ABSTRACT
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 forever gone, 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 Leibniz saw modern European reason being liberated.
