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We don't live with the community of yesteryear. And we don't enjoy the public services Europeans do. So we turn to the market. Once we do, we find that service providers raise the standards of personal life, so that we come to feel we need them to live our 'best' personal lives.

For many Europeans the next decade looks to be filled with threats rather than opportunities.

The Europeans governments have massively changed the landscape in Europe. There is no doubt about it. They have put together the European Financial Stability Fund. They have discussed and approved the European Stability Mechanism.

The Europeans waited so long that they are impacting people who depend on their pensions. We are still early enough to fix it for the next generation. A few states have started scaling back their programs, while others have come hat in hand for billion-dollar federal bailouts.

When they come to Europe, they are confronted by still closed borders. Thus, the concept of open borders is a very selective concept, one that is not taken seriously at all in the experience of non-Europeans.

By common consent, most European countries support the maintenance of robust welfare states and are comfortable with taxation systems that support them.

Europe should stick to an open economy, to competition and we should refuse protectionism. It will not save one single job in the long run to protect non-competitive industries.

The difficulties of many European countries derive from their corporatism: state projects serving cronies and vast social protection programmes, both run by elites. These surged in the 1970s and 1980s.

We can't put up a protectionist dam on our own against the neo-liberal world market either. However, we can try, together with our European partners, to maintain the social character of Europe as much as possible.