Chapter 18
Europe

Europe was built on an initial impulse to come together to avoid future wars. The problem is that we were blissfully satisfied with this noble initial design, and that we forgot to plan for the long term, that is to say the succession once the memory of the war would have faded away.

Today, the Europe of nation-states is a Europe of bargaining in which there is little room for solidarity. It is therefore fundamentally incompatible with responding to Marx's problem of putting progress at the service of the greatest number, and in fact, responding to the moral expectations of people.
Yet paradoxically, moral expectations remain the main motivation for European construction. Indeed, the French, for example, do not have a particular desire to 'reunify' with the Germans or the Spanish. So to restart, European construction needs a sufficiently progressive social project so that those who implement it can proudly say to their descendants: we did it. In this sense, this entire book deals with the construction of social Europe, and not just this chapter. Conversely, wanting to build a left-wing Europe on the basis of the regulation of capitalism by law as envisaged by Marx in Capital, and practiced by most European states, and by current European institutions, is illusory and therefore dangerous. Indeed, this does not work well for three reasons. On the one hand because as we saw at the beginning of this book, the regulation of capitalism by law that Marx had envisaged in Capital is insufficient. On the other hand, legislative disparities between States are a powerful tool to hinder this regulation, so standardization should be carried out before being able to envisage the construction of social Europe, therefore not doing much for decades. Finally, there is no real European trade unionism. All this leads in practice to a Europe more to the right than the States, therefore to a rejection by the people of Europe who do not find there a system morally up to their aspirations, with ultimately the rise of anti-populists -Europeans. Put more simply, Europe can only be built by being morally more satisfactory than the nation-states it supplants, and this implies providing, as this book does, a response that goes beyond simple updating old recipes.

Let us also point out that there will be no effective integration without the emergence of a common culture, that is to say in the practice of a common language. This effectively imposes Esperanto as the only official European language, as well as its compulsory teaching as the first foreign language in all Member States. Erasmus is good, but it creates a link for a small minority of European citizens, with only one of the other Member States, so it is insufficient to sustain a European democracy.

In summary, there are three Europes, the economic, the social and the cultural. The social presupposes a new proposition as this book does. Culture presupposes a common language.

The last important point for advancing European construction is to take advantage of current cultural differences to fight corruption through the intervention in each country of people from other countries. However, it is quite easy to implement in the case of organizations, and more precisely at the level of operational control described in chapter 11. The 'other 50%' that we had considered in terms of the typology of people involved in control may very well contain members from other countries, regularly when it comes to organizations whose activity is highly structuring, more sporadically for other organizations for which this makes it possible to circulate good practices between countries while limiting the risk of 'it's not good, but it's always been done like that'.