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The project of a united European whole, despite all its shortcomings and contradictions, is the best thing that the nations of Europe have invented in their centuries-old history, ' says Sami Naïr in this essay on the European Union. But he shows, with proverbial clarity, how the initial objective has been trapped in an economic strategy based essentially on 'free and undistorted' competition, excluding any dimension of common public policies. He shows that the non-existence of social Europe was not a regrettable drift, but an orientation inherent to the neoliberal paradigm imposed at the end of the 1980s, and supported by conservative and social-democratic parties, in the name of a vacillating 'general European interest.' Naïr reveals that it was the French socialists who, under the mandates of François Mitterrand (1981-1995), opened the doors to this neoliberal path, allying themselves with the European conservatives. This choice is the structural weakness of the European left. Although the European Union has achieved remarkable successes - a single currency, a large market, free movement of citizens, etc. - inequalities between nations within the single market, deindustrialization or the annihilation of national public services are causing deep unrest and generating the rise of anti-European scepticism. There is a direct relationship between neoliberalism and neopopulism. The time has come, argues the author, to initiate mutualized public policies between States to get out of this quagmire. And to give Europe the global role it deserves: to overcome its impotence in the face of the large blocs (the US, China), to choose the ecological transition, to strengthen its solidarity with Ukraine and to face the challenges in Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. In this essential essay, Sami Naïr addresses all these problems and proposes paths to the sovereign Europe we need.
