Siena Conference On The Future of Europe

: 09 May 2022; Events

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SIENA CONFERENCE ON THE FUTURE OF EUROPE

SIENA - PONTIGNANO

26-27-28 MAY 2022

We are living a dramatic time. Years of existential threats and radical transformations. It is also a time when it becomes imperative to adapt institutions conceived for a more stable context to a century which increasingly seems defined by ever more frequent and intense crises.

The first two Vision conferences on the future of Europe took place in October 2020 and June 2021, while the continent was struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The third conference is being organized while hundreds of thousands of families are besieged in Kiev and Odessa. For the first time since the early sixties a nuclear strike cannot be classified as a negligible possibility.

And this is happening while the globalization machine was slowly restarting its engine after the great pandemic freeze. And yet this unprecedented crisis does not only significantly accelerate pre-existing technology and economy driven mutations, it also creates the moral obligation of a radical rethinking of how we govern complex societies.This means that all institutions conceived for a different century - the United Nations and its security council, the World Health Organization, the NATO, the European Union itself - will need to adapt to a dramatically different context.

The third conference that Vision is organizing with the University of Siena and think tanks/foundations of the five major political group in the European Parliament at the Certosa di Pontignano in Siena is meant to be a scale up of the previous events and the consolidation of project meant to create a permanent hub of ideas to reform the EU and to support the design and implementation of EU policies.

Among the participants: Romano Prodi (Former Prime Minister of Italy and Former President of the European Commission), Francesco Frati (Magnifico Rettore Università degli Studi di Siena), Francesco Grillo (Director at Vision and Affiliate at Sant’ Anna School of Advanced Studies), Gregorio De Felice (Chief Economist Intesa Sanpaolo), Carlo Papa (Managing Director of Enel Foundation), Antonios Nestoras (Head of Policy and Research European Liberal Forum), Maria Joao Rodrigues (President of the European Progressive Studies and former Portugal's Minister of Employment), Bill Emmott (President of IISS's Trustees), John Hooper (Corrispondente per The Economist), Angela Giuffrida ( The Guardian), Jan Piotrowski (Business Editor, The Economist), Victor Mallet (Paris Bureau Chief, Financial Times), Paola Papanicolaou (Group Head of Transformation Intesa Sanpaolo), Roberto Tallei ( Deputy Head of the International News, Sky TG 24).

The event will take place in Siena from the 26th to the 28th of May.

Concept Paper

Agenda

Speakers

WG 1 - THE BATTLE FOR GLOBAL DIGITAL LEADERSHIP

FINDING A ROLE WITHIN THE “BATTLE FOR GLOBAL DIGITAL LEADERSHIP” A NEW ERA FOR INDUSTRIAL POLICIES

Merits and limits of the EU attempt to regulate global digital platforms.

If we consider the battlesdefining the quest for global digital leadership, Europe seems to have not even fully entered them. There is no European global digital platform for e- commerce, social networking, or other digital services (the only exception is Spotify) and with the departure of UK, the EU lost an economy with a significant digital innovation capacity. However, the potential held by these internet giants is far reaching, as they capture and trade one of the most important commodities of today: data. Not only are digital platforms among the most valuable companies in the world, but they are also; re-shaping entire chains of production value and our consumer habits, redefining public spaces, and impacting on the efforts of the ecological transition. Digital sovereignty is therefore something that needs to be integrated and conceived as a priority for policymaking at European Union level.

And yet, the EU still struggles with outdated instruments and approaches (fines, competition rules not adapted to the speed of the internet and not in line with new consumer habits and wants) and even with unclear definitions of the platforms it wishes to regulate.

The working group will thus focus on how the EU could start governing global digital platforms, finding the right mix between industrial policies, regulations, and anti-trust instruments with the view to maximize the welfare of European citizens and consumers and use disruptive innovations to make European firms more competitive. The Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act and GDPR will be a crucial part of the discussion. But the conversation should also cover investments: both in new, public European platforms and in start-ups that will create services for those platforms.

