How do you build a pragmatic Europe? Well, as with any company in crisis, Europe must return to its core activity, which is to do that what improves the quality of life of citizens, and only where they do better than a lower administrative level. In doing so, Europe must discard ballast, develop a lean and mean structure and pursue its own value model, instead of wanting to outperform other continents.

1. END OF THE JUGGERNAUT

Europe and the European institutions are victims of the inflation of bureaucracy, as the German sociologist Max Weber called this. An army of 50,000 officials should keep Europe on the right track. The bureaucracy has become its own community, its own ‘bubble’, with its own laws and its own privileges.

Some argue that this monster administration is the price of democracy. I think it is exactly the opposite. Spread over more than 50 buildings in Brussels and present in most countries of the world, the juggernaut is rather a source of alienation. Eurocrats usually write notes to each other, meet among themselves or inter-institutionally, as it is called. It is a closed cocoon that closes itself off from the citizen.

By analogy with large companies that are losing weight, Europe must also go on a diet. To do this there are many obstacles, both political and administrative.

1.1. THE ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES: OBSTACLES OF A POLITICAL NATURE

The Commission is a European body. That means that the Commission and its members work for Europe and not for their country. It is therefore pointless for Member States to want their country to have a commissioner. This does not make sense. Moreover, the commissioner is given a certain competence. How can he or she work for the ‘motherland’? Didier Reynders, for example, is a Justice Commissioner. That is all well and good, but what is in it for Belgium, his country of origin? And when a country enters or leaves the Union, a new commissioner has to be appointed or withdrawn. Due to the Brexit referendum, Jonathon Hill, who held the important portfolio of the banking union, resigned and was replaced by Julian King, who stayed on as UK commissioner until the referendum was translated into a real exit, three and a half years later, with the portfolio of security.