Regulation? Yes, please.

"The United States innovates, China manufactures, and Europe regulates." With deceptive simplicity, the phrase attempts to summarize a supposed division of labor in the global economy that relegates Europeans not only to a secondary role, but clearly to the most unsympathetic one. According to this view, the United States would continue to play the pioneering role that history seems to have reserved for them (aided, in the vision that Trump is imposing, by a military power capable of intervening without legal restraint throughout the continent), while China would have become the world's factory (not always through its own merits: another version of the phrase says "China copy" rather factoryAnd Europe appears determined to hinder the free market while sinking into ineffectiveness. But the truth is more complex.

It is true that, at times, the European Union seems eager to contribute to a caricature that presents it as an economic space dominated from Brussels by bureaucrats whose only job is to impose exaggerated, if not downright extravagant, regulations: to give one example, the fact that you can't separate the bottle stopper without risking getting it in your eye. Or, more seriously: I think most of us struggle to understand how Brussels can propose 9.7 fishing days per year (I'm fascinated by the idea of a 0.7-day day: what are the fishermen supposed to do, return to port earlier?).

But the caricature hides a historically incontrovertible fact, and that is that European prosperity is linked to its capacity to subject markets to regulation. On the contrary, the absence of regulation only benefits a minority who, while enriching themselves at the expense of others, leave the costs of their enrichment to society as a whole (in the form of environmental pollution, housing crises, or the terrible effects of inequality). It may seem anecdotal, but on a recent trip to New York, walking up Fifth Avenue, I discovered, shuddering, that a hideous skyscraper obscured the Empire State Building, the city's most powerful symbol for a century. When I asked how they had allowed such an eyesore to be built, the answer was simple:Free enterprise", free enterprise.

However, the winds of deregulation have reached the European Union. Fueled by the Trump administration's enormous propaganda machine, they have begun to affect basic policies such as the European Green Deal and the imposition of taxes on large US technology companies, in addition to forced rearmament. Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director of Le MondeHe warns that "The Trumpian offensive poses a double challenge for Europe, both in terms of security and ideology." And he concludes: "The latter is the most dangerous." And, we might add, it is often the most difficult to combat: the rhetoric of the far right can only be countered with rigorous analysis. This is what the French economist Gabriel Zucman, a disciple of Thomas Piketty, recently did in the same newspaper. Zucman has proposed a special tax for the super-rich, called the "Zucman tax." In a recent article, Zucman observes that this "is the fashionable idea, both in Brussels and in Washington: the United States is taking off; Europe is falling behind." A leitmotif even reflected in the now-famous White House national security strategy, which states that "continental Europe has seen its share of global GDP decline from 25% in 1990 to 14% today, partly due to national and transnational regulations that stifle creativity." On the contrary, Zucman asserts that "the idea of European sclerosis versus a supposed American El Dorado, which underpins the deregulatory offensive that currently seems to be succeeding in Brussels, is based on nothing." For the French economist, Europeans can be proud of their model: more leisure time, better healthcare, greater equality, and fewer carbon emissions, with overall productivity comparable to that of the United States.

The coercive capacity of the United States seems to have no limit: Trump, a figure of highly questionable morality, has declared to New York Times that the only limitation to his power as commander-in-chief is his own morality. But if he ends up yielding to American pressure and propaganda, Europe will abandon what has constituted its raison d'être until now: guaranteeing its citizens, in addition to peace and democracy, a public system of healthcare, education, and social security (despite the erosion it has suffered with the unbearable growth of inequality in recent years). In this context, someone might even be tempted to stop believing in the idea of Europe. But they would do well to ask the British first, most of whom already regret leaving the EU: according to official figures, five years after Brexit, 55% of Britons consider it a mistake, while only 30% think they did the right thing. Figures that speak for themselves.