While the "Geopolitical Commission" project launched by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and the first woman to take up this post, aims to broaden the horizons and competences of the Community's institutions, the unprecedented period of crisis that the world is currently experiencing prompts us to focus our attention on the necessary European revival.
Citizens expect the Union to provide concrete responses and efficiency. The common institutions and national leaders are being questioned, but a viable, wide-ranging programme must now be deployed in a period of acute crisis: circumstances force us to focus on the essentials, discarding the superfluous. Robert Schuman's Declaration of 9 May 1950 celebrates its 70th anniversary this year and provides us with a compass and a method. What are the steel and coal of the present and the future?