Europe Is Indispensable and Unbearable
Why nobody wants to leave and nobody is happy
Lire en français →Europe Is Indispensable and Unbearable
By Claire Beaumont, with the voices of the Assembly
I asked the question one February evening, around the large table, to eleven people who agree on almost nothing. A Chicago economist, a Marxist from Paris 8, a colonel from intelligence, an Austrian cypherpunk, a logistics boss from Seine-Saint-Denis, a former commodities trader, a Conseil d’Etat jurist, an investigative journalist, an AI engineer, a kid from Villeurbanne, and an old sage who only asks questions. The question was simple: should we stay in the European Union?
Unanimous answer. Yes.
Then I asked the second question: are you satisfied with the Europe that exists?
Unanimous answer. No.
This paradoxical unanimity may be the only political truth of our time. Europe is the only project to which everyone subscribes and which nobody can stand. A marriage in which neither spouse asks for divorce, but neither utters the word love.
Leonie Marchand — twenty-four, Villeurbanne, sociology degree she calls useless — murmured something that evening that hasn’t left my head: “A marriage of convenience without a prenup.” That’s exactly it. We’re married. We don’t even know under what regime.
The No that was swallowed
On May 29, 2005, 54.67% of the French vote No to the European Constitutional Treaty. Not 50.3. Not a handful of undecided voters tipping one rainy evening. Fifteen million people say No. Clearly. Decisively. With the highest referendum turnout since Maastricht.
Two years later, Nicolas Sarkozy has the Lisbon Treaty adopted by parliamentary vote — a treaty that incorporates the essential substance of the rejected text. Valery Giscard d’Estaing, author of the Constitutional Treaty, will admit it himself: the institutional proposals are “the same, simply reordered within the text.” The people spoke. Parliament corrected them.
If you’re looking for the precise date when millions of French citizens concluded that the European Union was something done without them and against them — there it is. Not before. Not after. On May 29, 2005, at noon, Europe was a promise. On December 13, 2007, when Sarkozy signs in Lisbon, it became a fait accompli.
And ever since, every time a European official says the word “democracy,” somewhere in France, someone snickers.
You can discuss the content of the treaty. You can explain that the No was confused, heterogeneous, contradictory — it was. You can point out that Jean-Pierre Chevenement’s No had nothing to do with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s. All of that is true. And all of it is beside the point. Because the question was not the content. The question was: when the people say No, does it count? The answer was: No. And that answer, twenty years later, remains a poison in the veins of the European project.
The numbers are right. The people are too.
Gabriel Bastiat — our Chicago economist, the one who cites Friedman page by page and whom Lucie Grimal watches the way you’d watch a Jehovah’s Witness — always puts the same figures on the table. With the same cold precision.
The single market generates between 8 and 9% of French GDP. Roughly 230 billion euros per year, according to the work of Thierry Mayer at Sciences Po. That’s more than the budgets of Education, Defense, and Justice combined. Leaving the single market is the economic equivalent of amputating a leg to run faster.
Gabriel is right. The numbers are there. The single market works.
But Leonie always raises the same question from her corner of the table, with the politeness of an unpinned grenade: “Your 230 billion — where do they go? Into whose pocket?”
And Lucie Grimal answers with figures Gabriel doesn’t contest — because you don’t contest facts, you contest causality. Since Maastricht, the share of wages in eurozone GDP has fallen from 66% to 58%. Eight points. In exact mirror, the share of profits has risen. For thirty years, the pie grew larger. The slices got smaller — not all of them, not the same ones.
Europe has enriched France. Europe has not enriched the French equally. And there, in that gap between the aggregate statistic and the payslip, lodges all the anger that sends people to the extremes.
Leonie’s mother worked at La Poste. Her office closed in 2010 — European postal liberalization directive. The directive was probably necessary. The severance was probably legal. And the anger is probably intact. Because nobody came to Villeurbanne to explain why. Because the termination letter didn’t have a European flag in the header — it had a La Poste logo. The anger drowned in silence. The silence of those nobody ever talks to.
Europe is indispensable because Gabriel’s numbers are true. Unbearable because Leonie’s silence is true too.
