[FR] Crisis notebooks

It is difficult for people like me, that is to say those who were the young stokers of the second generation of founders, the generation that shaped Europe between Giscard’s revival and the Maastricht Treaty, to make operational suggestions to the current leaders of the European Union because between them and us, there is no common perception of the shortcomings, aspirations and changes that need to be examined and implemented. We, the workers of the sixth hour, i.e. neither the first nor the eleventh, who populate the Board of Directors of the Jacques Delors Institute, do not quite inhabit the same world as those who govern us, and what we can say and think – and even more so how we can say and think it – is lost somewhere between our leaders, of whom Angela Merkel is undoubtedly the most emblematic figure, between the lake of indifference and the sea of sarcasm.

The era of practicality

The paradigm shift that followed the end of the Cold War partially delegitimised the European project and made those who, like us, took it seriously enough to want to build it on a geographically, institutionally and economically coherent basis, seem outdated. The spirit of intellectual rigour and perseverance in action then deserted those responsible for the project, who were content to manage day-to-day affairs with a curious mixture of intelligence and cynicism, respecting their previous commitments – hence, nevertheless, the creation of the euro and enlargement to the East – the incomprehension of a disoriented public and the daily shock of successive geopolitical and geo-economic trials.

I believe that the main cause of today’s prevailing Euroscepticism and the inability to articulate appropriate European action is that our leaders unjustifiably refuse to provide clear and coherent answers to three basic questions: Who? What? How? Who is eligible to join the club? What should we do together and separately? What internal rules should govern relations between members and enable them to act together effectively? These questions seem abstract, theoretical, even pointless to our current leaders, even though they are lurking in the back of the minds of each and every one of our fellow citizens. In fact, the masters of the game fear, however cautious the answers may be, either that dissenting positions will emerge between them that would paralyse them, or that their countries will lose out in the new mutualisation game, or worse still, that they will have to relinquish some of their power if this clarification exercise is carried through to its conclusion and results in a call for the strengthening of common institutions. They therefore wish to take refuge in what Jacques Delors calls the “practical-practical”, and at irregular intervals offer Europeans solutions that are reputedly empirical to problems that, in their view, should not be addressed in a real-life context, solutions that are managed within the framework of an institutional system that has been made artificially incomprehensible and procedures that are obscure and unnecessarily Byzantine. This raises a simple question: how can we make our donkeys, i.e. our governments, thirsty?

Three temptations

Given the current institutional balance of power within the Union, the relative poverty of a Community portfolio reduced to the exercise of overly limited commercial, monetary and regulatory powers, and finally the legitimate scepticism of a public that state leaders have done everything in their power to disorient over the past 25 years, we must resolutely guard against a temptation that is as seductive as it is illusory: that of rebuilding the project from scratch. This is a magical temptation that takes three forms, which are similar but different and equally utopian: that of short-circuiting, that of the “big choice” and that of rushing headlong into the future.

Let us examine these three forms of temptation that could pave our way to hell. Let us begin with the shortcut. True believers in the European project believe it is possible to overcome the difficulty by mobilising MEPs and/or the children of civil society within the framework of bodies dedicated to the progress of the Union, such as the European Parliament or the Conference on the Future of Europe. Whether we say so or not, this spontaneous grassroots approach aims to circumvent the mistrust of states towards any qualitative progress in the common project. The approach suffers from two major flaws: it imagines that it is possible to move forward against the states without them reacting, which is utopian; it thinks, with unforgivable levity, that the Union is a spontaneous project, a project that could give rise to a true consensus without any prior intellectual or moral effort. To succeed, it would therefore suffice to melt different metals in a suitable crucible for political and social forces that are both heterogeneous and cut off from governments to spontaneously produce something other than incoherent proposals frozen in the doublespeak of Euro-bliss.

Shipwreck and disillusionment are inevitable at the end of this utopian path. Those who doubt this need only reread Éducation sentimentale. If we want to move forward, we must proceed differently. It is impossible to ignore the states. That is where the power lies, increasingly less respected and increasingly paralysed, certainly, but totally unavoidable. Without a shared outline of a plan – and that is not a foregone conclusion – between France and Germany, we would have to give up all hope of success. These political and societal debates, which are not being fruitfully pursued by the Franco-German duo, can only result in a chaos of good intentions. As Riccardo Perissich of the proposed conference so aptly puts it, ‘an instrument designed to save Europe could very well destroy it.’ Let us renounce this unrealistic vision of the future.

