On May 26 the director of Social Platform Pierre Baussand – the largest network representing the EU civil society – publishes an article called “The EU does not have to change its dream – it has to live it”.

Spectacularly boring (for such a short article), poorly argued,  a bit arrogant and rather useless, it is exactly what one might  expect from practically the most important leader of the EU financed civil society in Brussels.

The article starts from the call for the “need to rethink the EU project”  of the Vice-President of the EC – Mogherini . Elegantly, Pierre writes : “I want to say one thing: don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater – the debate should be on the EU we want and not about whether the EU should exist or not. So what are the changes we want to see?”

Ignoring the logical fallacy ( Mogherini argued about the need to rethink the EU and not if the EU should exist or not) , the fact that he promises to tell us one thing and ends up writing many and not really linked to the title, the rather poor choice of metaphor; the interesting part is the switch from I to the we at the end of the first paragraph.

Either there is a Royal “ we” or He talks in the name of many which is even more disturbing. As the rest of the article is written as “we” without any indication of who those we are and it is signed as Pierre Baussand I couldn’t decide either way.

What “we” want is explained in a perfectly wooden language  “ We want to move forward with a more social Europe; it is time to work on greater social convergence in the EU. For that reason we want EU leaders to implement what is already written in the treaty such as the social clause…”

How “we” do it is even better – a perfect example of civil society leadership –“ we will continue to push for the roll-out of social standards …[and]… we call on these key policy-makers to ensure that Europe lives up to the spirit of its word by making concrete proposals for improving the social situation in the EU, rather than allowing negative rhetoric to diminish the European project to a pipedream.”

Yes, rolling-out the social convergence and having concrete proposals to match the spirit of words in order to avoid pipedreams is the type of visionary talk we badly need from our civil society leaders.

I was wondering how the push and the call are concretely done but probably is better not to get into the details of the work of „we”.

The article ends up dramatically with an appropriate call “ let’s engage !”.

Too bad it is not signed captain Picard as that will make a whole lot more sense.

The article can be found here –

The EU does not have to change its dream – it has to live it