The EU is facing a critical moment in its history. The sustained growth of Euroskeptic and populist parties, the recent economic and financial crisis with its corollary of austerity, the never-ending soap opera of Brexit, the increase in terrorist attacks by Islamist radicals and far-right activists, the deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean, and the abandonment and repression of migrants in the north of Paris or in Calais, are only some of the critical issues challenging the EU. These problems are partly a consequence of EU politics and policies. They are also, in one way or another, all connected. More fundamentally, several of these problems challenge the very founding principles of the European project.

Europe's crisis of hospitality and solidarity

Traumatized by the horrors of World War II, the founders of the EU first aspired to lay the foundations for lasting peace. In this respect, their project has been incredibly successful. Europe has never enjoyed such a long period without wars (one could point out the wars that followed the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, but they were not within the borders of the EU). However, several other founding aspirations of the EU have not enjoyed such fortune. Article 1 of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights states that human dignity is inviolable and must be respected and protected. The following articles go on to celebrate the right to life, the protection of human integrity, and the prohibition of degrading treatments. Similarly, the digital portal of the EU asserts that “The EU protects all minorities and vulnerable groups, and stands up for the oppressed. Regardless of a person's nationality, gender, language group, culture, profession, disability or sexuality, the EU insists on equal treatment for all.” Such noble principles are allegedly at the core of European values: “the EU values are common to the EU countries in a society in which inclusion, tolerance, justice, solidarity and non-discrimination prevail. These values are an integral part of our European way of life.”

These declarations sound great and should give rise to humane policies. But according to the Missing Migrants Project, between 2014 and 2018 about 18,000 refugees died in the Mediterranean.

The biggest issue confronting Europe today is moving forwards with the EU project. Studies focusing on the EU as well as public discourse concentrate disproportionately on the flaws of this supranational construct, giving the impression of constant crisis. This incentivizes the counterfactual reasoning that post-World War II social and economic progress would have been possible in the absence of the EU. What is worrying about our present situation is not the increased fragmentation of views on what Europe could become but the growing acceptance (and increasing familiarity) of things as they have always been. EU integration is a simultaneous process of creation and destruction that slowly erases the sovereignty of the nation state. This rattled the old European order and is met with resistance from the nation state. And yet twenty-first-century challenges cannot be addressed with nineteenth-century institutions, meaning nation states first and foremost. An increasingly complex global environment presses to stride forwards with the remodeling of the European institutional system.

The new prominence of the EU in political discourse seems to suggest that this is a project in peril of disintegration. The argument is that building a monetary system that makes sense in Finland just as much as it would in Greece is too difficult. It is that rule of law means different things in Hungary and in the Netherlands. And it is that “Russian connections” spell gas pipelines in Germany and existential threats in Estonia. However, the need to give some kind of unifying meaning to rules and concepts was always inevitable. It is fanciful to assume that there would be no resistance from national and local interpretations to unifying European rules. “Building Europe” can only happen at the expense of national sovereignty. Much like the popular movie line from Highlander: in the end, there can be only one. Either the EU or the nation state will predominate. My goal here is to sketch the opportunities for a more solidified EU offered by current challenges.

Embrace coalition building

The May 2019 European Parliament elections gave the EU a more fragmented legislative body. The center-right European People's Party (EPP) and the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost their combined majority for the first time even if they remain the two largest parties.

The EU has achieved a great union of the private economy, but little union of the public sector. The paradox is that European public finances are so scant that the EU has to intervene, control, and eventually bail out the public finances of its member states, a process that many regard as undemocratic. The EU is too interventionist because it is too weak. The alternative is for the Union to bolster public resources for large-scale initiatives, stop controlling and interfering in domestic policy-making, and return more fiscal autonomy to the member states.

We need to discontinue the idea of a “fiscal union” between member states and, instead, provide the European Commission with more fiscal resources. The fiscal autonomy of each of the levels of government, both the member states and the Union, as well as the local and regional governments, is the best formula for efficient public management and democratic accountability.

Comparing Europe and America

Some inspiration can be taken from the process of building the first modern union of states in a great continental area and inspired by democratic principles: the United States of America. The lengthy process of building the American Union, which was gradual, conflictive, and asymmetric, might be reminiscent of the process currently under way in the EU. It took close to 125 years from the initial undertaking to form the Union, the ratification of the US Constitution toward the end of the eighteenth century, to the point that the United States achieved solid federal institutions. From this standpoint, the EU, which has lasted to date around half this time, has made greater progress in many fields than the United States had halfway through its construction process. However, the EU's principal hurdle lies in its public finance sector.

