Introduction
A sense of historical and political exhaustion haunts Europe. After five centuries of providing the solutions for the world, Europe seems incapable of solving its own problems. There pervades a feeling that there are no alternatives to the current critical state of affairs, that the fabric of social cohesion and post-WWII social contract that linked gains in productivity to gains in salaries and social protection is gone forever, and that the resulting increase in social inequality, rather than delivering higher economic growth, is indeed plunging Europe into stagnation. European social cohesion is degenerating before our eyes, sliding into European civil war by some Fatum (overpowering necessity) from which Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) saw modern European reason being liberated.

This is all the more puzzling if we consider that at least some of these seemingly intractable problems are somewhat similar to problems that nonEuropean countries have confronted in recent years with some measure of success. More puzzling yet is that these countries, in addressing their problems, have drawn on European ideas and experiences. But they have reinterpreted them in new ways, by twisting and reconfiguring some of their components and mixing them with other components derived from non-European sources, while engaging in a kind of intellectual and institutional bricolage focused on concrete results rather than on orthodox models and dogmas.

The sense of exhaustion is compounded with a sense of miniaturization. Europe seems to be shrinking, while the non-European world seems to be expanding. New actors have emerged on the global scene, such as China, post-Soviet Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa,3 while Europe appears less and less relevant. Moreover, in a rather paradoxical way, as the European Union (EU) expanded the distinctiveness of Europe’s presence and profile in world affairs became diluted. When the Western European countries were less dependent on Brussels’s directives and were viewed as independent actors, they projected a vision of Europe as a benevolent and peace-loving actor in international affairs, a profile clearly contrasting with the one projected by the United States. In contrast, when in our time the president of France, following slavishly on the steps of the United States, enthusiastically embraces the decision to bomb Libya and Syria, he is not only inducing the suicide of the French left but also wrapping up the soul of Europe in the diploma of the Peace Nobel prize awarded to the EU in
2012 and setting it on fire. >READ FULL CHAPTER