Europe isn’t broken. Few want it, yet.

When I was fifteen, I ran a small magazine. It was called Europe Journal, I tried to get an issue out every month, and it was written in two or three languages. I don’t think more than a few dozen people ever read it. I already believed, at that age, something I believe more firmly today: that the countries of this continent have no future on their own. Not a slow decline, but the end of their existence as independent actors, or at best a comfortable vassalage to whichever bigger power is in a good mood that decade.

More than thirty-five years later, I am frustrated, and I am angry, at how little has moved. This series is my attempt to say what should.

First, let’s be fair: the engine works

I want to be clear from the start, because this series is not a demolition job. What exists today delivers a great deal, and anyone who pretends otherwise is either lying or too young to remember.

Eighty years without a war between the historical enemies of this continent. A single market that lets a small company sell to 450 million people without a customs form. Free movement, which my generation received as a gift and the next one takes for granted. Roaming charges killed. The GDPR, imperfect, and nonetheless the reason (with its ePrivacy cousin) the entire planet now asks your permission before dropping cookies on your machine. Erasmus. A single charger for every phone, because we said so.

A small example I ran into recently. When I reviewed our Murena GS6 Pro, I could point readers to the official EU energy label in the EPREL database: repairability index, battery endurance under a standardised test, number of charge cycles, drop resistance. Public, comparable numbers that manufacturers cannot fudge. That regulation is Europe doing what only a continental-scale power can do: forcing the biggest companies in the world to tell you the truth about the object in your hand.

And what this continent gave the world

We have collectively forgotten this, so a short reminder. Democracy, in Athens. Philosophy and formal logic, with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Mathematics as proof rather than recipe, with Euclid and Archimedes. Roman law, still the foundation of the legal systems of a large part of the planet. The university. The scientific method itself, from Copernicus to Newton, which is probably the most important intellectual event in human history. The Enlightenment and the separation of powers, on which every constitution on Earth is built. The industrial revolution, electricity, relativity and quantum mechanics. Vaccination and penicillin. The World Wide Web, invented at CERN and given away. Airbus, the Higgs boson, and the rocket that took men to the Moon, designed by a team of European engineers. There are many others; the list is long enough to make the point.

Two things about that list. Europe received as much as it gave: our numerals are Indian, our paper is Chinese, our algebra comes from Baghdad, and much of Greek thought reached us through Arab scholars. Passing on what you have received is the tradition. And almost none of it was built for Europe. It was built from Europe, for everyone. We did not license democracy, science or the Web; we gave them away. That is a far better story than “protecting our market”, and it is the true one.

So the answer is not to break what exists. The answer is that it needs to evolve, and that it needs something it has never had: people who actually want it.

The actual problem: very few people want it

Ask anyone around you what Europe promises them personally, for their own life, in the next twenty years. You will get silence, or you will get a list of rules.

That is not the citizens’ fault. The last European project capable of making people dream was designed more than thirty years ago: the single currency, conceived at Maastricht in 1992. Schengen is older. There have been big decisions since. The 2004 enlargement gave 74 million new citizens the right to live and work anywhere on the continent, and it was the last time Europe changed lives at that scale. NextGenerationEU raised 750 billion of common debt in 2020, which was ambitious for governments. But for those already inside, name one decision in thirty years that made a nineteen-year-old in Lyon, Turin or Rotterdam say “I want to be part of that”. Since Maastricht we have had crisis management, summits, rescue packages, compromises at four in the morning, and not one proposal addressed to a person rather than to a state.

Meanwhile our political class has perfected a convenient trick: vote for something in Brussels on Tuesday, denounce it at home on Wednesday, blame “Europe” for it on Thursday. It costs nothing, it wins elections, and it has been slowly poisoning the only political construction that gives this continent any weight at all. I am not accusing anybody of a conspiracy. I am pointing at something more banal and more damaging: an entire generation of leaders whose horizon is the next election, managing an institution whose only justification is the long term. In fifty years, they have not produced a single project that people would fight for.

A project that nobody wants does not survive its first serious crisis. That is the real risk, and it has nothing to do with treaties.

What this series is going to say (the short version)

So let’s do the exercise seriously. Not “how do we fix the institutions”, but: what would a European federation actually put in the life of the person living in it? Here is the whole thing in one list. Most of these points will get their own post.

