Europe is not in decline. It is tired. This is not the same thing: decline is a fate; fatigue is a state.
Medicine distinguishes between two forms of fatigue:
Physical fatigue, which results from the depletion of energy reserves: mitochondria become exhausted, glycogen is depleted, and muscle fibers break down. Aging amplifies all of this.
Mental fatigue, which arises from prolonged overwork and a succession of crises that are never truly resolved: Bluma Zeigarnik discovered in 1927 that the brain becomes fatigued if it must keep numerous unfinished tasks in active memory, constantly consuming energy for each “open loop.” The effects of this mental fatigue are formidable: a shortened time horizon, an inability to tolerate complexity, procrastination, and a buildup of poor decisions.
An individual’s fatigue is measured by their salivary cortisol levels, heart rate variability, and inhibitory control scores. A company’s fatigue is measured by its absenteeism rate, employee turnover, the decline in its capacity for innovation, and the response time to competitive disruption. A nation’s fatigue is measured by the exodus of young people, declining birth rates, falling productivity, reduced investment in training and research, voter abstention rates, and the proportion of official reports that are never acted upon.
A nation’s fatigue is caused by too many wars and revolutions, political structures on their last legs, a population that no longer believes in collective progress, prolonged stagnation that erodes hope, the devitalization of regions, too many challenges, and enemies that are too powerful.
History offers chilling examples: In the 3rd century, Roman citizens refused to serve in the legions, entrusting their defense to barbarian mercenaries whose loyalty was bought, and that was the end of the Empire. In the 19th century, Qing China—powerful and proud of its millennia of superiority—rejected the Industrial Revolution due to its inability to break free from patterns that had worked for a thousand years, and it collapsed.
All weary nations have chosen the deadly illusion of inaction, the gradual ease of decadence, the illusory security of the status quo.
Among the world’s most exhausted nations today, for various reasons, we can cite Russia, Lebanon, Haiti, Japan, and Korea. And Europe.
For Europe is aging. It knows how to tackle the problems besieging it;
it does not think long-term, watching as China and the United States take market share from it in all sectors of the future without finding the energy to protect its industries and without the will to rebuild new ones. It is paying the price for the “happy deindustrialization” theorized in the 1990s, the reasoning of a continent seeking an intellectual justification for its own productive abdication. It was fatigue disguised as strategy.
France, in particular, bears the most visible symptoms of this collective exhaustion: a birth rate in free fall, public debt spiraling out of control, reforms passed, then contested, then abandoned, widespread distrust of institutions; and a host of unresolved problems, the simultaneous occurrence of which is a source of fatigue. The country is restless, spinning its wheels, wearing itself out, without ever solving a single one of its problems. And everywhere there is this vague feeling, this background murmur heard in cafés as well as in boardrooms: we won’t make it out of this.
Fatigue, however, is not inevitable.
To address it, we must first acknowledge that it exists: anyone who refuses to acknowledge their exhaustion cannot regain their strength.
A tired body that rests, eats healthily, exercises, and reconnects with purpose can fight exhaustion very effectively.
An exhausted company that has the courage to cut to the bone, simplify, reduce the number of its priorities, and empower its teams to close their own operational loops can reinvent itself. Thus, after a period of exhaustion, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft managed to get back on track.
For a nation, the remedies first require a collective clarity about the country’s true state; the conviction that effort can produce results; and the unwavering resolve to tackle one problem after another.
History offers some encouraging precedents: Denmark in the 1980s was on the brink of financial collapse, fractured, and exhausted; once collective awareness of the stakes was achieved, bold reforms (flexicurity, tax reform, massive investment in education) were carried out with a rare social consensus; forty years later, Denmark consistently ranks among the happiest, least fatigued, most productive, and most resilient countries in the world. Canada also achieved fiscal consolidation in the 1990s, cutting federal spending by 20% over two years without social upheaval, because the diagnosis was shared and trust in institutions was still high.
France and Europe can pull through. To do so, they must meet the following three conditions:
1 Make honest assessments of their situation. Not more reports, but shared, debated, and accepted assessments. France, for example, knows that its social model is underfunded, that its industrial base has evaporated, and that its youth are leaving. This is not a decline; it is a state of exhaustion. We must accept this, collectively and clearly, without looking for someone to blame.
2 Close open loops, that is, make decisions—even imperfect ones—and implement them: A mediocre decision put into action is better than ten reports gathering dust, no matter how excellent they may be.
3 Give ourselves the freedom to think ten years ahead, twenty years ahead, to the next generation.
That is to say, prioritizing funding for education over pensions, innovation over rent-seeking, and transition over conservation.
Our old nations are not doomed. If they can hear their weariness as an invitation to act, and not as a call to give up, their revival is still possible; it is urgent.