Brussels – “His dream” for more than two decades since he was at the helm of the European Commission. Romano Prodi returned today (March 26) to showcase in the EU capital the “beautiful and difficult” project of creating a network of Mediterranean universities. On the sidelines of a meeting with the President of the European Parliament, Malta’s Roberta Metsola, he announced that the EU Parliament “will present a first idea for the pilot project.”
Prodi’s vision dates back to 2002, and the former premier has never abandoned it. It is basically to establish thirty or so equal universities between European countries bordering the Mediterranean and those in the southern neighbourhood, on the southern shore, ment as academic structures with a single seat divided between North and South, with an equal number of professors and students from the two sides of the Mediterranean, and an obligation for students to attend the same number of years in the North and South. On scientific subjects preferably, and economics, in any case non-controversial. Universities would be based, for example, in Bari and Tunis, Naples and Tripoli, Barcelona and Rabat, Athens and Cairo, Marseilles and Algiers.
Prodi explained to reporters that
“The major financial weight can only be European, then there will have to be a contribution from other countries as well, but the core must start from a European decision.” When he presented it 23 years ago, during the period in which he presided over the EU executive from 1999 to 2004, it was shelved because “the Northern countries were not really interested; they said it was a useless project, money thrown away.” Those were the years of the great eastward enlargement of the European Union, culminating in 2004 with the accession of Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Malta.
Now, however, the spotlight is back on the Mediterranean, a sea that has changed and in which “there is no longer any direct influence from us; think of Libya where the Russians and Turks are in charge,” Prodi stressed. That is why, according to the former EU leader, now “there is a much stronger support” for his project, which he also discussed recently in Cairo with the ambassadors of African Mediterranean countries.
“Europe must have passionate projects,” Prodi insisted again, “and this is a project to give Europe strength, dignity, and diversity in relation to the new authoritarianisms. A project “for the young but also political.” In ten years, it could create a community of hundreds of thousands of students and professors, and a mobility that speaks the language of sharing and exchange, not the language of death and despair of Europe’s more lethal migration route.
With Metsola, “there has been a warm, exciting dialogue.” Prodi knows this; it is a project “many years in the making,” and it is almost a political testament to an incurable pro-European who has always looked southward. “The Mediterranean is healed only if we put together the new generation. There is no other possibility,” the former premier warned.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