The second temptation is the comfortably Manichean one of the big choice. It feeds the eternal and clarifying discourse of ‘the crossroads’. The time has come to choose between two paths, two options: the Europe of solidarity, joint action, financial transfers and political choices versus the Europe of freedom, trade and legal standards. ‘Against’ is not the right word, however. These two Europes are not opposed, they overlap. It is a choice between Europe and Europe plus, the very choice that President Macron proposes in his interview with the FT, or, to be more precise, proposes to Northern Europe in the supposed name of Southern Europe. This Kantian presentation – ‘either/or’ – of the direction to take presents a legitimate choice: that of pedagogical clarity, intellectual rigour, moral obviousness and political simplicity. I would be ill-advised to criticise it, as it is the one that I, along with many others, have been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to bring to the debate for thirty years.

And yet, today I wonder, even more than before, about the appropriateness of this analytical framework. And this for one simple reason: we are in a state of emergency and we cannot wait for minds to mature before taking action. But the undertaking cannot succeed if they are not ready. Neither the leaders, nor public opinion, nor Northern Europeans, nor even, probably, a large part of Southern Europeans are politically, intellectually or morally ready for a European night of 4 August. Proposing it may be personally gratifying for a French head of state standing up to history, but in the current state of the tribes, after twenty-five years of intellectual and political decay, attempting to force Europeans into a binary, radical, abrupt and, moreover, aggressively moralising, is to run the risk of arousing the irritation of some and the mistrust of others, of encouraging evasive and dodgy strategies everywhere, and of increasing the risks of misunderstanding, tension and even disengagement. For too long, the European debate has been confined to a laboriously organised empiricism, only to be asked, without delay or preconditions, to soar towards the ethereal blue sky of grand principles. All or nothing will condemn us to very little.

The third temptation, the legitimate offspring of the second, is that of hubris, of a clean slate. Since the pandemic is disrupting everything, wreaking havoc on the economy, challenging our customs, activities and lifestyles, undermining the foundations of globalisation, the market economy, business life and social relations, and disrupting everything on which the European Union was built, we cannot afford to be small players. The Union must rise to the challenge and respond to the general upheaval with quasi-revolutionary activism on all fronts. In concrete terms, this would involve deconstructing liberal Europe, breaking the value chains of global production through public intervention, forcing companies to go green, thereby promoting the emergence of an alternative model and, as the President of the Republic would say, helping the peoples of Europe to “reinvent themselves”. In short, it would be a question of making the European Union the main agent, or at least the conductor, of a change in civilisation.

This headlong rush, even if it is based on all the fantasies spawned by the pandemic, lockdown and economic collapse, would nonetheless lead the European institutions, and first and foremost the Commission, to betray their mission, which is to ensure the preservation, proper functioning and growth of an open and regulated social market economy within the Union. This betrayal would be unacceptable for three reasons: firstly, the Union would be failing in its vocation by turning its back on its obligations as laid down in the Treaties and the provisions derived from them; it would call into question a system that has not failed in any way and whose balance has only been affected by the indirect effects – lockdown – of a health crisis that it played no part in causing; finally, the Union would not be supported in its disruptive intentions by any prospect of a credible alternative model.

Just because the European and global economies have been seriously affected and disrupted in recent weeks by a major health crisis does not mean that the organised combination of free enterprise and a high level of social protection in an open and regulated economy should be considered an obsolete or illegitimate priority. Illness is not an ordeal, a judgement of God that makes the victim guilty. Riccardo Perissich is right to quote Susan Sontag: “Nothing is more punitive than giving meaning to an illness, that meaning being invariably moralising. ” If we leave the realm of morality and move on to that of analysis, there is no more reason to think that the great revolutionary night has arrived and that our economic system, however badly shaken it may be, is about to cease to be part of a global system characterised by the cultural and technological unification of the planet, the speed and simplicity of transmission, the fragmentation and multi-localisation of value chains, and the exploitation by economic agents of comparative advantages and their effects on costs and prices.

Three guidelines

The formulation of what could be an action plan for the European Union for the coming months and years clearly exceeds the scope of this reflection and, in any case, the competence of its author. However, it follows from the preceding considerations, which are disenchanted but not desperate, that this action should be part of a framework organised around three guiding principles:

1. The European Union must link its image to a priority objective: the economic recovery of a Europe devastated by the pandemic. Back to basics. This is the application of the USM (single message) principle. The Union must avoid spreading its concern too thinly and scattering its generosity. Let us say that if it intends to remain faithful to the spirit of Jean Monnet, it must focus on organising effective solidarity “based on its traditional competences and using the considerable budgetary, legal and, above all, monetary resources that successive treaties have endowed it with. To be heard and understood, this effort to focus can only be directed towards a single objective, a “recovery” of economies that is considered a political and media priority.

