“We are not forming coalitions of states, we are uniting people.”
These historical words of Jean Monnet, one of our founding fathers, express in one sentence what the EU has achieved over the last decades. Only 20 years ago the Iron Curtain divided people and ran like a scar through Europe. Today we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of an enlarged and re-united EU, a Union of citizens who have decided together, of their own will, to build a common future, based on the rule of law, an internal market and the gradual abolition of internal borders.
What we have done for ourselves — supporting and consolidating democracy for millions of people — we also wish to help others to accomplish. The EU’s transformational power is a major force for democratic and economic change in neighboring countries, not only in the candidate countries but also in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, fostered by the European Neighbourhood Policy.
In the last year we established the “Union for the Mediterranean” with our Mediterranean partners and agreed with them on six flagship projects delivering concrete benefits for citizens of the region. Similarly, we proposed an ambitious new Eastern Partnership aiming at bringing a lasting message of solidarity, with additional, tangible support for democratic and market-oriented reforms and the consolidation of partners’ statehood and territorial integrity.
These changes bring new opportunities, but also new responsibilities for our partners and for a united global Europe. In last summer’s conflict in Georgia and in the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine, a united and swiftly acting Union showed that it can be a guarantor for stability, freedom and security in our globalized world.
We are rising to this challenge by seeking to build a global consensus to tackle the issues we all face. This is particularly true in finding a global answer to the current global financial and economic crises. The EU has not only become one of the driving forces in the G20, which brings together all global and regional key players, but we also provided the blue print for a global response that resulted in the most ambitious global stimulus to boost the global economy and reshape our globalized world.
This crisis is also an opportunity as it is opening minds to the need to come up with global solutions. Thus, we agreed to work with our G20 partners for a breakthrough on Doha, climate change and energy security, and are frontloading our aid to those developing countries worst hit by falling export revenues.
2009 is not merely a year of crises. It is also a unique moment in the world’s history and a unique opportunity to work together to tackle global issues. A strong global Europe should seize this momentum and make its contribution not only to overcoming the challenges posed by the global financial and economic crisis but also to achieving an ambitious and binding agreement at the climate conference in Copenhagen at the end of this year.
Benita Ferrero-Waldner is the commissioner responsible for the European Commission’s external relations and European Neighborhood Policy.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
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