The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has this Thursday warned against the "nationalist poisons" which prevent Europe from working together and strongly criticised what they represent: "I say no to any form of separatism which weakens Europe and adds fracture and division".
Juncker was speaking after being invested as with an honorary doctorate by the University of Salamanca in a ceremony attended also by the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. Juncker repeated his support for Spanish law in support of the Spanish executive in the face of the situation in Catalonia.
The president of the European Commission emphasised that the EU is based in law and warned that the day that the norms freely accepted by everyone are not respected, Europe will have lost its opportunities.
"We cannot gamble its rights", he said, before warning of a "threat hovering over the union", the independence movements. In his opinion, they're "a poison which prevents Europe from working together to influence the world". He continued that "we don't have the right to dismantle at a national and regional scale a model of coexistence which we have to construct for the whole of Europe. If we do so, we'll enter a decline".
"Yes to the Europe of nations, yes to the Europe of regions, but I say no to the division of the national and regional categories which we've surpassed since the Second World War."