The ecological imperative should certainly not be ignored, but it must not distract us from the immediate priority, which is necessarily perceived as such: the return to prosperity of European and global economies. Let us stay the course on implementing a strategy of gradually increasing the price of carbon, combined with the introduction of a mechanism to adjust this price at the EU’s borders. Let us multiply incentives of all kinds to green investments, but let us guard against repressive and moralising attitudes in the distribution of lifelines. An economist’s Hippocratic oath should prohibit us from making the provision of life-saving care conditional on the patient’s compliance with conditions that place excessive constraints on an already severely tested productive sector.

The European Union, and within it the Commission in particular, should take on a role that no one has yet fully played: that of reducing uncertainty. The first obstacle to the orderly mobilisation of Europeans is their anxiety about the future. Europe is struggling and making little progress because it is walking in darkness. Europeans need to understand what lies ahead in order to get moving. As Jacques Delors often says, we need to put the church, i.e. the Commission, back in the middle of the village and make Brussels once again the respected and influential capital of European diagnosis and prognosis. In particular, it should answer three questions: how can we distinguish between the economic shock and the structural decline in the problems affecting us? How should the European Union and the major geopolitical blocs of the world see their relations evolve and prioritise their respective strengths? How will the 27 Member States emerge from this ordeal and assess their strengths, weaknesses and, therefore, their respective priorities within the Union? There is no power without knowledge, nor lease without an inventory. It is up to the European Commission to once again become the mirror in which the European Union should learn to recognise itself in order to find its way back.
1. The European Union’s main mission, and the only one that is truly legitimate in the eyes of European populations who have never had their heads so close to the noose, is to prevent the systemic risk that could sweep away the euro, its zone and, little by little, the entire European Union, due to the uncontrolled debt of certain states. In the eyes of many, this risk is called Italy. It has been serious for a long time, but it has become acute as a result of the health crisis and the undermining of all the economic and financial balances in Europe and the world.

How can it be defused? We must finally agree that, in these times of disenchantment, the traditional idealism of pro-European circles can only be of limited effectiveness in justifying action that goes beyond the greedy and chaotic gesticulation of tired procedures. In order to rise, even if only empirically, to the level required by the gravity of the situation created by the pandemic, Europeans must move from the age of goodwill to the age of willpower. They must base their actions on an awareness of the seriousness of the situation and the scale of the risks involved. The fear of ultimate collapse is now undoubtedly the only shared collective emotion that can rouse our leaders from their slumber of inertia and the routine of their petty quarrels. Not staged, artificial and exaggerated fear, but real, serious and thoughtful fear, the fear of seeing the economy of the old continent collapse permanently and the eurozone disintegrate morally and politically under the effect of a shock that is too brutal and too massive this time to be manageable, such as, for example, Italy’s financial default leading to the economic, social and political collapse of the zone’s third largest economy. Fear has already served as a good advisor, because by stimulating the zeal of the states, it has led them to modify the rules of the stability pact, to let the ECB push its commitment further than ever before, ‘whatever it takes’, alongside states condemned to a formidable and massive increase in debt, and finally to mobilise, even if in a quarrelsome improvisation, the various instruments and procedures that the Union has gradually equipped itself with to deal with the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis.We must now go further and rethink, not theoretically but practically, the new requirements of what could be called preventive solidarity. The measures implemented so far have almost all consisted of alleviating the debt burdens of Member States. In short, they consist of helping over-indebted states to take on even more debt. There are better ways forward. The Commission, in conjunction with the ECB and the financial administrations of the major states, must put forward realistic and ambitious responses: how can we strike a balance between temporary emergency measures and medium- and long-term restructuring of our economies? How can solidarity be exercised other than through a continuous increase in the debt of indebted states? In what proportions and according to what modalities should joint actions benefit public administrations and/or the productive sector? Between which institutions – Community and national, monetary and budgetary – should responsibilities be shared in the exercise of this new solidarity? And, as a common factor, how can we demonstrate that the Union does not intend to offer Europeans a new version of The Grasshopper and the Ant, but rather ‘one for all and all for one’, a variant of The Three Musketeers, expanded to 27?Everyone has their own ideas, big or small, about the potential answers to all these questions, but the essential thing is not the answers themselves, but the identity of the person giving them. The key is for the Commission to use a realistic and well-structured policy document as a basis for obtaining a mandate from the European Council to draw up a white paper on the recovery and transformation of the European economy before the end of the year. The European Union is now the only place where a comprehensible future for the peoples of Europe can be developed and proposed. The periphery will only escape fragmentation if the centre succeeds in being ambitious, precise, realistic and consistent.‘There is no science except that of the particular; the universal is the infinity of our inattention.’ Bachelard’s formula applies to politics as much as it does to science. It is through the particular that we reach the universal. It is empiricism that allows us to transcend empiricism. As in 1950, it will be realism that will once again open the way to the ideal, and fear that will restore our hope.