GETTING the European Union through its "mid-life crisis" required the creation of a new sense of European identity in its citizens, the President, Mrs Robinson, said yesterday.
On the first day of her official visit to the Netherlands, which holds the EU Presidency, she said: "The original and exemplary nature of the Union tends to get lost in the fog surrounding its complex institutional and legal structures. The excitement of the original design needs to be reclaimed."
In a lecture at the University of Utrecht to mark the 40th anniversary next week of the Treaty of Rome Mrs Robinson spoke of the Union entering its "most critical and challenging phase" and the danger that its process of growth and change would not be up to those challenges unless its peoples identified with it.
Mrs Robinson quoted the Czech President, Mr Vaclav Havel. "Europe," he said in 1994, "has to rediscover, consciously embrace and in some way articulate its soul or its spirit, its underlying idea, it purpose and its inner ethos."
"For that there needs to be a community of values which earns the allegiance of its citizens," Mrs Robinson said. "They must feel at heart it stands for something."
She said commitments to the fight against racism, to development and to international minimum standards of human rights must be fostered.
Mrs Robinson yesterday met Queen Beatrix in The Hague before travelling to Utrecht to deliver her lecture. Today she will return to the Dutch capital to visit the World Court and the International War Crimes Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia where she will have discussions with the judges.
In her speech Mrs Robinson said the ideas of the founders of the EEC and the unique institutional balance they created were based on the desire for "peace, prosperity and the creative channelling of nationalism, but the latter was never about wiping out the richness of diversity. The European framework was to be one within which Europeans could celebrate difference rather than stifle it, or still less, root it out."
The Union was entering a new period with the ending of the Cold War and "the re-joining of the eastern and western parts of the continent is a moral and historical imperative for Europe as it faces the next century. This is the first #time in history when the prospect of Europe as a continent of democracies has real meaning."
She said the EU must lead by strengthening democracy in its own institutions and that did not mean simply providing better access to information. "The Union must appeal to us as citizens, not just as consumers and workers."
If the Union was to be seen to be relevant, she argued, it must be able to address citizens' concerns about international crime and terrorism, and the trafficking in people, particularly children.
She welcomed the designation of 1997 as European Year against Racism, warning of the "urgent need to combat racism", not only by legislative means but through far-reaching changes in attitude.
In comments that might be seen as critical of Britain's blocking of a European monitoring centre on racism, the President asked: "Is there a willingness to adopt this as a core European value so that the monitoring of racism and xenophobia would be effective at European level, or is there substance in the complaint of some human rights bodies that the EU is focusing more attention on deterring immigration than on combating racism?"
Mrs Robinson said the emergence of a wider European identity "as part of a circle or hierarchy of identities" should not be feared. "A stronger sense of we-feeling between the peoples of Europe will be necessary if the Union is to enhance its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens."