WG 2 - A COMMON FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

THE DRAMATIC COME BACK OF AN OLD ASPIRATION: A COMMON FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY FOR THE 21^stCENTURY

The drama unfolding in UKRAINE has dramatically changed priorities and even the terms of what has been one of the oldest aspiration of the so called federalists: only few months ago NATO seemed to have come close to what the French President, Emmanuel Macron called its brain death: the US decision to leave Afghanistan left the allies questioning the nature an alliance born in a completely different context, where the US – UK – Australia initiative seemed to show that the global center of the world was shifting towards Asia. Only few months after the invasion of Ukraine seemed to bring the world clock backward to dangers that other generations felt during the darkest years of the cold war.

The recent crisis, however, is the result of years of increasing irrelevance. The entire South and East shores of the Mediterranean have been devastated by conflicts of which Europe is only paying indirect prices. Turkey and Russia have been more influential than the EU in countries which are at one hour flight from Rome or Athens. For years the US has rung as an alarm bell that speaks about how the EU is losing footing on the new world order. Confronted with this alarm bell, it is time to think of how the EU can regain its place in the global chess table, perhaps with those instruments it has employed for a long time (diplomacy, soft power), by gaining negotiating leverage through strategic autonomy in other fields (such as energetic or digital), and by starting to develop a common foreign and security policy.

The questions however are:

how to start realistically and what is feasible in the short term?
up to what extent can armies be integrated?
how does the answer change when it comes to data sharing and cyber defense (or attack)?
what kind of division of labor (and of areas of influence) can we possibly envisage between the European block and the US?
which could be the impact of the latest crisis on the relationship with Turkey?
how much does a 21st century army cost, whereas it seems clear that we have not only a question of how much we spend but also of modernization (and redundancies to cut)?
up to what extent is a foreign and defense policy compatible with unanimity?
does it require a core group of founding, large members?

WG 3 - HOW TO SAVE SAVE LIBERAL DEMOCRACY FROM TECHNOLOGICAL OBSOLECENCE

EU AS THE PLACE TO EXPERIMENT THE INNOVATIONS THAT CAN SAVE LIBERAL DEMOCRACY FROM TECHNOLOGICAL OBSOLECENCE

The debate on the European democratic deficit is one of the oldest among the many long- standing discussions which over the last decades have addressed the question of how to institutionally reform the European Union (for example: Huber P.M., 2009).
Within the architecture of the European Union (EU), the European Parliament (EP) is the institution which should guarantee direct accountability towards European citizens (PRIESTLEY, 2010; Hix, 2008). It is also the only case of a supranational assembly elected with universal suffrage (direct election) and its power has progressively increased since the first election in 1979 (Héritier, 2017; Hix, Noury and Roland. 2007.). Yet, this positive evolution contradicts the fact that the interest of European citizens, as measured by the turn out at the polls to elect the EP, has never been high.

Indeed, turnout has progressively gone down, with the only exception of the last election in 2019. And yet the 2019 election was also the very one when the share of MEPs from Eurosceptical parties reached its highest (31% of the total) while the share of the two mass European political parties (EPP and ESP) fell for the first time below half of the votes (44%).

Yet, democracy is not only elected assemblies. Europe needs to make a much more systematic use of new deliberative approaches like the Citizen panels that the Conference on the future of Europe (COFE) is experimenting, of citizens’ initiatives, of well-designed EU – wide referenda. We also need to institutionalize the use of electronic voting.

The COFE is producing some interesting proposals, the School of Transnational Governance at the EUI is hosting a vibrant debate10 and a Vision proposal for flexible constituencies will also be part of the inputs to the working group11.

The dual health and economic emergency generated by the Covid 19 pandemic and the first EU extraordinary response to it is, indeed, creating an unprecedented “window of opportunity”. On the one hand, there is the possibility to address the long-standing problem of the so-called EU ‘democratic deficit’ which is no longer compatible with a quantum leap in the EU integration process whose urgency has been made clear by the emergency. On the other, the response is the premise for the EU to become the lab addressing the diffused crisis of representative liberal democracy which affects also individual Member States.

Indeed, the issue of the European democratic deficit finds strong parallels with the new social and political dynamics brought about by the Internet. Much like the European Union struggles to create a harmonized framework to ensure equal and fair representation of all EU citizens while aiming at transcending the national geographical dimension; the Internet has impacted the dimension of the spatial organization of the lives of the vast majority of individuals, changing the shape and definition of the territorial communities they belong to.

