In this issue, we address the issue of freedom of movement, migration and borders. Shocked by the fact that Romania and Bulgaria have been rejected by the enlargement of Schengen while Croatia is entering the European area, we wanted to return to this history, and more broadly, to show how federalists have always defended equal rights by republishing an article from 1976.

As soon as we talk about immigration and open borders, we come up against the "great shift to the extreme right" of minds. Jean-Francis Billion’s 1973 article shows that this phenomenon is nothing new. Jean-François Drevet’s current analysis reports that we remain prisoners of the shackles of nationalist thought.

The French pension reform crisis is striking in this regard. In a Western Europe with a declining birth rate (despite injunctions, social pressure, tax support and social benefits), maintaining a system of solidarity between generations is an issue. The development of an extreme right state of minds prevents us from thinking of solutions based on greater openness and acceptance to the rest of the world. All this without forgetting that this pension reform is very unfavorable to immigrant workers, without this having moved many people...

By using all the contortion tools of the little Fifth Republic parliamentarism, the government shows its inability to take advantage of its relative majority to make it an opportunity to relearn parliamentarism. The very palpable democratic fatigue after the use of the article 49.3 and the massive demonstrations that followed show the institutional impasse in which this Constitution puts us. It is therefore necessary to rethink the institutions by changing the Constitution, or even changing it with a Sixth Republic that is approaching federalism.