At the very start of its existence, the US federal government was extremely weak, as weak as the EU is now in terms of financial resources. The majority of its expenditure, including that on the wars against the British, came from the individual states, which had proclaimed their sovereignty before accepting the US Constitution.

The world is a European invention, and Europe's task in the twenty-first century is to take responsibility for it. It is true that every large cultural unit, now or in the historical past, can be said to have a “world” of its own. It is perhaps even true that every human individual has his or her own “world”, in the sense of a particular way of organizing the data of experience. But the world, the familiar globular entity, both physical and intellectual, which ever-increasing numbers of people, over the past six or seven centuries, have been persuaded to accept as a universal human environment, was invented (although we still say “discovered”) by European explorers, experimenters, and thinkers.

A principal characteristic of this world is that it is not organized, that it always turns out to be more than we thought it was, more than we can fit under the dominion of God or Fate in any form, that it always turns out, paradoxically, to be different from itself. Indeed, the inventors of this world, and we in their wake, set a positive value on its infinite elusiveness. We insist on respecting hard facts, which always means new facts, since old facts by definition are soft, corrupted by the devices we have applied in understanding them. We insist on the uncharted, the unknown, even the unimaginable, as a field for our activity. In other words, this new world – which we thus follow those European pioneers in recreating – is designed to be out of control. Its whole character – as world, as “reality”, as fact, as a field for activity – is always to be at least one step beyond all our abilities to control it.

Out of control

If you want a world of infinite possibility, therefore presumably of infinite promise, you have to accept a world out of control. It took until the twentieth century for the second half of this bargain to become fully clear to us. The world has been out of control ever since its invention; but only recently have the most disastrous consequences of this condition forced themselves on our awareness.

Most people studying Europe in 1970, when the CES was founded, would be amazed at the progress of European integration since then. Of course, the Schuman Declaration was 20 years old in 1970, and the ECSC had been supplemented by the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the much broader EEC. But these Communities included only the original six member states (France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux), with the first enlargement still three years in the future, and Community institutions were generally quite hesitant to take any actions not supported by the member states. True, the European Court of Justice had promulgated the principles of the supremacy of Community law, and of its direct effect. Even so, the number and importance of instances where member states were obliged to change their policies remained quite restricted.

Federal aspirations

Perhaps the quality of the change at work was more important than the quantity. Former Commission president Walter Hallstein observed in 1969 that individual Europeans were being affected by the Community's legal system “more strongly and more directly with every day that passes”. He went on to point out that Europeans were “subject in varying degrees to two legal systems – as a citizen of one of the Community's member-states to [the] national legal system, and as a member of the Community to the Community's legal system”. This was a new experience for many Europeans, but it was “not a new experience for citizens of countries with federal constitutions” (Maas 2007: 21).

Raising the idea of federalism suggests that some people might be less surprised at the progress of European integration. Federalists like Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann had proposed as early as 1943 a European “continental” citizenship alongside national citizenship. In the aftermath of World War II most European political leaders supported creating a common European legal status for individual citizens. Thus Winston Churchill in 1948 called for “a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship” and hoped “to see a Europe where men of every country will think as much of being a European as of belonging to their native land” (Maas 2017).

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?

If we ask a political economist, “what is the biggest issue confronting Europe today?” the likely answer we will get is: “where should I start!?” Indeed, there is no shortage of candidates: the macroeconomic divergence of the EU's member states, the conflicts about EMU, the powder keg of immigration policy, the growing concentration of wealth and political power, the wave of populist mobilization after the Great Recession, and, on the horizon, technological changes with unforeseeable implications for the structure of European economies. One could add the (real or self-imposed) limitations in fiscal capacities of many welfare states to deal with future challenges (an ability that I would nominate, without expecting much disagreement, as a “significant achievement from Europe's past”).

Many of these problems can be linked to the question of what happens to Europe's middle classes – as workers, consumers, and citizens. This does not mean that we should stop being interested in, concerned about, and solidaristic with Europe's “precariat” or “outsiders”. But in terms of sheer numbers, it should be clear that Europe's societies will look very different if they fail at the political integration of its middle classes. Much research suggests that this political integration is inextricably tied to labor market experiences and consumption opportunities. In the light of growing economic inequalities and their social repercussions, it is this link that begins to appear precarious to many contemporary observers.

Admittedly, the fate of the middle class has not only to do with economic facts and measurable insecurities but also with psychology. To appreciate the problem, we have to move from an individualistic to a relational perspective. Economists still sometimes pretend that people care about money per se. Empirically and theoretically, it is more plausible to assume that people are primarily motivated to feel included in groups and to get as high a status in

these group as possible (Marx 2019a, 2019b). In capitalist societies, money is an important material and symbolic resource to acquire status. A wealth of evidence in psychology, sociology, and biology shows that humans are incredibly sensitive to even subtle social cues signaling inclusion or exclusion.

