Letter of the President, August 2005

What we haven’t learned from America….

…we will (have to) learn from China. We, Europe, that is, are still brooding over what to do about this heavily fragmented collection of small and medium sized – states – called the European Union. In the meantime, the Chinese market is taking off – some of the fast growing Chinese ICT enterprises will soon be or are already global players – exemplified by Lenovo’s takeover of IBM’s hardware business.

What I am talking about is the power of a homogeneous market. The upsurge of North America’s ICT industry has as one of its main pillars a market that stretches without limits from New York to San Francisco, from Chicago to New Orleans. China enjoys the same advantage on an even bigger scale – a structure that Europe never had and never will have.

But Europe has taken revolutionary steps to get somewhat close to a maximum of homogeneity – no customs duties, wide areas of harmonized legislation, a single currency. These steps have indirectly been at the cradle of a successful mobile market, featuring new technologies and companies like Nokia and Vodaphone.

At the moment, however, these developments seem to be at a halt. A common market, optimized as far as it is possible on a continent that speaks a multitude of languages and has inherited a multitude of different cultures, needs a strong coherent platform to go further. Alas, a constitution for the European Union and all the measures connected with it, suddenly seems far away.

So either we watch and admire North America and the Far East growing, and go on brooding over our meticulously staked little national gardens, or we prove what we’ve always been pretending to be: just better.

A global market needs global players, not puzzle stones. Europe is still an unfinished puzzle that needs a strong common framework to let the market prosper. It doesn’t have to be the heavily criticised constitution of 2004 that turned out a failure – we rather need a top-down process of mental awareness and legislative harmonisation that gives the citizens a chance to believe in Europe as a unit – that belief will create a prospering homogenous market on its own.

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