At the heart of the challenges facing modern governments are the intertwined tasks of devising policies to deliver economic prosperity and of mobilizing popular consent for them. The importance of economic policy was noted in the nineteenth century by William Gladstone, the British prime minister renowned for his fiscal acumen, who observed that “budgets are not merely matters of arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of prosperity of individuals, and relations of classes, and the strength of Kingdoms”. The importance of mobilization is manifest in democracies, where economic policy-making is always also coalition building.

Few can doubt the magnitude of those challenges in Europe today. Many countries that could once reliably command 3 per cent rates of annual economic growth now struggle to secure 1 per cent. More than 15 per cent of young people in the EU are unemployed, and the vast majority who do find work are being forced into temporary jobs lasting only months if not weeks. Moreover, the adjustment of most European countries to a technological revolution marked by the advance of digital technologies lags well behind parallel movements in the US and even China. To cope with the technological revolution of the twenty-first century, the nations of Europe need new modernization strategies.

Political will

Part of the challenge, of course, is to identify such strategies. Finding an effective strategy is not a simple task because every country starts with a different set of institutional endowments. Thus, approaches that might work in one will not necessarily succeed in others. There are no magic bullets here. However, the process of implementing new economic strategies has also been complicated by the disintegration of longstanding electoral alignments and the fragmentation of European party systems. There is some truth to the old saying that “where there is a will there is a way”, but in democracies the relevant “will” emerges out of party politics and it is uncertain whether partisan competition in Europe today is capable of generating the will to implement policies that will promote prosperity in the coming years. Why not?