’s insights, we chose to call our initiative Agora Europe – a series on the European Political Space. Paraphrasing Balibar, we could say of all the member-states, “Pas d’autre France sans autre Europe”(“There is no other France without another Europe”). Agora Europe is a permanent and itinerant agora gathering together hundreds of national and international members whose task is to create opportunities for public debates regarding the future of Europe, to discuss the potential of each country to reshape the European political space and to promote the participation of citizens and social forces in this process on the assumption that the greatest challenges of our time cannot be solved at the national level but only at the European level.
