India and China have set deadlines that function as promises of transformation.
India uses the expression विकसित भारत 2047 (“Developed India 2047”), pledging that by the centenary of independence the country will have become a prosperous civilization rediscovering confidence in itself.
China, for its part, looks to 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic, and anchors its horizon to the formula 中华民族伟大复兴 (“the great Chinese rejuvenation”): modernization, technological primacy, and geopolitical centrality after a century of humiliation.
And Europe?
Europe seems to keep its gaze fixed on the world of yesterday, turning its back on a future toward which we move reluctantly and distrustfully. Yet, more than the laboratories of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, it is precisely our continent that today hosts the world’s most ambitious project of transformation.
The continent that invented nationalism has begun to set in motion its overcoming. In a world marching toward renewed fragmentation into opposing blocs, replaying the old script of national primacy and empire, it is Europe that keeps the possibility of a new history alive.
The project of European union is not only the sole path for our continent to remain a place of autonomy and dignity rather than becoming a colony and playground for the new great powers. It is also an extraordinary adventure in political science fiction, capable of reshaping the meaning of the economy, democracy, the relationship between people and technology, between people and the environment, and even the organization of the world and of our individual lives. It is a revolutionary project of political invention, the latest in a rich and long tradition of Europeans creating their own history.
But for it to become this again — and not the grey theatre to which European politics in recent years has too often been reduced it — we too must urgently recover, to an even greater extentas much as or more than India or China, the capacity to imagine and build the future.
Europe has its own centenary as well: 2057.
One hundred years after the Treaties of Rome, which in 1957 set the European unification process in motion.
Today, we are belatedlyslowly awakening to the fact that Europe needs to be stronger, bolder and more integrated to thrivestrive in a multipolar world without US leadership. Rather than reacting to external pressures in a timid and chaotic fashion, we need to projectclarify who we are and how we want to change ourselves and the world.
What Europa 2057 is?
Europa2057 is a laboratory of ideas, an audiovisual and publishing project, a network of people and events, and an open platform for all those who wish to reclaim the spirit of political imagination and transformation.
