Chapter 18
Europe

Europe was built on an initial impulse, which was to unite countries in order to avoid future wars. The problem is that we have been blissfully satisfied with this noble initial goal, and have forgotten to plan for the long term, that is to say once the war memory would have faded.

Today, the Europe of nation states is a bargaining Europe 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, to responding to the moral expectations of the people.
Paradoxically, however, moral expectations remain the main motivation vis-à-vis European integration. Indeed, the French for example do not feel a particular desire to "reunite" with the Germans or the Spanish. So to restart, European construction needs a social project sufficiently progressive so that those who implement it can proudly say to their descendants: we have done it. In this sense, it is this whole book which deals with the construction of social Europe, and not only this chapter. Conversely, wanting to build a left-wing (democrats) Europe on the basis of the regulation of capitalism by law as envisaged by Marx in The Capital, and practiced by most European states, and by current European institutions, is illusory and therefore dangerous. Indeed, it 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 the law that Marx had envisaged in The Capital is insufficient. On the other hand, legislative disparities between states are a powerful tool to hinder this regulation, so it would be necessary to proceed to standardization before being able to envisage the construction of social Europe, therefore not doing much for decades. Finally, there is not really any European trade unionism. All this leads in practice to a Europe more right-wing (liberals) than the nation states, therefore to a rejection by the people of Europe who do not find there a system morally up to their aspirations, with in the end the rise of anti-Europeans populists. Put more simply, Europe can only be built by being morally more satisfactory than the nation states it supplants, and that implies bringing, as this book does, an answer which goes beyond simple updating of old recipes.

Let us also specify 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 education as the first foreign language in all the 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 not enough to support a European democracy.

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

The last important point for advancing European integration 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 set up in the case of organizations, and more precisely at the level of operational control described in chapter 11. The "50% other" that we had envisaged at the level of the typology of people involved in control may 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 allows good practices to be circulated between countries while limiting the risk of "it's not good, but it's always been done that way".