Salzburg’s train station, Austria 1st of June 2030. A young girl named Lousiane steps down of the railway wagon. She sits for a minute on the stairs of the railway and browses a final analysis on her phone for her assessment that is due tomorrow. She is determined to validate all of her credits successfully to complete her license of intercultural mediation at Salzburg university and being able to head towards Munich next year where she intends to subscribe to a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) double-degree with San Paulo university. She then gets up, enters a post office and stamps her two tax bills for income tax and electricity consumption. She logs in on the EU Commission website to keep track of the referendum she participated in which asked if people agreed on the new electric pools circuit that will extent further in Salzburg’s close countryside and checks the dates for the next European elections. This short account seems very common but none of European citizen could have done any of Lousiane’s moves 20 years earlier.

Lousiane lives in a small studio in one of Salzburg remote suburbia. She is able to reach the city center in 20 minutes, it would have taken her an hour and a half ten years earlier. Indeed, the European Union allocated a large budget to build railways lines in order to open up remote areas. More than 10 000 cities have been linked together thanks to the boldness of the “An intercity train for all” ERDF (European regional Development Fund ) program.

Lousiane is from Slovenia but she is able to continue her studies in Austria thanks to the EU Baccalaureate Standardization which guarantees that her Slovenian high school diploma could be use anywhere within the European frontiers. But she is thinking about heading towards Munich to complete her bachelor degree for which she’ll have an automatic equivalence and a scholarship. The European Solidarity Fund for Youth, which delivers loans with interest rates proportional to the average salary of the five first years of arrival into the working market, is not an embryonic institution anymore.

The data base Lousiane is browsing when sitting down on the stairs is NLEU (Numerical library of the European Union). Since his advent, Internet has been perceived as a wonderful stimulant for texts and images sharing but very few of the works retained in the European cultural institutions were available in an electronic format. Thanks to petitions through e-democraty, EU governors have set up a minimum contribution to this data-base for each state in 2015. Most of the European libraries aggregated themselves to the prior BNF/DNB (Bibliothèque Nationale francaise/ Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) partnership and 85% of the European literature is now accessible on the web for a modest annual contribution.

At the beginning of the decade, Louisane would not have written the same address on her letter. Instead of sending it to the EU treasury, she would have foot the bill to the tax office in the country she would live in at the present time. Tax harmonization have been included in the EU legislation recently to put an end to the unfair and deceptive fiscal dumping. Even if 40% of her fees are transferred to the Tax Office of her country, the rest is sent to the Community Fund and contributes to project bonds.

Her electricity bill in 2010 would have been five time more expensive then the one she pays today. The common budget mentioned above enables the EU to become energetically autonomous. Ten years ago, nuclear fusion by magnetic confinemen became a true Marilou Rouja 1st Prize Trifling gestures accounting for great achievements 3 story and Europe holds a competitive edge in terms of energy cost. If the 2010’s decade witnessed large cuts in public budget, we can’t deny the wisdom of those governors who persevere to allocate sustainable entitlements to Research and Development. The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project in Cadarache South of France would never have succeeded without the long-term vision of those commissioners. We also owe this energy consumption relief to the “Union for Mediterranean”, a project on his wane in 2010 which received a new impetus 15 years ago. It enables the bulk of the European southern countries to run with solar power energy. Former governments had clearly underestimated the benefits that they could draw from a subscription of North African countries to the European projects.

Europe have proved her capabilities to propose a democratic revival. The Commission has broken down with its image of an opaque room which takes decisions without consulting its people. If Louisane is feeling concerned about next-term European elections, it is because the Commission displays the colors of the Parliament’s majority.

Lousiane story proposes us a glorious picture of the European achievements. Still, we must recall that we owe the boldness of implementing such measures to a big fear of European decline and of economic doldrums that stifled the whole continent for many years after the 2009’s crisis. We, European people, must be “phobovoltaic”, fear gives us greater energy. If our European governors all ended trusting in an environmental, social and democratic project, it was because real danger was knocking at our door. History has proved, with WWII, the 70’s economic crisis or the Berlin wall collapse, that we’ve always moved forward when feeling greatly endangered. But now that Europe is tantamount with promising horizons, it is not the time for this portion of land to take its breath back. Lousiane’s optimistic generation have even more chance to succeed into being creative than its predecessors. That is why it has to accept this challenge of driving forward the European dream.