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In the Spring 1999, when I was unanimously elected President of the European Commission, European institutions were in a paradoxical situation. In the end Europe had almost fifty years of great success, it reached peace, development, in a continent which used to be divided and full of tensions in the past. Yet, in spite of this, European institutions were passing through a crisis. There was a collective resignment by all the Commission members and no country wanted to take the responsibility of pushing forward the European integration process. They talk about the lack of great leaders somehow linked to Europe and oter reasons. I found myself in the need of re-building, of helping the renewal of this political process. In Berlin summit in March 1999, they gave me the task and the taskwas one of building a clear strategy for the development of European institutions, starting from the commission reform, that is the main government organ and secondly a strategy for the enlargement of the Union. Don’t forget Berlin Wall had fallen and many central-western European countries demanded joining the Union. We had to give a political answer, but it couldn’t be given without a reform, without making the European commission more efficient. So we needed a new agenda, we had to organize again the European institutions’ way and the decision-making rules. That’s it, this was the task of the European Commission in the Spring 1999. This meant organizing point by point all the procedures, the decision making models, the relationships between the European Commission and the European countries and, above all, deciding if it was possible giving not just practical actuation to Euro, which had already been decided before, but if it was possible giving new impulse to the continent development, which was passing through a deep crisis, especially in comparison with the dynamic of American economy and to the new Asian occurrences, above all in China and in India. Here it is the diffucult contigency of a Europe with big taskes but whose credibility had been reduced to the minimum by the circumstances. In the months before the coming into force of the Commission the difficult task was about the relationships with the different countries, different governments, about looking for the commissioners fitting for the new functions, about starting the creation of a team game in order to build the cohesion needed to achieve those important aims. They were months of preparation but intense months, very storng from the emotional point of view, because we had to give courage to the deputies, but also to the officials, to the leaders, to all the people living in the field of European institutions.
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