The End of Europe

by Samuel Gregg
       

In his Mémoires d’Espoir, the leader of Free France during World War II and the founder of the Fifth Republic, General Charles de Gaulle, wrote at length about a subject on many people’s minds today—Europe. Though often portrayed as passionately French to the point of incorrigibility, de Gaulle was, in his own way, quintessentially European........Today’s Europe is a much smaller place. As the European Commission’s President, Jean-Claude Juncker, observed in an October speech, the EU’s share of global GDP is declining. Europe’s aging populations, he added, have fallen from an estimated 20 percent of the world population in 1914 to a mere 7 percent today. Internally, many European nations’ public finances remain in a perilous state. Likewise, most Western European countries’ unemployment levels show little sign of falling. Just one week later, as if to drive home the point, Juncker stated, “The European Union is not in a good state.” This, he noted, is “above all visible with regard to the migration problem.”

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