GEAB Special file
The editorial GEAB team decided to share, exceptionally, with its readers an excerpt of the as yet unpublished document entitled “Community or Empire”; a book written by Franck Biancheri in 1992. This excerpt evokes the importance for the EU’s endowing with a forecasting capacity to adapt its governance to the challenges of its reopening to the world; a most needed move after thirty years of laboratory development, sheltered between the “Soviet Iron Curtain and the American Umbrella”.
[…] It is with much bitterness that we, heirs of Franck Biancheri, are presenting to you a report whose recommendations, if they had been applied, would have avoided many a dark hour. Find below an excerpt from the book:
“The inefficiency of the community action derives from two main causes: the absence of a capability to predict the future and the inadequacy of existing operational tools. The ability to predict is an essential component of any successful action, both at the individual and at the collective levels. The old saying “To govern is to foresee and not foreseeing is running toward ruin”[1], illustrates this very well. And above all, to govern is to foresee problems. Some problems have no practical solutions, except one: to prevent them from happening. Hence, the importance of anticipating them well in advance.
However, the European Community has no prediction capability. Neither the Commission nor the Member States are in a position to anticipate any major event. With the capacity to predict, or anticipate[2], one must understand and foresee problems relating to the implementation of a policy or action and design measures to avoid them. Indeed, all forecasts disconnected from any means of action are as useful as those of Nostradamus; which is to say, solely for selling tabloids.
Login
The corona crisis has been the trigger for the EU to finally start issuing common bonds. It was a modest and hard-won step forward. In the midst of the flames, [...]
A long time ago, in 1998, Franck Biancheri, our regretfully departed director of studies, signed an anticipatory article entitled: « 2009, when Europe ends up in the hands of the grandsons [...]
Since its creation, the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin has been designed among other things to inform European public opinion and decision makers about the fact that the global geopolitical reconfiguration [...]
This anticipation is not very original but it must nevertheless be faced with all the lucidity required. It is hardly a hypothesis, but rather a certainty: the allied European far [...]
The financial crisis followed by the debt crisis has led to a substantial change in the mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) and to more political provisions. The ECB [...]
There is a lot about epilogues in this issue! In the case of the EU (a phase in the construction of Europe which came into being on 7 February 1992 [...]
There’s no need to wait for the results of the election to anticipate some of the major features of the new Europe that will be established after June 2019. Certainly, [...]
The prospects for social reorganisation that can be imagined from the current health crisis are enormous. We have, therefore, decided to focus on Europe, about which we are much more [...]
Comments