Single European state is a dangerous utopia, PM says

Further expansion of the EU's competences and establishing of the "United States of Europe", is a dangerous phenomenon and a kind of utopia, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said at a conference on the future of the European Union.

The event "How to reform the (European - PAP) Union for the future of Europe?" was organised in Warsaw on Friday by the Polish delegation of the centre-right European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament.

By setting a barrier to the further expansion of the competences of the European Union, we are also defending Europe and the EU, Morawiecki told the conference.

During the debate, he spoke about the need to re-examine "the entire institutional and legal specificity of the EU" from three points of view: cultural-identity, economic and political-state.

As he added, the EU consists of 27 countries, cultures, sometimes with a very long tradition and a strong identity, "recently strengthened... for example, in Poland."

"We say that the creation of a single European state, 'the United States of Europe', is a kind of utopia, a dangerous utopia that cannot be constructed solely on the basis of legal assumptions and the extended competences of individual institutions," Morawiecki said.

"Here our voice may be weaker or stronger, but the more we speak to common sense and show that these differences not only cannot and should not be 'equalised'," he said.

In his opinion, this "would impoverish the European heritage" and would lead towards "a very dangerous experiment with many utopian features."

Speaking about the economic view of the EU, Morawiecki said that "the eurozone was created 20 years ago and the question is still hanging in the air whether (...) this is an optimal currency area".

"I used to deal with this in the past and I can say, based on the available literature, about the evolution of economic integration processes, that there are increasingly more indications that the eurozone is not an optimal currency," he added.

In his view, there is "a collision of a certain political will of some elites with the harsh economic reality."

"This collision, which is growing today, can be at the same time... an increasing obstacle to the actual further integration of the eurozone, and also of the EU... divided into 27... significantly different... economic areas," Morawiecki said.

According to him, deepened economic integration, moving towards institutional and monetary integration, "which is based on certain adopted theoretical assumptions, and goes against economic processes, is a road to nowhere, where sooner or later we must face an economic and financial crisis."

Morawiecki also talked about the third view of the EU, the area of "possible institutional, legal and state integration", which, he believes, is "an extremely dangerous phenomenon because it penetrates into the structure, the social tissue and into state-legal-institutional architecture... and may lead to interstate conflicts of unknown proportions."

He assessed that "in the interest of maintaining the EU's cohesion at the level at which it seemed to be a positive phenomenon until recently, is (...) to put a barrier to further expansion of (the EU's - PAP) institutional and legal competences".