New Narratives for the European Project

This brief synthesizes doubts about the presently prevailing European Institutions’ narrative, which we will call ‘the received wisdom’. We concentrate on the long-term challenges and plead for more thinking on the allegedly positive relation between innovation, employment and growth in the face of opposing evidence coming from international organizations and academia. We argue that business as usual is not an option to deal with the present inequality and unemployment challenges. We suggest opening up the reflection to different economic paradigms, and to other sources of legitimate knowledge and scholarship, from bio-economics, to social inquiry and to non-neoclassical economics. Foremost, we argue that no progress is possible without reconsideration of normative questions such as ‘what’ do we wish to sustain and for ‘whom’.