Esprit de l’Europe, Europe de l’esprit
Europe the scapegoat is endlessly on the receiving end of criticism from our contemporaries: it is opaque, bureaucratic, far removed from the realities of everyday life and the aspirations of its citizens, it lacks the breath that fills the lungs of nations. It has no soul and is destined to disappear. None of these criticisms is entirely false, but none of them is absolutely true. And Hegel’s beloved Geist is necessarily an active force in the history of Europe. This dossier on the spirit of Europe and the Europe of the spirit recently published by the Revue générale is a reminder of that.
The dossier begins with an introduction by Frederic Saenen reminding us that this holy spirit/breath (πνεῦμα or pneuma, to transliterate the word, ἅγιον (hagion)), features in the Septuagint and then the New Testament. This holy spirit becomes the Paraclete or Advocate after Pentecost, but is already mentioned “no fewer than 378 times” in the Hebrew Bible, in the form רוּחַ (ruah or ruwach) (our translation throughout). Floating above the original chaos, God uses this breath to give life to the first man in Genesis. It is also what gives life to the vocal cords and gives rise to the Word of Creation. Like it or not, the Europeans have always found this primordial breath, in its theological form and rich secular alternative, deeply emotive.
Sociologist Christian Gatard takes us on a journey of exploration of the new mythological frontiers. “Before coming in to land on a geographical zone as a political, cultural and identity-based emblem”, Europe represented “land of the setting sun” to an Eastern eye. “That Europe was therefore not the centre of the world. Already”, the author writes, adding: “on one hand, ancient Greek evokes vision embracing a wide expanse. On the other, the Akkadian language suggests sunset. This double definition embodies a conflict between vision and dusk, between expanse of the spirit and a gradual descent into darkness”. “Far from embodying the universal or original, we live under the sign of a kind of drift, the horizon and the setting sun. Does the narrative we are preparing to explore suggest travelling around the outside, fragmentation, possibly the awareness of a loss, a decline… or does it evoke going beyond, a transcendence?”.
Commenting on the kidnapping of Europe, Gatard stresses the logic of how the masculine dominates the feminine in the French language: “Europe, primordial feminine, embodies the earth, the matrix [translator’s note: feminine nouns], the collective body which the celestial order [Zeus transformed into a bull] contradicts and transforms. Is this symbolic rape the origin of an unresolved tension in the European identity: tension between the call for an organic matrix unit that would be the feminine genius, legend and myth [translator’s note: all expressed as masculine nouns in the original French text] and the reality of a plural space, born of conflict, uprootings and successive appropriations… bloke things?”.
Gatard goes on to argue that “from this point of view, Europe is not just the victim of a kidnapping, but also the driving force behind a transmutation. It stands up to the ordeal, integrates the foundational violence, and manages, over the ages, to embody a permanent space that is capable of absorbing the other, endlessly reinventing its own myth, of making exile into a force of creation. In this way, through the fabric of the myth, a fundamental lesson for our time is woven: Europe sees itself as simply a duty, the incessant oscillation between the memory of its origins and openness to others. It is, and must remain, a territory that has been taken away from itself, irreducibly blended, tragically beautiful”.
The other contributions to this particularly rich dossier include one by Renaud Denuit, who writes the editorial comment for the Bulletin Quotidien Europe, taking us on a tour of Robert Schuman’s house in Scy-Chazelles. This house, emblematic of a lost age, was a great favourite of former spokesperson of the European institutions, Paul Collowald, who died in June of this year at the age of 102. (Olivier Jehin)
Frédéric Saenen (edited by). Esprit de l’Europe, Europe de l’esprit (available in French only). Revue générale, 2025/2, June 2025. Presses universitaires de Louvain. ISBN: 978-2-3906-1611-5. 244 pages. €25,00
Où va l’épargne ?
This edition of the Revue d’économie financière paints a picture of the savings landscape in Europe, where savings rates remain generally high since the Covid crisis, which saw an average 59% increase in savings between 2020 and 2021. Saver behaviour differs from country to country, however: in Germany, Belgium and France, savings flows are consistently at high levels, with more volatile behaviour in Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
In an article on the vital role played by asset managers in the investment of household savings, Laure Delahousse and Thomas Valli, senior officials with the French financial management association, stress that the Noyer and Letta reports of 2024 already warned that European savings are starting to move out of Europe, to the detriment of financing EU growth. “In Europe, household participation in financial markets remains relatively low, particularly in countries in which the pension system is principally based on the first pillar, such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain”, the authors note, adding that “in countries that have pension funds, the share of household wealth invested in shares is higher. Additionally, as pension contributions are counted in this wealth, the volume of financial assets is 1.5 to 2 times higher these countries (in relation to their respective GDP). This means that in the long term, private savings consistently and continuously cover the funding needs of businesses. As an addition to bank funding, the investment of private savings in the economy via financial markets is a powerful driver of growth and adds value to businesses. In France and the EU, the level of medium- to long-term savings is far too low, representing 90% of GDP, compared to 310% of GDP in the United States”.
