A Civil Society Call in favour of a consolidated EU Competitiveness
The federalist vision that Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman first ignited — and that Altiero Spinelli later revived with passionate urgency through the Ventotene Manifesto — remains, to this day, an unfinished architecture. The rejection of a European Federal Constitution left the continent with monetary union without genuine economic and fiscal union: a single currency sustained by the European Central Bank, yet without the shared sovereign capacity to give it full political legitimacy. This structural incompleteness, long tolerated in times of relative stability, has become acutely dangerous in an era defined by the simultaneous convergence of VUCA and BANI realities — volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity compounded by brittleness, anxiety, non-linearity and incomprehensibility.
We are living through overlapping civilisational crises: ecological breakdown, democratic erosion, the weaponisation of digital platforms, and the rise of two antithetical but equally perilous models of modernity — the authoritarian technological accelerationism championed by an increasingly assertive China, and the ultramercantile, transactional nationalism embodied by the MAGA doctrine as articulated by figures such as Peter Thiel. Neither offers Europe what it most urgently needs: not efficiency alone, not dominance alone, but meaning.
The reports produced by Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta have made the structural case with exemplary rigour. Completing the Single Market in services, capital, energy, defence, and data is not optional — it is the rational precondition for European survival in an era of systemic geopolitical competition. We endorse this agenda fully and without hesitation.
But we refuse to reduce Europe to a transaction. A genuine Single Market, deepened and made whole, is a necessary condition — it is not a sufficient one. Europe’s true and irreplaceable competitive advantage lies not in the speed of its algorithms or the efficiency of its supply chains alone, but in its capacity to cultivate a shared civilisational ethos — one rooted in its humanist inheritance and consciously renewed for the crises of the present century.
We wish to be precise about something that the pioneering work of Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta implicitly demands, but that civil society must articulate with full clarity: the victory Europe seeks in the global competitiveness race must never become an end in itself — a rapacious pursuit of stage trophies, measured by quarterly indicators and geopolitical scorecards alone. Such a victory, if achieved at the cost of ecological coherence and social solidarity, would be indistinguishable from the very models of domination we seek to transcend.
True European competitiveness must inscribe itself simultaneously and coherently within a pluralist vision — one that refuses the binary logic of bloc confrontation — within a multilateralist geo-economics that rebuilds trust in rules-based international cooperation, and within a genuine re-friendship with Nature as the foundational precondition for addressing the general ecological crisis. These are not soft additions to a hard economic programme. They are the conditions under which that programme acquires lasting legitimacy and civilisational depth.
It is here that the thought of the historian Fernand Braudel becomes unexpectedly prescient. Braudel’s concept of the économie-monde — the world-economy as a structured, hierarchical, but organically interconnected spatial totality — offers a far more honest and generative framework than the anachronistic, ultimately self-defeating globalisation of the past three decades. A Braudelian world-economy is not a flat, frictionless global market in which all places are interchangeable. It is a living system of differentiated centres and peripheries, each contributing its specific intelligence to a shared metabolism. Europe’s ambition should be to become the most humanly creative and ecologically responsible node in that system — not its most aggressive predator.
This ambition can only be realised through lifelong learning embraced not as a policy slogan but as a genuinely articulated, deeply internalised commitment of global civil society. Education that accompanies the whole arc of human life — that teaches adults as well as children to navigate complexity, to revise certainties, to remain curious in the face of entropy — is the only force capable of opening the path toward such a world-economy: not the anachronistic, devastating, and conceptually impoverished globalisation that erased difference in the name of efficiency, but a civilisational project in which the diversity of human cultures and natural ecosystems is understood as the very source of collective resilience.
Against the seductive but ultimately perilous drift of what Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti named il pensiero debole — the post-Nietzschean fantasy, now amplified by digital culture and hyper-consumerist ultra-hedonism, that constraint is obsolete and that we may all become sovereign gods of our own experience — we propose a different philosophical grounding. We call it neo-Stoic realism: not the austerity of a joyless soul, but the lucidity of a mind that can face the full weight of intersecting crises without flinching, and can act with responsibility and creativity within genuine limits.
In the age of post-Truth — in which the proliferation of hypotheses has not brought enlightenment but disorientation, in which the relativisation of all reference points has left vast numbers of human beings without firm creative anchors in their inner and spiritual lives — neo-Stoicism is no longer merely a philosophical option. It is a necessary response to generalised entropy and to the crisis of meaning that haunts a world growing simultaneously more interconnected and more spiritually adrift. The inner freedom it offers is not passive resignation but active discernment: the capacity to distinguish what depends on us from what does not, and to act courageously within that distinction.
With Denis de Rougemont, we affirm that the European project is, at its deepest, a person-centred undertaking — rooted in the irreducible dignity of the human being. With the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, we remember that the human being is not sovereign over nature but continuous with it — that our re-friendship with the living world is a condition of survival and authentic self-understanding. And with Edgar Morin, we embrace complexity as a method: the capacity to hold contradiction, to think across disciplinary boundaries, and to resist the intellectual cowardice of premature certainty.
The economic thought that animates this ethos draws on Joseph Stiglitz’s rigorous critique of inequality and on the Economy of Francesco movement — born under the inspiration of Pope Francis — which insists that markets must serve persons and communities, not consume them. Sustainable consumption, in this light, is not deprivation. It is a higher form of freedom: the freedom of those who are no longer enslaved by the compulsions of the market, and who have recovered the capacity to ask what life, in its fullness, is genuinely for.
From the EUSDR International Honorary Chair”Jean Bart” (CIO-SUERD), a platform founded by EUROLINK–House of Europe Foundation, in partnership with the Romanian Academy, we make the following affirmation: the journey toward genuine societal resilience — toward a Europe that is competitive, sovereign, and humane — can begin educationally tomorrow, not in a decade.
It begins with programmes of responsible governance and open government that take seriously both the Draghi–Letta structural agenda and the deeper cultural transformation without which that agenda will lack the civic foundation it requires. It begins with curricula that teach empathy alongside economics, critical thinking alongside digital literacy, and ecological belonging alongside entrepreneurial ambition. It begins with the deliberate generation of a new European ethos — rooted in the post-personalist humanism of Edgar Morin, in care for the living world as French philosopher Emanuele Coccia envisions it, in the federalist civic passion that Denis de Rougemont, Altiero Spinelli, and the founding generation of Europeans bequeathed to us, and in the long civilisational perspective that Fernand Braudel’s world-economy offers as both compass and corrective.
We read ”One Europe, One Market” because we believe in both halves of that title with equal conviction. We advocate for it because the alternative — a Europe that is technologically integrated but culturally hollow, economically rationalised but spiritually adrift, competitive in output but impoverished in meaning — is not a Europe that will endure. The century ahead will be shaped by those who understand that civilisations are not built by markets alone, but by the quality of the human beings that markets are ultimately meant to serve — and by the depth of the inner life that no market can provide, but that every genuine education can help to awaken.
For conformity,
Prof. Assoc. Sever AVRAM
Heaf of CIO-SUERD ”Jean Bart”