The machine without a driver
Satoshi Durand — our cypherpunk, the one who reads Hayek in code and Rothbard on the metro — dropped a figure during the debate that silenced the table. 4.9 trillion euros. That’s the amount of quantitative easing by the ECB between 2015 and 2023. Twice France’s annual GDP. Created from nothing. Without a parliamentary vote. By a governing council that nobody in France could name if asked on the street.
Where did that money go? Raphael Noir — our investigative journalist, the one who believes nobody and checks everything — nuanced the point. The QE was responding to a price stability mandate violated on the downside. Inflation was below target for years. The ECB wasn’t doing dark magic — it was doing its job.
But both are right simultaneously, and that’s where it gets vertiginous. The QE was technically justified. And it did, in practice, inflate the prices of real estate and financial assets held by the richest 10%. Raphael is right about the mechanism. Satoshi is right about the result. And 4.9 trillion euros’ worth of decisions made without a single voter having their say — whether the outcome was good or bad — that poses a democratic problem no amount of technical expertise resolves.
Greece learned the hard way. The Greek people voted Oxi — No — at 61% in 2015. Monday morning, the ECB cut liquidity. Lucie Grimal said it with her characteristic cold precision: “A people votes, a central bank decides. There’s your sovereignty exercised in common.” Augustin Moreau, our ordoliberal jurist, distinguishes between “exercising in common” and “losing all leverage.” The distinction is legally exact. Materially, for a Greek retiree whose pension was cut by 40%, it’s inaudible.
Neither mystique nor sword
Colonel Pierre Dumas, thirty years in intelligence, three continents, a library of Peguy and Burke in his office, spoke two sentences worth an entire treatise on political science: “Europe began as a mystique — peace, reconciliation. It degenerated into bureaucracy. But a mystique without a sword is just a pious wish. And right now, Europe has neither mystique nor sword.”
Neither mystique nor sword. Europe has 100,000 pages of legislation and zero sentences you could quote from memory. It has a “Strategic Compass” that plans for a force of 5,000 troops — when France alone was deploying 5,100 in the Sahel. Alone. With already insufficient means. The collective ambition of twenty-seven armed nations is less than what one country was already doing badly.
In February 2022, when Russia invades Ukraine, Europe discovers within forty-eight hours that it has no army, no integrated intelligence, no autonomous projection capability. It’s Washington providing 80% of satellite intelligence. Seventy years of European construction, and it’s an American president who decides whether Europe can see what’s happening at its own border.
But Socrate — our faceless questioner, the one who never takes a position and destroys all certainties — shattered Dumas’s melancholy consensus by posing a devastating question: “Does France itself still have a narrative? The Republic, laicite, universalism — do these words still bring tears to anyone’s eyes in Villeurbanne, in Bobigny, in Lens? If the national narrative is in crisis, is it fair to blame Europe for not having manufactured a supranational one?”
Long silence around the table. Leonie finally answered. Not with theory. With the concrete. “Even without a narrative, at the national level, I know who to yell at. The mayor, the prefect, the president — I have an address. Brussels, what do I have?”
That, perhaps, is the crux of everything. Europe has no address. No face. No window where you can go and shout. When things work, nobody thanks Brussels. When things break, everyone knows whom to blame — Brussels again, but this time they’ve got the wrong door, and behind the door there’s nobody.
The convergence that should worry us
Something unexpected happened around the table. Lucie Grimal, analytical Marxist. Satoshi Durand, Austrian libertarian. Leonie Marchand, voice of the invisible. Three people who, on almost everything else, oppose each other ferociously. Lucie wants to redistribute. Satoshi wants to abolish the state. Leonie wants to be heard. And yet, on one precise point, the three converge: the European architecture protects competition with more vigor than it protects workers.
The wage share from 66 to 58%. Tax competition that has driven the corporate tax rate across the EU from 35% in 1995 to 21.3% in 2023. Forty percent of multinational profits shifted to tax havens, several of which sit inside the EU — Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands — according to the work of Gabriel Zucman. Capital moves freely. Labor remains constrained by language, culture, unrecognized degrees. Freedom of movement is not symmetrical. It never has been.
Gabriel Bastiat, to his credit, didn’t contest the figures. He contested the causality. A global trend, not just a European one. Technology, not treaties. Raphael Noir then got him to concede a point on Ireland: the much-vaunted GDP per capita is inflated by the profits of American multinationals. The Irish Central Statistics Office itself invented an alternative indicator — the GNI* — because its own GDP had become an accounting fiction.
