Chapter 18
Europe

Europe was built on an initial impulse: the desire to unite to prevent future wars. The problem is that we have happily rested content on this initial noble design, forgetting to consider the long term – that is, ensuring a succession of values and engagement once the memory of war had faded.

Today, the Europe of nation-states is a Europe of bargaining, where solidarity has little room to develop. It is therefore fundamentally incompatible with addressing the issue posed by Marx – that progress should serve the greatest number of people – and, by extension, with meeting the moral expectations of the peoples.
And yet paradoxically, moral expectations remain the main motivation behind European construction. For example, the French do not have a particular desire to 'reunite' with the Germans or the Spanish. So in order to restart, European construction needs a sufficiently progressive social project, one that its advocates can proudly present to future generations by saying: 'We did it.' In that sense, this whole book deals with the construction of a social Europe, not just this chapter. Conversely, building a left-wing Europe based on the regulation of capitalism by law, as envisioned by Marx in Capital, and practiced by most European states and current European institutions, is an illusion and therefore dangerous. Indeed, this approach does not work well for three reasons. Firstly, as we saw at the beginning of this book, the legal regulation of capitalism, as proposed by Marx in Capital, is insufficient. Secondly, the legal disparities between countries are a powerful obstacle to such regulation, which means that harmonization must be pursued before any real progress on social Europe can be made. That would require doing little for many decades. Finally, there is no real European trade unionism. All of this in practice leads to an EU that is more right-leaning than the national states themselves, resulting in rejection by the peoples who find its moral system insufficient to meet their expectations, and ultimately in the rise of anti-European populism. To put it more simply, Europe can only be built if it is morally more satisfying than the nation-states it replaces, and this means providing a response that goes beyond the mere updating of old recipes, as this book does.

Let us also clarify that there can be no effective integration without the emergence of a common culture, which in practice means a common language. This necessarily imposes Esperanto as the only official European language, along with mandatory instruction as the first foreign language in all member states. Erasmus is good, but it creates connections only for a small minority of European citizens, with only one of the other member states. It is therefore insufficient to support a European democracy.

To sum up, there are three Europes: economic, social, and cultural. The social Europe requires a new proposal, as is put forward in this book. The cultural Europe requires a common language.

The last important point for advancing European construction is to take advantage of current cultural differences to fight corruption by having people from other countries intervene in each country. This is relatively easy to implement within organizations, especially at the operational control level described in Chapter 11. The '50% from elsewhere' we envisioned in the typology of people involved in control can easily include members from other countries, regularly in the case of organizations whose activities are highly structuring, and more sporadically for other organizations, where it can help circulate best practices between countries while limiting the risk of the 'it's not good, but it's always been done this way' attitude.