The relation of a society to its future is crucial, and many contemporary French philosophers, notably Marcel Gauchet and Pierre André Taguieff, have devoted their attention to this topic. Their thoughts are crucial for understanding the present French crisis, as well as for enriching our understanding of our own challenges. I have already written on the impact of the collapse of the Marxist utopia on France: For many Europeans, this has restricted the future, and there is no escape from capitalism. This system cannot be replaced: it has to be managed through its successive crises and a decent society created despite the tough laws of competition. I'm not sure that Marxism is dead, and globalisation, which weakens the ability of the state to regulate the market and the “creative destruction” inherent to the system, may have the unexpected consequence of giving this ideology the kiss of life. Some of Marx's writings even seem to have had Microsoft in mind. But for now nobody seriously envisions a socialist economy. The dominant European project is the creation of a democratic and pacifist empire of multicultural societies respecting human rights and the rule of law. But a democratic empire without frontiers, without an identified people, without a single state, elections and accountability, and with conflicting economic interests and sharing only values said to be universal and a self-hating view of the cultural and political past looks like a hazardous enterprise disliked by important segments of its population. The myths of “planning” and of “rational decision-making” have endured a severe beating. The future cannot be planned. This is an impossible goal. The Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper has shown that planning for the future assumes that the future state of science and technology can be foreseen and how it is going to progress. It assumes the number of scientific problems or enigmas is limited and can be successfully resolved. All this has been shown to be false. Popper's compatriot Friedrich Hayek showed that correct planning requires a mastery of all the relevant data, which is simply impossible to achieve by any agency even if it is highly efficient. Statistics never tell the whole story. Knowledge is widely disseminated throughout society, and individuals cannot be collected. Rational decision-making assumes a problem can be defined along with all the possible options in response to it. It assumes that all these options and their consequences can be assessed, together with the costs and benefits of each. It says that it is possible to opt for one and then find the money and the team to implement it. All this is impossible, even if there was time to ponder all the moves. There are too many parameters, too many sources of information, human behaviour is too unpredictable, too many actors could intervene, and too many hazards could disrupt the processes. Moreover, there is never enough time. Problems are growing more complex, and time is much shorter: The news channels and the information revolution have created intense pressure on political decision-makers. They have to act more and more quickly, and secrets are no longer kept. The right to have secrets is one that the executive branch of government and the state is slowly losing. If the latter try to defend it, rumours create unpalatable pressures. Moreover, the more money is spent on collecting information and analysis, the less there is for intervention. If a reasonable degree of clarity is required for collective action, if good control and mastery of a process is needed, then more often than not there is a plausible case for doing nothing. I am of course overplaying my hand to emphasise the difficulties, but the problems are nevertheless real. At the start of the last century people were optimistic. Science would bring solutions, results and hope. It was delivering results. Communications were quicker, medicine had improved the lot of many people, and the end of poverty was conceivable. The future would be brighter, it was thought. Now, science brings uncertainty and bad news, together with clones, cyber threats, disastrous climatic change, pollution, an unprecedented power of destruction, nuclear threats and chemical and biological weapons. Science is no longer a promise. Instead, it is seen as an ongoing process that is out of control, relentless and inexorable with nobody able to provide direction or to plan things and of course with less and less democratic control. Some European problems darken the already bleak picture, including declining demography, older populations, massive migration problems, the integration of newcomers, terrorist threats, economies lacking flexibility and being less competitive and challenges from the East and South. The European Union is itself a controversial project. Political and social dynamics have compromised the principle of political representation and empowered vocal segments that are able to mobilise and talk loudly, making life tough for those who do not have the required abilities. When political representation is in crisis, the collective will wanes. The modern state is a prodigious invention, a remarkable European solution to the confessional wars that nearly destroyed the continent during the 16th century. It was in practice incrementally invented by king Louis XIII and Cardinal de Richelieu in France, and the theory stems from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and to a lesser extent from the Frenchman Jean Bodin. The state is a set of agencies above society, but also originating from it, which enables the head of state to prevent civil war, to manage the present, and to plan for the future. It is an acknowledgement that social links are in a perpetual state of self-creation by the community and the people and an attempt to rationalise this process and to design the future through policies and decision-making. When the future is bleak, the state is in crisis, but people increasingly turn to it for a solution. When there are no guidelines for the future, there are no guidelines for decision-making. Europe's relation to the future is complicated, to say the least. The writer is a professor of international relations at the Collège de France and a visiting professor at Cairo University.
