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But just as Europe is the most in need of institutional transformation to meet today’s existential challenges, it is also particularly well-equipped to achieve it, thanks to its considerable experience evolving through crisis and balancing solidarity with freedom. The key will be to develop a clear vision of the future, deepen cooperation in key areas and devise a new organizational framework.
Start with vision. Europe needs an explicit strategy for tackling the polycrisis that synchronizes time horizons to improve short-term crisis management (essential to break self-reinforcing crisis mechanisms) and establish shared long-term objectives (essential to maintain momentum).
Smaller, more autonomous and more flexible units should be responsible for implementing this vision, in collaboration with independent actors — often from civil society — that specialize in building consensus, developing long-term strategies, and monitoring their implementation and effects. A culture of decisiveness and accountability is essential.
The vision’s longer-term component should reflect generational ambition. India has a road map for becoming a developed economy by 2047, a century after its independence. China plans to achieve “national rejuvenation” by 2049, the centennial of the People’s Republic. Europe should anchor its own strategy in 2045, 100 years after it started anew following the horrors of World War II. In devising this new vision, Europe should learn from others’ strengths; for example, America’s capacity for strategic thinking, exemplified by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s work researching and developing emerging technologies.
The second imperative is to build robust new frameworks covering three critical elements of European security: finance, defense and social welfare. The new financial architecture must aim to increase investment in Europe in order to boost productivity and support technological innovation in critical sectors. Given its smaller investor base and structural fragmentation, this will require Europe to get better at efficiently allocating capital and mobilizing savings. Completing the capital markets union should be the main task of the new European Commission.
As for defense, the Ukraine war has exposed Europe’s existing architecture as shaky and slow. A new framework — one capable of handling continent-wide procurement, supporting interoperability between security forces and giving Europe a technological edge — is badly needed.
Likewise, the new design for social welfare must be coherent, fiscally viable and responsive to the needs of modern societies. In recent decades, Europe has allowed liabilities and funding gaps to grow in a range of areas — including health care, housing, education and energy — owing to a lack of consensus concerning what the modern welfare state should look like. Given that safeguarding the European way of life is essential to long-term social solidarity, this cannot continue.
The third key imperative for Europe as it faces polycrisis is to devise a new organizational pattern, based on flexibility, adaptability and subsidiarity. Issues need to be tackled at the level where they unfold. Global challenges — such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence and financial stability — demand more structured international cooperation and regulation.
Challenges that should be handled at the European Union level include updating Europe’s economic model, boosting productivity and competitiveness, and handling trade policy. Nation-states, for their part, must foster solidarity and, together with local communities, handle concrete policy implementation. Public-private cooperation is also essential to leverage businesses’ experience, know-how and institutional capacity for adaptation, risk management and crisis response. The new organizational model should look more like a net than a chain, because a net’s strength is the sum of its knots, while a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Europe cannot afford to delay action until after the next shock. If we are to weather the polycrisis, we need strategic reflection, collective leadership and out-of-the-box thinking today, guided by the shared ambition of “Refounding Europe” by 2045.
Thomas Buberl is the chief executive officer of AXA.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024
www.project-syndicate.org
Source link : https://www.manilatimes.net/2024/10/25/opinion/columns/europe-and-the-polycrisis/1990947
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Publish date : 2024-10-24 16:01:00
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