Essay selected for the semi-final phase of the Global Challenges Prize 2017: A New Shape – Remodelling Global Cooperation.

Whereas many European states are reluctant to carry out an active “historical policy”, preferring – or pretending – to remain neutral in historical issues and to leave them to scholars, Poland, especially since the return to power in 2015 of the ultra-conservative party Law and Justice (PiS), is not bothered to enforce such a policy in various spheres under state control, from public media to schools, diplomacy and cultural action.

In its contemporary history, which can be considered having started in 1945, Japan has achieved the remarkable performance of having most of the time recorded trade surpluses. This result is all the more impressive that it has been mainly driven by exports of goods, almost constantly on the rise since the Japanese economic take-off in the 1950-1960s, despite limited local availability of raw materials and, after 1980, a stagnant population.

In a context of lack of confidence, depressed investment and aggregate demand as well as deflation risks, all of these phenomena occurring despite a conjunction of favourable factors (cheap oil, weaker euro and very accommodative monetary policy), we propose to take up the proposal of the European Commission to revise the Energy Taxation Directive, introduced in 2011 and withdrawn last year due to the opposition of the Parliament and the Council.

At least since the birth of modern capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe, competition has been recognized by many economists and other theoreticians of ethics and social sciences as an essential driver of progress. Either applied to trade, politics or science, competition, they claimed, stimulates innovation and confronts products, services, parties or ideas on a marketplace that rewards the best and sanctions the worst, alike a permanent race where spectators are also expected to be voters, as it should be the case in liberal democracies.

The subject of this paper is to clarify policy interactions between border-free travel, cooperation in the realm of homeland security, integrated border management, migration and asylum policy and regional engagement, then building a policy coherence index for the 28 EU Member States based on official positions of their governments regarding these five aspects.