“The creation of an ‘InvestEU’ label proposed by the Noyer report (2024), applicable to national savings products invested mostly in EU businesses, would make it possible to apply separate treatment for savings that funds EU businesses (…). In return for their contributions to the competitiveness of the European economy, member states would be able to grant tax incentives to products bearing this label”, Delahousse and Valli note, stressing that “in France, Germany and Italy, private pension funds are small compared to those of the Netherlands and Sweden” and that “bolstering complementary pensions by means of capitalisation could increase the amount of capital collected and ensure volumes of investment in the long term”. They go on to point out that “in France, more than 10 million pension savings plans (PER) have been opened in the framework of company (collective and compulsory PERs) and individual PERs, although the levels of these, while unquestionably on the increase, are not yet high enough to meet the challenges of pension preparedness and economic competitiveness”.
“In Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, the capital markets are developed and geared towards the financing of their economies, based on high volumes of pensions savings, in the cumulative amount of 3000 billion euros, or nearly two thirds of the entire volume of EU pensions savings, while representing just 12% of GDP. Conversely, savings volumes invested in overnight deposits are particularly low in these countries”, the authors go on to observe.
“The European Union is facing urgent funding needs, to pay for two transitions (climate and digital) and meet major challenges in the fields of defence, innovation and competitiveness”, with needs estimated at 750 to 800 billion euros a year up to 2030, according to the Draghi report, stress Jean-Baptiste Gossé, Julio Ramos-Tallada and Pierre-François Weber (Banque de France). “The EU has considerable levels of private savings that have doubled over the last two decades to reach 35,000 billion euros in 2023”, but “compared to the United States, the structure of the financial portfolio of European households shows a predominance of low-risk assets, such as bank deposits and life assurance products, at the expense of investments in shares or investment funds”, the authors stress. Yet “on average, financing constraints have affected 45% of EU businesses over the last five years, compared to 38% in the United States, with considerable disparities”. However, these constraints are “lower in countries with an ongoing savings surplus (the Netherlands, Denmark and, to a lesser extent, Germany) [than] the larger economies of southern and eastern Europe, [which] are exposed to less favourable conditions and are more likely to have a negative effect on competitiveness”. (OJ)
Sylvain de Forges (edited by). Où va l’épargne? (Available in French only) Revue d’économie financière no. 158, Q2 2025. Association Europe Finances Régulation (AEFR). ISBN: 978-2-3764-7112-7. 282 pages. €35,00
Les Russes à l’épreuve de la guerre
Egmont researcher Joris Van Bladel is the author of “Land van het Grote Sterven” (Land of the Great Sacrifice), published in February of this year. In this article, he sets out to show that despite dynamics of social control and self-censorship, opinion polls carried out in Russia provide valuable indications about how the social climate has changed. The social climate is a “key strategic indicator, not to predict an imminent collapse – an unrealistic hypothesis – but to identify underlying tensions, profound misalignments and the various imbalances running through Russian society”, the author explains, adding that “even in the absence of political mobilisation or open protests, it is possible to read signs of fatigue, resignation and disconnection. The stability is a relative one, which could last for a long time, but its fragility remains constant – until it is broken by a sudden imbalance” (our translation throughout).
He goes on to add that “on that basis, our central hypothesis is as follows: Russian public opinion – or more broadly, the social climate – can reveal something about the viability of the aims being pursued by the Kremlin in this war. Not what the Russians ultimately think of themselves, but what they are prepared to show, endorse or put up with. Because even authoritarian regimes cannot function without a certain amount of tolerance, or at least without broad social passivity. Vladimir Putin is perfectly well aware of this: the attention he pays to opinion polls, his response to any fluctuation in his popularity, and particularly his systematic recourse to internal surveys carried out by the federal protection service (FSO) make this quite clear”.
“When the Russian people were asked about their most pressing problems, the result was unambiguous. They are not worried about Ukraine or the war, but about inflation (94%), the drop in their purchasing power (69%), low wages and access to healthcare”. In another survey, 29% of respondents mentioned the negative effect of the war on their standards of living, income and prices, “an increase of eight points compared to the previous study of 2024”, Van Bladel stresses. In the same survey, “37% of interviewees said that within their families, friendship groups or places of work, they knew at least one person who had been killed or wounded at the front” and this figure, up considerably from 2022, shows the “slow but steady spread of the human cost of the war (…), which is gradually turning from a war far away into a shared reality, gradually blurring the boundary between the military sphere and the private sphere”. Furthermore, “three-quarters (75%) of Russians are opposed to forcible additional mobilisation, a figure that rises to 81% among young people aged between 18 and 30”.
The author speaks of a “Russia that is neither monolithic nor in a state of collapse, but one that has been eroded by wear and tear, caution and latent resignation”. “Behind the apparent solidity of the powerbase, dynamics of silent adaptation, progressive disengagement and collective fatigue are taking shape”, Van Bladel argues, adding that “thinking the Russia of today is therefore acceptance of thinking the uncertain”. (OJ)
Joris Van Bladel. Les Russes à l’épreuve de la guerre – Anatomie d’une société sous pression (available in French only). Futuribles, edition 467, July-August 2025. ISBN: 978-2-8438-7485-7. 128 pages. €22,00