Definitions and early twentieth-century foundations

Marc Lavoie (2014: 72) claims that the concept of irreducible or fundamental uncertainty draws a near-universal consensus among post-Keynesian economists, who consider it one of the foundation stones of the school itself and one of the defining characteristics that set it apart from mainstream economics. A consensus may indeed be present as to the overall importance of the concept, but there is nonetheless some debate as to its exact definition. In nearly all accounts of it, the following quotation is often used in the way of a defining preamble:

Some (such as Paul Davidson 1982) have connected this passage to a terminological distinction attributed to Frank Knight (1921) between “risk” and “uncertainty”. A condition of risk is said to arise when the precise future outcome of a process cannot be known, but when the range of its possible outcomes is known fully, and a probability can be assigned to each individual outcome on the basis of observed past realizations. The example of the roulette game, used by Keynes above, can be rationalized this way: where the ball might end up is, obviously, unknown, but all the possible slots in which it can fall are known ex ante. Moreover, a probability can be computed for the ball to fall in each slot, either in theory or in practice, by careful observation of what has actually happened in the past.

John Bruton once said, “the European Union is the world's most successful invention for advancing peace”, and some may argue a great symbol for effective globalization and collaboration. While Europe is vast beyond the EU, rarely do we view the continent without considering the EU. Nevertheless, with many looming issues and concerns, one wonders: How successful is it really? Will it grow to encompass the rest of Europe? Is it really the savior for all of Europe? And if there are pressing issues, what are the steps to be taken, in order to keep the EU alive throughout the next decades? The number of EU skeptics continue to increase, while the EU supporters decrease. In the light of Brexit, many increasingly wonder if the EU will exist by 2050.

There is no doubt that Europe will continue to transform and flourish over the next decades, and that would be due in large part to the EU's reach and influence. We are pro-EU optimists who want to see Europe and the EU to flourish in the next decades and believe the EU will remain in existence by 2050, but we predict that it will go through, and needs to go through, serious changes and reforms with regards to gender equality, union size, member state sovereignty, and domestic policies, as well as the way member states work together.

More women, fewer new member states

In the wake of a gender awareness era, we predict that the EU will promote women in key decision-making positions, in politics and the economy, to appeal to the masses. With the current EU gender pay gap of 16 per cent (European Commission 2019), this promotion of women is a much needed rebranding that will significantly advance the performance and quality of work in the EU region. Women also outnumber men in all of Europe (Smirnova & Cai 2015). This raises the question of how the EU hopes to appeal more to the people and current member states’ citizens, if not providing equal treatment to men and women. Amending the current discrepancy would be a great strategic move that inspires young generations to support the EU even amid difficult times.

INTRODUCTION

In mid-2018 Google Station arrived in Lagos, Nigeria. Previously launched in India, Indonesia, Mexico and Thailand, this is a public internet service comprising a network of free Wi-Fi hotspots. Upon launch in Nigeria, Google Station was available at six locations in the capital, but Google aims for rapid rollout over the coming months, and hopes to have 200 hotspots up and running across five Nigerian cities by the end of 2019 (Akinyelure 2018).

Google Station represents one among a proliferating array of capitalist investments, across cities in both the Global South and North, designed to shape urban futures and also to capture the profits arising therein. By making internet access freely available to city residents, Google has inducted an urban future in which data will flow more abundantly, and sooner, than it otherwise might; less than a third of the Nigerian population currently uses the internet. But it has done much more than that. It has arrogated to itself a share of the income that those data flows will elicit: for, while Lagos gets free internet, the quid pro quo is that Google gets control of advertising in the Wi-Fi log-in portal. Upon launch, Google did not disclose the amount invested in the new Nigeria service, but the dollar value is less important than what this value fundamentally represents, which is the price payable in the present for securing control of a durable future income stream. Google has, in short, capitalized that future income stream, which is a uniquely urban stream in so far as it is predicated upon the unique spatiality of the city – a densely populated milieu characterized by rapid and vast flows of people, energy, money and, of course, data.

Google Station represents a striking example of a wider phenomenon that we refer to as the “capitalization of the urban”. This phenomenon is the subject of the present chapter. We consider it in two stages. First, we consider it in theoretical and historical terms. The capitalization of the urban, we argue, represents (and can be helpfully understood in terms of) a historically specific imbrication of urban space and capitalist markets, one that we place in the context of the longer-run development of market/ space as conceptualized by David Harvey, especially his writing on the urbanization of capital.