What Kind of European Society do we Want? A Blueprint

What kind of European society do we want? A blueprint The European Union is struggling to survive. Its disintegration has been predicted and contradicted since the start of the financial crisis in 2008 by ever more Europeans . The European citizen protests and increasingly lacks confidence in “Brussels”. This article exposes a renewed original blueprint for European integration in which the human person is heard and attention to minorities and education is given. It revives, actualizes and expands on the original vision on European unification according to one of its founding fathers who was also its main architect, Robert Schuman, for its surprising topicality. Schuman’s personality and background as a practicing Catholic from the region of Alsace-Lorraine explain to a large extent the intrinsic content of his view on integration and the core of today’s unrest. They help to understand his sensitivity to transparency and his human person centered approach to integration in which regional and national identities were protected unless these went against the respectively national or European common good and in which a humanly speaking digestive transition period was taken into account. They also explain his focus on the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and therewith his stress on the subsidiarity and solidarity principles that according to him are crucial for a proper way of integration. Focusing and expanding on these principles in which the human person with his transcendence is at the core with effective solidarity and care for common good as a consequence, a renewed and updated original blueprint will be presented.