Yes: it is time to reach for the speech Theodore Sorensen wrote for Kennedy's inauguration (Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country). Because sixty years on, that call needs rewriting and addressing to every European citizen, one by one.
In the European debate you hear, more and more often, opinions that have settled into permanent complaint: that we are the world champions of red tape; that we hold the global lead in lukewarmness about what is happening right under our noses; that we are an "obsolete experiment"; that we understand nothing but regulation and have zero capacity to innovate. In short, that everyone is overtaking us on the inside.
Without dismantling those arguments — most of them understandable, and all of them with a clear answer, as we shall see shortly — the point worth insisting on is this: we are losing sight of the fact that the European project is unique in the history of humanity.
The project of a society that chose to swap bayonets for violin bows and that built, on the ashes of near-total destruction, a model of shared prosperity still without equal today: in culture and education, in basic science, in the quality of its institutions, in social cohesion. Unquestionably in sport, too. And in economic indicators (yes, economic: the sum of our continent's economies — nominal GDP — is still on a par with that of the United States and still far above China's).
A model that also appears to care about the future of the planet and the people on it. On paper, at least.
And yet it seems plain that if we carry on doing the same thing, in a world where we have always been a minority, the seams of this model will eventually give way.
Something will have to be done. Do something!, as Mario Draghi put it recently. Just do something. And the man has a point: he has always been willing to take a position, and he has put forward his own set of measures (the unanswerable Draghi report which, together with the Letta report, amounts to a genuine roadmap for a prosperous Europe).
Europe's weakness is not one of talent or of values; it is one of decision. We are still settled into the comfortable debate about who else is responsible. Comfortable and sterile, because it dodges the key question: are we clear about what Europe has to do — and about what we are prepared to change so that it can?
The answer is less vague than it looks. If Europe wants to count in a world of continental powers, it has to concentrate on four clear priorities.
1. Strategic autonomy
Here the level of agreement is beyond question: it is close to unanimous. The idea has nothing to do with autarky or with retreat, quite the opposite: it means exploring in order to generate value of our own. It means not depending critically on third parties for energy, defence, key technologies, data, digital infrastructure or essential supply chains. Strategic autonomy is being able to decide without fear of reprisal. It is practical sovereignty in an interdependent world. The problem is that Europe has less autonomy every year, because it cannot generate as much value of its own as the United States or China. Which is to say: it is innovating less and less. The big innovations come from outside.
Some of us knew a China we thought incapable of doing what it has done in barely two decades: going from a country that copied in order to compete on cost to one that leads in close to 70% of emerging technologies in order to compete on value. It was not magic. It was a sequence of far-reaching decisions: innovating for real, which is to say focusing on the problem and not on the solutions, and killing ideas productively. Taking the risk out before scaling. And building instruments of patient capital and decision-making without crossed vetoes, with strategic direction.
One point deserves a pause here: capital markets. Europe has something others envy, and that is savings. The paradox is that those savings, yours and mine, are mostly funding American innovation, through financial products sold to us round the corner from home. They fund technologies we are now being pushed to buy more of, feeding the great American unicorns, the giants that lead in deep tech. The reason? There is no genuinely single European capital market.
A European capital market is a necessary condition, though not the only one, for delivering on that broad agreement about strategic autonomy. It is also a chance to use a powerful weapon, our savings, to make ourselves count against giants such as Wall Street. Why else do you suppose American administrations (not only Trump's, though his now says so openly) take such an interest in keeping Europe fragmented?
Some European countries have every incentive not to create a single capital market. Those whose pension money sits in particular financial markets, for instance. States that play the veto game for a Pyrrhic win, blocking what could be built together thanks to a pernicious rule of unanimity in decision-making.
2. Cutting red tape
Again, there is no doubt that agreement can be reached here. Europe has too often confused regulation with control, and control with effectiveness. The result is a regulatory ecosystem that penalises speed, size and risk: precisely the opposite of what innovation and global competition demand. Simplifying does not mean leaving people unprotected. It means releasing productive energy, talent and capital now trapped in redundant procedures.
3. Competitiveness at global scale (economic and industrial)
This one may draw a little more argument, but the agreement is still overwhelming. Europe needs the flagships it does not have today — unicorns, companies able to lead high-value sectors — and above all it needs its firms to grow. The world does not compete on good ideas; it competes on systems able to scale them. Without companies of the right size there is no massive investment, no power to set standards and no economic weight in geopolitics.
4. Tax
The tax argument then tends to turn up as an alibi. Should we pay less tax? No. We should pay it better. Better means, for example, taxes that reward company size, that push small and medium-sized firms to grow, that back R&D investment in universities and in public and private research centres, that encourage problem-based innovation, and that are harmonised enough to stop a race to the bottom between member states.
Instead we lose ourselves in the sustainability debate. While GDP per capita grows steadily, the talk of what cannot be sustained is fairly alarmist. Pensions and healthcare — each of them around 15% of GDP — are, to a large extent, manageable. Reformable, if you will allow me, without great upheaval.
There is a manufactured and growing argument around all this. An argument of the gut, not of reason. Universities all over the world could bring clarity to it. The problem is the noise that drowns them out.
You will have noticed that I have discovered nothing so far. Or rather, nothing that has not been said already (again: it is worth going back to the Draghi and Letta reports). But everything, absolutely everything, leads to one prior decision, uncomfortable and urgent: abolishing unanimity in European decision-making.
As long as a single capital can veto the common advance, Europe will go on being strong on diagnosis and weak on action. Unanimity is not a democratic principle; it is a blocking mechanism. In a club of twenty-seven it amounts to permanent paralysis. Without a real qualified majority there is no effective foreign policy, no common defence, no industrial policy and no integrated capital market.
Can unanimity be abolished? It always can. Politics is the art of the possible when the will is there. And if some do not want to? Then it has to be said without euphemism: Europe cannot be held hostage by those who do not believe in it.
Josep Borrell has spoken recently about the pressing need to break with unanimity in EU decision-making, while noting that abolishing unanimity requires unanimity, and concluding on the spot that it looks like mission impossible.
And yet we have a recent example in Brexit, where a member state stopped being one overnight. If unanimity is the problem, could the European project not be refounded by those willing to take the step, accepting that some will leave along the way? Brexit was not the end of Europe; it was proof that the Union can survive whoever decides not to share its destiny. The same formula can serve us for the complementary set.
At this point it is worth going back to the opening question: what is in our hands, individually, as European citizens? Far more than we think. It is enough to give up four individual positions:
- First, by giving up any political option that pulls us away from Europeanism. Not out of dogma, but out of realism: outside Europe we are irrelevant; inside it, we are a power held in common. Backing only those political options that look for the basic agreements rather than for confrontation of the gut is an individual decision. As is arguing for that position out loud. As we have seen, there are four broad agreements on which everything can be built.
Kennedy appealed to a generation ready to take on responsibility. It does not look as though many listened. Europe needs that same appeal today, without the heroics and with some urgency. Europe's future is not decided in Brussels; it is decided in our own everyday decisions: political, economic and cultural.
The keys to Europe, one citizen at a time
- Back clearly pro-European positions that look for the four basic agreements
- Give up polarisation
- Give up our own confirmation biases
"Do something" (Mario Draghi)
Joaquín Romero Roldán is an Independent Board Advisor and a member of the IC-A, the Spanish institute of directors.