Former EU ambassador to the US John Bruton will stress a sense of urgency in tackling Europe's debt and other problems at the ULI conference taking place in Paris today.
Bruton, who will give a keynote speech entitled ‘Europe And The USA: The Next 10 Years’, believes Europe’s problems are more than a financial crisis. ‘We are facing a crisis of the welfare state in ageing societies, a crisis of globalisation, a crisis of nation states and, potentially, even a crisis of the efficacy of European democracy.’
Rather than try to tackle these problems one by one, Europe needs to address them all at once, Bruton asserts. ‘We need to put in place a mechanism for making the banks whole, a mechanism for getting the finances of all the member states in order, and also a growth strategy,’ he told PropertyEU. ‘To try to do them separately is more difficult than to do them altogether. Arguably, if you do them altogether they will mutually reinforce one another. Tackling them separately you run the risk of failing on all three counts.’
Bruton, a former Irish prime minister who sits on the board of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, points out that individual European governments have up to now guarded their discretionary and sovereign powers closely but that these are no longer sufficient to solve their problems. ‘The only way these problems can be solved is by everyone acting together,’ he stresses. ‘We’ve been conducting policy as if we were 27 independent states but we’re not. The truth of the matter is that we’re very much interdependent. Our banks have lent vast sums to one another and our economies are completely interdependent, far more so than we’ve ever been in European history.'
The full article on John Bruton's address to the ULI Conference is published in the February edition of PropertyEU Magazine. Click on the link below to subscribe. | 
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