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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.

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An inheritance for everyone, paid for by inheritance

I was 25 when I released the first Mandrake Linux, in the summer of 1998. The idea itself cost nothing: a PC, an internet connection, a few months of nights. Everything that came after cost money we did not have, and we spent the following two years finding it. I was lucky. I know people of my generation who had better ideas than mine and never got to try them, for the most banal reason in the world: nobody around them had anything to lend.

This post is about a radical answer to that. I am not pretending it could pass tomorrow. I am putting it on the table because the debate it opens is one Europe has avoided for a century, and because the numbers behind it are far bigger than anyone admits.

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