THE EUROPEAN UNION CULTURE IN THE SOCIAL AMBIT

In 2004 Europe will become a reality of 25 countries with the widest enlargement of its history, adding to its body 10 new countries: Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Hungary. It will be the realization of the dream, a radical change of our history, that will realize the premise for a global idea, definitive of those that will be the boarders of Europe and the European reality of the future. With the enlargement the European Union will achieve an increase of the 20% of its population to forehead of a 5-6% income increase. It will represent therefore an effort, a political action, an investment in the economic dimension never seen before in the history. These countries will add to our community 25% more technicians, researchers, applied scientists, giving so the possibility to prepare the new scientific Europe of the human knowledge that is essential to build our future. Europe will open the way to the overcoming of the problems that the overwhelming greatness of the United States and the impetuousness of China and Asia represent, not in the protectionism or in the closing of the boarders, but in the development of that great resource represented by its great human resource and by its culture. An intergovernmental conference of the member countries has been constituted and is operating for completing a negotiation intended to reach a new Treaty, that will finally constitute a constitution for Europe. The text of the treaty is in advanced elaboration and object of a heated debate. The agreement of the E.U. countries on the future European constitution will represent a political action of fundamental importance and historical value. We will finally have a constitutional paper that will institute and join Europe for a future political design that will allow the development of a participative and democratic life of the Union for a long period and will allow also to burden itself with the great problems of the globalization as well and to face them with unitary constructive spirit and a new political idea that is worthwhile to all the member-countries and favors their life and activities. The stages of the run of the only process of coming to the approval and the following acknowledgements of the aforesaid constitution in the 25 Europe countries, when not yet wider, appear today complex and of a not easily predictable duration, not only for the known historical-political precedents of the member countries, but for the correlated deficits of a harmonic generalized and generalizable European culture, whose achievement will lead to a real articulation of the times of such stages. Culture pervades every form of knowledge and human activity, therefore, I have prepared this paper proposing to myself to limit my reflections to the aspects to which I am currently prevalently devoting my study pledge (the welfare state in the E.U.).