Spatial organization is changing, becoming de facto more fluid, and transcending national boundaries. Yet, if instruments and electoral processes are not adapted to this changing scenario, the European Union liberal democracy risks becoming technologically obsolete and thus deepening its democratic deficit, consequently engendering distortions in social and economic conditions and inefficiencies and injustices in the way the European society is politically represented in elected assemblies.

The difficulty of democracy at a European level finds a parallel in the Member States. Participation in particular in local elections is declining, as is the Membership in any of the parties and other organizations participating in formal democracy. And there is the authoritarian temptation, the simple demagogue who simply wants to do away with democracy and safeguard an eternal position of power. It is vital for the EU not to limit discourses to the old debates on democracy on the EU level, but to attack the new challenge in Member States and ask the question what the EU can do about democracy in Member States. As a follow up to the Conference on the Future, for example, work could start on an EU Charter on Democracy in Member States, following the same methods of work that eventually led to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This working group will therefore be discussing what instruments and strategies can strengthen European democracy, both at the EU level and within Member States, by adapting it to our changing world.

WG 4 - THE RIGHT PATH TOWARDS CARBON NEUTRALITY

FINDING THE RIGHT PATH TOWARDS CARBON NEUTRALITY: A NEW GREEN DEAL IN THE AGE OF ENERGY AND SECURITY INSTABILITY – THE ROLE OF COMPANIES, GOVERNMENTS AND FAMILIES

“This is Europe’s man on the moon moment”.

The words that give the title of the third VISION conference, were also the words with which on the 11th December 2019, the President of the Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, gave to the “green deal” the aura of the pact which would have defined her Presidency. The European Union’s commitment to reach zero net emissions of CO2 by 2055 and to reduce them by 55% vis-à-vis their levels in 1990 were a great challenge which would have implied a radical transition in production and consumption models.

Since then everything has changed: the 2020 COVID19 produced the sharpest recession of the EU’s history and the greatest reduction in emissions; the subsequent NEXT GENERATION EU has found in the ecological transformation its most important policy objective; regulations from the European Commission and the European Banking Authorities have been approved so to create a strong incentives for companies to increase the green ratio of their assets; the war in Ukraine has changed again priorities making even more complicated and urgent the need to reach energy autonomy; the price of gas and oil has increased so much to endanger the very implementation of NGEU.

Some of the big questions that this working group will reflect upon are: which is the true cost of the transition towards neutrality? Is there a way to make it politically sustainable? Which is the right balance between ambition and pragmatism? Which environmental policies should be prioritized to achieve more ambitious targets in light of the POST- Ukraine energy instability?

More specifically, orienting financial institutions and companies towards sustainable practices and investments has become a central feature of the EU strategy. Indeed, the former governor of Bank of England Mark Carney (2021) argues that banks and investment funds that pledged to stop all investment in polluting companies by 2050 account for more than 130 trillion dollars. In order to guide the financial world in this transition, Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) indicators were developed.

However, their implementation poses a series of challenges: first, how to avoid greenwashing? Secondly, how to use ESG to encourage a balanced and strategic transition (i.e., not diverting investments from those – especially manufacturing - industries that pollute the most but that exactly for this reason still need significant investments to become more sustainable).

Thirdly, how to make ESG easy to apply for boards. ESG cover a wide array of broadly defined “economic activities” that are not always defined. Moreover, the need to evaluate the totality of financial institutions’ portfolios represents a huge challenge in terms of scale.

Finally, how are ESG affected by the recent evolution of energy and carbon prices and related stagflation risks? What role can carbon markets and other policy instruments play in driving the economies on a truly sustainable path?

This working group will reflect upon these and other related challenges, in order to identify solutions that will make ESG more viable, of easier application and more effective. Particular attention will be devoted to the most suitable policies that may promote the adoption and diffusion of reliable ESG indicators, to the required investments to achieve climate neutrality in the next decades and to the key instruments that are needed to finance the low carbon economy in both developed and developing countries.

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