New research identifies an 'imagination gap' as where political choices can still matter
Europe’s crisis is not that people have stopped believing in Europe. It is that they can no longer imagine a credible future.
A new report by the European Council on Foreign Relations and the European Cultural Foundation on Wednesday has called the phenomenon the “imagination gap”. It is described as the space between those wanting a stronger, more united Europe and being unable to picture, with any confidence, how such a Europe might ever materialise.
“European integration asks us to believe not only in what the EU is but in what it might become,” the study observed.
Imagining what Europe could become is proving harder. Across six European countries, 68% of people spoke about Europe with a “sense of deterioration and a loss of normality”.
