Iñigo Urkullu, former Lehendakari and president of the eAtlantic Fundazioa Foundation, spoke at the opening day of the International Law and International Relations Courses, held at the Faculty of Arts in Vitoria-Gasteiz, with a presentation on “participatory governance for a Europe that is necessary in global (dis)order.” In his speech, he emphasized that “Europe faces one of the most exciting challenges in its history: building a new model of political coexistence, a new form of democracy that, beyond the mere juxtaposition of current political systems, is capable of embracing and developing a new society based on freedom, equality, equity, solidarity, social justice, diversity, and sustainable development.”

After acknowledging that “we are witnessing a paradigm shift in global geopolitics,” the president of the eAtlantic Foundation emphasized that “two of the main problems we face in the current international reality stem, on the one hand, from the practical lack of norms, of international rules capable of addressing the challenges arising from a global geopolitical context dominated by permanent conflict and the absence of global balance; and on the other, we are faced with the absence of shared global leadership.”

For all these reasons, Urkullu emphasized, “it is necessary and essential to try to revitalize multilateralism. And we also need to reset and strengthen the spirit, drive, and vitality of a renewed global consensus around the defense of human rights.” And referring to Europe, he admitted that it is witnessing “one of the most exciting challenges in its entire history: building a new model of political coexistence.”

For the president of the eAtlantic Foundation, “the rise to power of populist and autocratic leaders invites reflection on the model of society we are developing. In this conception, multilateral rules are superfluous, and they comfortably settle into the global geopolitical chaos.” For this reason, he insisted that “the shared challenge for European citizens is to guarantee the protection of the European social model and its inalienable common values.”

After recalling that “the Letta and Draghi reports warn that Europe is facing an existential challenge that questions its very foundations and values,” Urkullu admitted that “I am pleased that the reports serve as a platform to ratify and highlight the policies of promotion and commitment to innovation and digitalization that many of us have defended and painstakingly implemented for many years.”

Later, addressing the debate on the reform or refoundation that must be followed to re-legitimize a new Europe, Urkullu asked, “What should be the port of destination for a Europe in which the Basque Country finds its refuge and development as a nation?” It is here that he advocated “rebuilding a Constitution for Europe that combines the pursuit of integration with pragmatism, that functionally re-legitimizes itself by improving the lives and future of European citizens, that recognizes the existence of political realities far removed from the rigid binomial Europe versus States, that embraces the existence of living, active, and supportive European peoples, removed from the nineteenth-century struggle for exclusive and exclusionary state sovereignty.”