Eurotrash

Dans un texte passablement hallucinant publié ce matin, Jocelyn Coulon, l'antiaméricain de service de La Presse, nous chante un "Ode à l'Europe":

À lire et à entendre certains commentateurs, essentiellement anglo-saxons, l’Europe est à l’agonie, son modèle de développement politique et social un objet de musée, sa population frileuse, xénophobe et inadaptée au monde moderne. Ce genre d’imbécillités fait les choux gras des néoconservateurs américains et de plusieurs membres de l’administration Bush enragés par le succès éclatant de la seule organisation, l’Union européenne, qui a gagné une guerre, celle d’établir la paix sur le vieux continent. Cinquante ans après la signature du traité de Rome, les Européens ont de quoi entonner l’Ode à la joie de Beethoven, aujourd’hui hymne de l’Europe.

Et puisqu’il faut comparer, sur certains aspects de la vie quotidienne, l’Europe est l’avenir du monde, les États-Unis un repoussoir, parfois même un État du tiers monde.

"Enragés par le succès éclatant de la seule organisation qui a gagné une guerre, celle d'établir la paix sur le vieux continent".

Mais sur quelle planète ce pauvre abruti vit-il???

J'aimerais bien le voir en débat se faire massacrer par un des ces "imbéciles de néoonservateurs américains". Ce serait un pur délice...

Pour son information, la paix relative qui prévaut en Europe aujourd'hui a été imposée par les États-Unis en 1945, puis consolidée par l'effondrement de l'Union soviétique en 1990. Les pays européens, hormis la Grande-Bretagne, n'ont jamais libéré un seul pays incluant les leurs et leur rôle dans la chute du communisme en fut un de soutien, au mieux.

L'édification de l'Union européenne, cette monstruosité bureaucratique, n'a été possible que grâce aux États-Unis, qui ont sauvé l'Europe d'elle-même trois fois plutôt qu'une au cours du XXe siècle.

Concernant "l'avenir du monde" que représenterait l'Europe, il est difficile de lire cette phrase sans pouffer de rire...

La réalité, eh bien c'est que l'Europe agonise. L'Europe meurt. Son économie est moribonde, la croissance y est anémique, le chômage de masse endémique, les finances publiques dans un état lamentable, l'étatisme débilitant, les charges fiscales écrasantes, les services gouvernementaux médiocres, le système d'éducation en décrépitude, le taux de natalité en chute libre, les immigrés non-intégrés, la bureaucratie étouffante, le système surhiérarchisé, la jeunesse désabusée, le modèle social périmé et la démocratie bafouée.

Quant au "repoussoir" et à "l'État du tiers monde" que seraient les États-Unis par rapport à l'Europe, voici quelques extraits d'un reportage de Time Magazine publié en janvier 2004 que ce crétin de Coulon ferait bien de lire:

Three years ago, E.U. leaders vowed to make the union "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010. But one of the most worrying signs of their failure is the continued drain of Europe's best and brightest scientific brains, who finish their degrees and pursue careers in the U.S. Some 400,000 European science and technology graduates now live in the U.S. and thousands more leave each year. A survey released in November by the European Commission found that only 13% of European science professionals working abroad currently intend to return home.

The flight of European scientists to the U.S. is nothing new, of course. Political and religious persecution drove luminaries like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi across the Atlantic. The exodus continued in the 1950s and 1960s, as the U.S. poured billions into defense-related research and created magnetic clusters of scientific excellence, staffing them with the world's best minds and prompting Britain's Royal Society to coin the term brain drain. America's investments laid the foundation for the tech booms of the 1980s and 1990s, which drew yet more entrepreneurial Europeans westward. Europe's bureaucracies, rigid hierarchies and frustrating scientific fragmentation also pushed people away as they still do to this day. "Europe is a mess," thunders Christopher Evans, a biotechnology professor at four British universities and chairman of the venture-capital firm Merlin Biosciences, "a haze of overregulated and overcomplicated bureaucracies smothering the rare flames of true entrepreneurial brilliance."

[...] complaints like those of Claude Allègre, the former French Education Minister who heads the Paris VII geochemical lab, are all too common. He decries France's anachronistic "Soviet" system, in which control is centralized and researchers must run a bureaucratic obstacle course, whether to buy expensive equipment or order basic office supplies. "I'm planning on moving to the U.S. indefinitely because I want to continue my research," says Allègre. "I can't do so in the current conditions."

Brain drain isn't a purely academic problem. Billions of euros and tens of thousands of jobs are at stake, because science drives economic growth in the IT, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Europe can't afford to fall further behind.

In the spring of 2002, after three productive years of research at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in the U.S. state of Indiana, Matthias Tschöp went home. Leaving the country he calls "a paradise" for scientists was hard, says Tschöp, who studies hunger-related hormones. "I thought about staying, but I'm German. That's where I belong and where I should contribute."

He landed at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE) in Potsdam, and the shock set in. As at many German institutions, his colleagues were top-notch, but there was little money, and bureaucracy had a stranglehold on what resources were available. Though he quickly helped to win an €11.7 million E.U. grant for obesity research in collaboration with more than two dozen other institutions, it wasn't enough to overcome his disillusionment. "You had to file a four-page application to get a used computer, only to be rejected because of a mistake in paragraph 342," he says. "I could not deal with all that." He kept a visiting professorship at the DIfE and a role in the obesity project, but headed back to America, where he's now an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati's psychiatry department. He still laughs when he thinks of the $750,000 he got for his new lab, staff and travel at Cincinnati. In Germany, he says, "I couldn't even get a start-up grant."

No amount of funding can buy a culture of competitiveness. And if researchers don't see opportunities for reward, they'll take their talent to the States, where innovation and hard work are rewarded with generous grants, full credit and a financial stake in your work. "The U.S. has an entrepreneurial culture," says Finnish molecular biologist Erkki Ruoslahti, who moved to the U.S. in the 1970s and helped build San Diego's Burnham Institute into a top medical-research facility. "People tend to be more enterprising — because they have to be. Otherwise, they're out of business."

Scientists say the competitive spirit found in Ruoslahti's largely European-staffed lab and across America is absent from much of the Continent. In the U.S., "young people who prove they're good get many more opportunities, including perhaps the freedom to run their own labs," says physicist Guido Langouche, vice rector of the Catholic University of Leuven (K.U.L.), who did his postdoc work at Stanford and returned to Belgium for family reasons. "In Europe, you usually have to work for an older professor for 10 years before you get that chance."

Even those lucky enough to get their own labs feel restricted. "In Germany, the principle of reward for performance doesn't exist," says physicist Michael Alexander Rübhausen, 32, who leads a biophysics research group at Hamburg University. He cites a law requiring a doctoral-degree recipient to leave the institution at which the qualification was earned. The idea behind the law is to prevent favoritism in the hiring of new professors, but the practical result is to close off a logical growth path to young scientists at a career crossroads. Rübhausen is lucky — he got a grant guaranteeing his salary and funding for his group through the spring of 2004. But after that? "I don't know whether I'll be able to stay in Germany," he muses, because he won't be allowed to continue at Hamburg, and positions in his speciality are rare. So he's looking back to the U.S., where he did postdoc work.