Happy Birthday Europe! 60 years - Please Don't Retire

PULLACH, Germany, March 23, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Martin A. Schoeller, Chairman of the Bavarian Family Entrepreneurs and initiator of the Munich Europe Conference , emphasises the importance of a unified Europe.

Despite of all criticism and fears the EU and those who built it, can be incredibly proud and grateful for the greatest success in peace, freedom and prosperity since mankind exists. "The Nobel Prize for the EU was not exaggerated".

The poor and the wealthy of this planet have set their hopes in Europe. Migration desire and the investments of the wealthy to also get a home base in Europe, European schools and health service, a life free of fear and a guaranteed life in dignity for everyone underline the unique success of the European concept and organisation.

The actual tendency of American withdrawal from a global joint responsibility is even reinforcing the importance of positive guidance provided by Europe. While the Americans cut developing aid the Europeans should and will increase it.

We all know from looking at history and actually at the Middle East, Africa and many developing, frontier and Eastern countries, that the human being is the biggest threat to himself. We have a predator nature, protecting our friends and family and fighting our competitors with no mercy. Male humans can even unconsciously block their feeling of pity when in fight mode. Whenever there is the fear of scarcity by uncontrolled population growth and even the greed and strive for power, it makes human beings - especially the males - dangerous for others and leads to what we call abuse of power.

The predator in us is easily to provoke by demagogic populist politicians as Erdogan, even under a democratic mask. It is therefore important that Germany shall not become the platform for advertising the abolishment of checks and balances in Turkey and shall not be the helper of a new dictator to get in power by abusing the democracy. All this know-how is part of the European peace formula and urgently needs to be preserved.

Europe was built on the joint beliefs and values around the idea of human rights and human dignity. Europe has discovered - maybe following the oldest role model of Switzerland - that these values can only be maintained and also offered to the weaker members of our society by creating a rigorous system to prevent power abuse.

Machiavelli would have predicted that a society cannot be organized without the threat of cruel measures but it has worked so far, to a greater extent thanks to the prevention of power abuse than to the concept of democracy.

Many African countries, Egypt, Turkey and other Southern and Eastern hemisphere countries show that we need more than democracy for peace, freedom and prosperity for all. We need the European formula to achieve this and we need to continue to be a strong and friendly Europe and we even support our neighbors to benefit from the broad success of our model for society. So what is the European formula that we should preserve and not allow populists to jeopardize it by negative instrumentalization of fears?

Based on the motivation to never again have something like the second world war or the Nazi terror, the key is the system of power abuse prevention in order to never again put human rights in question for everybody and without any exception; also the agreement not to attack, but only to defend if somebody was attacked, as well as the principle of the social market economy are the 3 fundamental principles that can be called the European formula.

This practically means also equal rights for men and women which is different in any radical form of Islam. Therefore Europe is only compatible to the liberal forms and interpretations of Islam.

Europe also has the strength and authority to discuss this with countries like Saudi-Arabia and Qatar and others and thereby can exercise influence into a humanely desirable direction and request changes from those governments whose population wants to escape to Europe. This gives us a logical legitimation to request and enforce it by law and by trade contracts.

War is not needed. Our leverage is strong enough as people want to come to Europe or to make business in and with Europe. 100s of millions of Africans would like to come to Europe as they cannot even dream about a social protection with 1200 Euro per month, earning 30 USD per month with hard work and with no guaranteed rights. This is by the way a much higher priority than further redistribution of wealth internally at the expense of our economic strength.

Europe obviously needs a joint strong border protection, but also needs and is capable of influencing the African neighbor states to build cities for refugees and create centers with social market economy principles. Europe can provide support and know-how and contractual preconditions because Europe has successfully gone one important step further than just protecting human rights.

Next to human rights Europe stands for humanitarian solidarity and social market economy. The poorest and those who lose in the competition of the markets are protected in such a way that poor people in Africa and the Middle East try to migrate to get similar advantages.

To achieve this European quality of life for all, the key is the power abuse prevention system meaning the political and the economic power abuse prevention. For the political power control we have the strict division of the 3 powers plus the free press and for the economic power control we have the 4 basic standards that are being controlled and enforced by law: compliance, anti-trust,  social and environmental standards.

Who makes a fortune in Europe has to do it by fair play and respecting the social and environmental standards. Many entrepreneurs outside the industrial nations don't have to follow these 4 principals rigorously and this is a clear topic to be addressed by Europe in the future. KYC is already a step in the right direction.

If we want to keep our privileged European peace, freedom and prosperity, we obviously have to stay being a good neighbor of Africa and the Middle East without only building the borders that we now unfortunately need to build. We need to negotiate trade deals that encourage social standards and we have to ask everybody, foreigners and Europeans, to request social welfare at their home town. This works for example in Switzerland and prevents social welfare tourism.

These times we have seen fears to become passionate and support populists, therefore it should be our priority that European reason becomes passionate as well.

About the Bavarian Family Entrepreneurs
Pressekontakt:
Martin Alexander Schoeller
Landesvorsitzender Bayern
Die Familienunternehmer
und für das Kuratorium  der Münchner Europakonferenz
Zugspitzstr. 15
82049 Pullach
Tel. +49-89-55277-100
martin.schoeller@schoeller.org