For Europe, growth is existential. It is the precondition for every other political goal we may have, including our very survival. For too long, it has been traded off for other priorities, even though those priorities cannot exist without growth. In trying to do everything, we have hindered innovation, investment, and prosperity.
Fortunately, European institutions have a long track record of growth. They did it once, in the three decades after the Second World War. They did it again in Eastern Europe, in the last three decades. Poland entered the millennium at 47 percent of the European Union average income and today stands at 93 percent. Romania climbed from 37 percent to 83 percent. Lithuania surged from 39 percent to 96 percent. Few institutions can lay claim to not one but two of the great growth miracles in the past century.