Passengers stranded. Absent Europe… in the clouds

(BRUSSELS2) One might wonder what is happening at European level with this sky crisis. It took five days of almost total air blockage over more than half of Europe for the first joint decisions and meetings to begin to take shape. It was only today that a meeting was held at political level between Ministers of Transport (by teleconference). Meeting, it must be said, provoked more by the recriminations of the airlines than by the concern to resolve the question of the thousands of citizens who remained in the harbor
abroad. Strangely, no evacuation plan was organized or coordinated in common.

What a missed opportunity ... This could perhaps have been the occasion to test or at least experiment with common consular protection (an innovation of the Lisbon Treaty) or to mobilize the available means. After all, one of the primary missions of the PeSDC is to evacuate and repatriate its citizens stranded abroad. This is probably not the case with a typical school for an intervention by military planes or ships (1); our fellow citizens are not in danger. But necessity makes law. We could also have innovated by testing the chartering of special trains which could have usefully shuttled between southern Europe – where the airports have remained generally open and northern Europe which is completely blocked. But not nothing or, well, few things.

... Again ! It looks like Europe is hiccuping. It is astonishing to see, for several months, one crisis after another (humanitarian in Haiti, political in Kyrgyzstan, economic with Greece, citizen with this Icelandic cloud), and giving the European Union "tremendous" opportunities for time to prove its effectiveness, its usefulness and to put forward solutions for the future, and to see how European leaders are reluctant to seize it, seized by a sudden fit of timidity when nothing prevents action . On the contrary, everyone was waiting for Europe.

But now, the European Commission is dreaming, in the clouds, of greatness, desperately looking for concrete projects... while they are there, at hand, as they have rarely been: humanitarian aid, economic support, assistance to citizens ... All it would take is a bit of political determination, a zest of originality sprinkled with a bit of reactivity and audacity...

(Nicolas Gros-Verheyde)

(1) Read also: the Royal Navy was requisitioned