• The universal inheritance. Each child keeps the first 30,000 euros their parents leave them; everything above that goes to a European inheritance fund, which pays out what it collects to every young European, in three instalments at 20, 25 and 30. In the order of 150,000 euros per person on a realistic estimate. Not a benefit from the state: the inheritance of one generation, shared among all of the next, at the age when it can change a life.
• The right to the continent. At 18, one fully funded year in another country of the federation: housing, training or civic service, unlimited transport. Not a programme for the top students, a universal rite of passage, for the apprentice as much as the future researcher.
• Dignity, meaning the end of being a client state. Our own energy, our own chips, our own defence, our own cloud, our own AI. No longer waiting to find out what Washington, Moscow or Beijing has decided about us this morning.
• Security without surveillance. A federal police force with real investigative power against organised crime and terrorism, and at the same time constitutional bans on mass surveillance that no simple majority can lift.
• Making a family possible again. Childcare as an enforceable right, a housing shield for young parents, long and non-transferable leave for both parents. Not out of demographic panic, but because most Europeans already want more children than they have and are prevented.
• Energy that costs almost nothing. Full continental energy independence, a unified grid, and the end of the gas blackmail. This one shows up directly on your bill.
• A content industry, before a platform. Hollywood is not primarily a distribution network, it is a factory that has been selling the American way of life to the entire planet for a century, one story at a time. We produce extraordinary things and let others decide what gets seen and heard. Why does the world’s soundtrack sound almost entirely English when so many of our languages sing beautifully? We need a European content industry built to carry our values and our twenty-four languages, and only then the channels to distribute it.
• Judging by outcomes, not by procedures. Starting with food: today’s organic label certifies a list of authorised practices, not a result, which is why an organic crop contaminated by the neighbour’s field still carries the label. Replace it with a label that measures three things on the product and on the farm, regularly: what is in your plate (no pesticide residues, verified by analysis), what your food is actually worth in nutrients, and what the farm does to its soil, its water and the life around it. Pay farmers for measured results, not for compliance.
• Nature gaining ground. Legal personhood for our rivers and seas, continental rewilding corridors. The only part of the industrialised world where nature comes back.
• A memory built for ten thousand years. Our entire heritage digitised, preserved, and given to the world.
• Real democratic power for ordinary people, beyond electing representatives every five years. The form is open; the principle is not.
• The world around us. Africa as the demographic and energy partner of this century, treated as an equal and not as a recipient of aid. Our neighbours. Our former members. The door, and how it stays open.
• Seeing further than anyone. Fusion, and the sky. Not a flag on Mars: launchers and satellites so that we depend on nobody, and above all the ambition to see further than anyone else, into the deep universe, at the oldest question there is. Europe already builds the largest telescope on Earth and has mapped two billion stars; almost nobody knows it. We may never learn whether we are alone, and the looking is worth it anyway, because a civilisation that has stopped attempting the impossible has started dying.
• And the hardest question of all: meaning. Between traditional religion and dry atheism, is there something a modern civilisation can offer people to hope for? I will come back to this one at the end, and it may be the most important of the series.

Some of these are policy. Several are civilisational. That mix is deliberate. And one rule applies to every line: none of this is a wish list. Each item has a cost, and a federation that spends money it does not have is a federation that dies at the first recession, as several of our member states have learned the hard way. So every proposal in this series will come with its price tag, its funding source, and what we stop doing in order to pay for it. If I cannot make the arithmetic work, I will say so and drop the idea. The dream is the reason to do the arithmetic, not an excuse to skip it.

Which of these actually make people dream

Anyone who has tried to sell a product knows that what you find beautiful and what makes people switch are rarely the same thing. So let me apply that to my own list.

The two items that will genuinely move people are the inheritance and the dignity. The first because it is concrete, quantified, personal, unprecedented anywhere in the world, and paid for by the one flow of money everyone already knows is unfair. The second because the anger already exists, in every country, and it has no positive outlet.

Then come housing, childcare, energy bills and freedom of movement. Those are not dreams, they are relief, and relief wins referendums.

And then there are the ones I personally care about most, and which will only speak to a minority at first: the rivers with legal rights, the ten-thousand-year archive, the question of meaning. They are the depth of the project, not its sales pitch. I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

The honest downsides

I would not be credible if I only listed the good parts.

• The real obstacle to wanting Europe is believing it. Everybody has heard promises. Every item above has to arrive with its funding and its timetable, or it discredits all the others. I will try to do that, post by post.
• Unanimity is out of reach. Twenty-seven states will never agree on this. The only realistic path is a pioneer core of five to eight countries founding it inside the Union, the way the euro and Schengen began, with a permanent open door and each enlargement validated by referendum.
• Leaving must be possible, and it must be hard. A federation nobody can leave is a prison. But a federation that any extremist government can pull apart after one election is not a federation, it is a mood. So the exit conditions should be written down at the founding: which failures of the federation would justify a member’s departure, assessed against criteria agreed in advance, decided by the people in two votes several years apart, never by a single government or parliament. You stay because you could leave; you cannot leave on a whim.
• I am not a constitutional lawyer, an economist or a demographer. What follows is the reasoning of an engineer and an entrepreneur who has spent his career building things, and who is tired of hearing that it cannot be done. Correct me where I am wrong. I would rather be corrected than polite.

Why I am writing this at all

Because I have believed in this since I was fifteen, and because I think the diagnosis I had then was right and is now urgent. A country of 10, 40 or even 80 million people cannot, on its own, keep its energy supply, its defence, its digital infrastructure and its currency out of the hands of powers ten times its size. The choice is not between sovereignty and Europe. It is between a European sovereignty and no sovereignty at all, with the flags kept as decoration. Everything I have seen in the last decade, from the gas crisis to the chip shortages to the way our public services run on American clouds, has confirmed it.

And because the people who should be writing this are not. Fifty years of political careers built on managing Europe rather than building it have produced a generation of leaders who can negotiate a compromise and cannot describe a destination. I also think it is time that power went back, at least in part, to the people who build things. The post-war reconstruction was led by engineers and industrialists as much as by lawyers; the institutions we have now are run almost entirely by the latter. You do not get a continental grid, a chip industry or a space programme from people who have never had to ship anything.

Every great nation in history was built on a conquest, a war, a victory over someone else. Europe would be the first one built on peaceful firsts: the first universal inheritance, the first continent repaired, the first great power structurally incapable of spying on its own people, the first memory designed to outlast us by ten thousand years. Not “we conquered”, but “we invented”, which is only what we have always done.

The first power in history built not by conquest, but by consent.

This is the first post of “A quest called Europa”, a series on what a European federation could actually put in the life of the people living in it. Next post, now online: An inheritance for everyone, paid for by inheritance. If you want the following ones by email, the series has a home page with a sign-up form.

Gaël Duval, September 2026. Creator of Mandrake Linux and /e/OS, CEO of Murena. I believe Europe’s nations no longer carry any weight on their own, and that a federal Europe is the only way not just to keep them from disappearing, but to give their people something immense to hope for again. That is why I write this.

This series is written with the help of AI tools for research, structure and drafting. The ideas, the choices and the mistakes are mine.