When three theoretical frameworks as incompatible as these converge on an observation, you should listen. Not because they’re necessarily right about the causes — a Marxist, a libertarian, and a sociologist don’t, by definition, share the same theory of causation. But because the data is brutal enough to pass through every ideological filter and emerge intact on the other side.
Flow and stock
Seraphine Delacroix — our grande dame of international trade, six languages, four continents, three heads of state in her contacts — said something that evening I want carved in marble because it’s the most intelligent sentence I’ve heard about Europe in ten years.
“Sovereignty is not a stock. It’s a flow.”
You don’t lose it the way you lose a wallet. You deploy it or you waste it. When the EU negotiates CETA with Canada, it secures 143 protected designations of origin, including 42 French ones. Roquefort, Comte, Champagne. France alone, facing Ottawa, would have obtained none of that. When Aminata Kouyate opens a logistics route Paris-Barcelona-Dakar, the single market saves her three weeks of paperwork compared to a route outside the EU. Three weeks. For a company running on 4% margins, that’s the difference between survival and bankruptcy.
But the same Aminata reminds us that the Union which facilitates her trucks starves the banlieues where her employees live. The Stability Pact caps the deficit. Public investment stagnates. In Seine-Saint-Denis, there’s one GP for every 1,600 residents. In the 7th arrondissement of Paris: one for 750. And Aminata asks the question that lands like a punch: “Sovereignty isn’t a flag. It’s the capacity to act. And for my 200 employees, the capacity to act means a Europe that invests instead of counting.”
What should be done (and why it probably won’t be)
The Assembly produced concrete proposals. Not wishes. Mechanisms.
Reform the Stability Pact by excluding public investment from the deficit calculation — a budgetary “golden rule” capped at 1.5% of GDP. This is what the Draghi report already called for in 2024. It’s what the most elementary economic logic demands: when you build a school, it’s not an expenditure, it’s an asset.
Establish a European social floor: minimum wage at 60% of national median salary, effective corporate tax rate of at least 25%. Not to punish Ireland. To stop the race to the bottom that’s corroding the social contract in every member state.
Create a European advanced research agency — what Maxime Vauban calls a “European DARPA” — at 10 billion per year. Because, as Socrate reminds us with his customary cruelty, Europe regulates technologies it doesn’t produce. A traffic cop who directs cars but doesn’t own one isn’t sovereign. He’s decorative.
Build a genuine autonomous defense capability, with a binding floor of 2.5% of GDP and a general staff with real operational authority. Because sovereignty, at the end of the day, is the capacity to defend yourself. And nobody, to this day, is ready to die for Europe. As long as that sentence remains true, Europe will remain unfinished.
These proposals are serious. They’re costed. They’re necessary. And they have roughly zero chance of being implemented in the next five years. Not because they’re bad. Because Europe runs on consensus, and the consensus of twenty-seven nations with diverging interests systematically produces the average — which is to say, mediocrity.
Is love necessary?
Socrate asked the final question of the debate. The one nobody could answer. The one I still can’t answer.
“If the EU is indispensable but unsatisfying, does that make it a marriage of convenience missing love — and if so, is love a necessary condition of a political union, or is it enough that the accounts are fair?”
Gabriel Bastiat, for the first time that evening, had no empirical answer.
I don’t know if love is necessary. I know its absence shows. It shows in the turnout for European elections — 50% in 2024, the highest in twenty years, and we called it a success. It shows in the blank stare when you ask someone what it means to “be European” and they answer “Erasmus” for lack of anything better. It shows in the fact that twenty years after the No of 2005, nobody has bothered to ask the question again.
Europe has no narrative. It has a project. And a project has never made anyone cry.
But here’s what I also know: you don’t leave a marriage that keeps you alive, even when it’s stopped making you dream. You stay. You endure. You negotiate the terms. And perhaps, if you’re lucid and brave, you renegotiate the contract.
Europe is indispensable and unbearable. The only question that remains — the only one that ever mattered — is whether we’ll have the intelligence to make something of it, or whether we’ll keep living in a marriage of convenience whose clauses nobody has ever read.