Why Europe Matters?

The documentary Why Europe Matters, produced by Nathalie Tocci and Anu Bradford, strikes, in my view, the right balance between euro-pessimism and euro-optimism. They explain their position further in an article in The Guardian. In the documentary, several intellectuals and political leaders express their views on how the European Union should leverage its institutional and economic resources to preserve and improve its model in the current geopolitical context.

For example, Adam Tooze says that we should make the most of the fact that “the region in the world where more people want to live is Europe.” Peace, freedom, the rule of law and shared prosperity are what distinguish Europe and what should be preserved.

But preserving and improving this model requires decisions to be taken in response to the current geopolitical situation, to ensure that we do not become victims of the aggressive strategies of other blocs. The main decision is to further integrate the European economy and pool resources, especially in those technologies that will make Europe less dependent on an increasingly unreliable United States or on autocratic China. The European federalists understand this and are promoting an important manifesto along these lines.

Criticising the decisions of European policymakers, including those in Brussels, is entirely compatible with—and indeed complementary to—being pro-European. European integration is a necessary, but unfortunately not sufficient, condition for preserving our cohesive model and making it better.

The EU is the main obstacle to the ambitions of Trump, Putin and the oligarchs who support them. They have allies in Europe. Thanks to Brexit's failure, these allies no longer openly advocate dismantling the EU, but they promote sovereignist policies that would, de facto, undermine and ultimately destroy it.

It has been shown that, when Europe wants to act in an ambitious manner, it can: COVID-19 vaccines, the NextGenerationEU funds, support for Ukraine, and the freezing of funds for Poland and Hungary to put pressure on their governments and public opinion. We must now show that we can build a frontier economy capable of defending ourselves, rather than merely an economy that catches up with what others invent.

Jean Tirole and Karine Van der Straeten provide, in their recent book, "Économie du désordre mondial" (so far available only in French), what is, in my view, the best explanation yet of why Europe must pay serious attention to what Mario Draghi argues in his report about closing the technological gap with China and the United States.

Europe is not condemned to decline, they argue, but it is condemned to make difficult choices. We must shift from a catch-up model based on imitating those at the technological frontier to one in which we position ourselves at that frontier in the technologies that are key to sustaining our economic and social model.

If Europe is to defend its values—the rule of law, freedom and equality—in a world where brutal and transactional forces are on the rise, it must also defend itself by investing, in an integrated and prioritised manner, in the technologies that can prevent us from becoming subject to those forces. We will not counter blackmail from Trump or China by making French handbags or Swedish furniture, they argue, but rather by developing cutting-edge technologies and defensive capabilities.

Joint investment in cutting-edge innovation will directly benefit some regions more than others. An integrated and stronger budget will therefore also be required to compensate the regions that do not benefit directly from these investments.