-Regional inequalities often occur in large regions, in large spaces and even in any space. In China, for instance, wealth and development progressively decrease from East to West. In the United States, large centers are on the edges of the territory. In Brazil, the southeastern part of the country is the economic and social center. In the European Union, as we will see in the first part of this session, there is a logic of center and periphery, there is a Global North, that is to say developed regions where the decision centers and wealth are concentrated. There is also a Global South, or less prosperous regions, with more inequalities and less development, which depends on decisions taken in other regions. Within the European Union, do these inequalities create more divisions than in the United States, Brazil or China? The answer is no. However, contrary to these countries, the European Union is not a nation-state. It is the voluntary association of nation-states with specific legacies, languages and political cultures. As any enterprise, the European Union is reversible and not eternal. What has prompted Europeans, for the last fifty years, to create associations beyond these legacies, might not always remain pertinent. More so than social and spatial inequalities, are there differences within the European Union which might bring about its end? If so, would these differences create actual dividing lines? Together, we will try and answer this question in the second part. Let us start at the beginning. Look at this map of the GDP, gross domestic product, in the world. It is clear that the EU and its Member States are among the wealthiest and most productive regions. Researchers take this into account when determining whether Europeans influence the rest of the world or, on the contrary, whether Europeans are marginalized. Yet, you can also see that important socioeconomico-spatial inequalities exist within the European Union. There are three main disparities: West/East, North/South, center/periphery. The map of the GDP per capita clearly reflects them. The West/East disparity is the most persistent, and perhaps the most visible at first sight. In almost all the former communist countries, the East, the gross domestic product per capita does not reach 75% of the average GDP per capita in the European Union. Look at a graph of the GDP per capita of the 28 countries of the European Union, you can see that the bottom ten are all former communist countries. Only Slovenia, formerly part of the Eastern Bloc, is ranked before Portugal, the least prosperous Western European country. The current crisis, which began in 2008, highlighted the two main causes for this situation. First, their economic growth is not driven by innovation and advanced technological sectors. Secondly, the countries which joined the EU in the early 2000s are catching up economically but still mostly depend for capitals, inventions and decision centers on companies from the rest of the EU. We can also look at a closer scale. Looking on a national scale reveals that there are also differences within this group. For example, Bulgaria and Romania are poorer whereas Slovenia and Poland are wealthier. Let us move on to the second disparity between North and South. The map of the GDP per capita on a national scale shows the North/South inequality within Western Europe, which is overall very prosperous and has one of the highest HDI, human development index, in the world. The GDP per capita of Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and Italy are lower than in the rest of Western Europe. The map of unemployment among young people shows the same thing. The crisis begun in 2008 hit these countries much harder. 53% of young people, can you imagine? 53% of young people are unemployed in Spain. The rate is 57% in Greece. These figures are for 2013 and 2014. In comparison with the total labor force, the official unemployment rate is over 25% in both Spain and Greece. Whereas in Luxemburg and Germany, it is below 6%. Nevertheless, on an even closer scale, we can notice regional inequalities in each country. We can draw three conclusions. Firstly, each national economy is structured around the North/South divide. There can even be several Norths and Souths within one country. Every country is articulated between more developed regions, which act as hubs, and relatively less developed regions, which depend on these hubs. We will call these hubs "Norths". And secondly, all these Norths are structured around one or more metropolitan centers, where more and more activity is concentrated with a larger and larger range of action within the country, in Europe and sometimes in the world. Two of these European metropolitan centers are worldwide centers: London and Paris. These two worldwide metropolises connect the entire European space to the entire worldwide space. All these Norths make up a core, called a center, which is both transnational and European. It stretches from the Greater London to Lombardy. Some geographers extend it to encompass Veneto. It includes the Rhineland and the Alps. The term "European megalopolis" is sometimes used. This phrase was created in the 1990s by analogy with the two megalopolises identified by Jean Gottman, the great French geographer who emigrated to the United States. He identified two megalopolises: one on the East Coast of the USA and another one in Japan. We will now answer the following question: do these socioeconomico-spatial inequalities create divisions? Since the beginning of the eurozone crisis in 2008, this question has been essential. In several countries of this geo-economic center, a debate has been going on about the legitimacy of the eurozone including some of the least developed countries. The reason was that these states and their companies were behaving like what economists refer to as "single currency stowaways". This means that they benefit from the advantages of the single currency without facing the obligations or paying the price. A very serious debate occurred in 2009 and 2010 about excluding Greece. In parallel, in some less developed countries, some schools of thought accused the center, especially Germany, of placing them under trusteeship with the help of the European Commission and of imposing an economic diktat to save the euro. The overall debate over the resolution of the eurozone crisis focuses on which economic policy is more pertinent. This debates involves every country in the eurozone as well as in the EU. The European Union adopted a twofold solution in 2012 by a vast majority of Member States and European Parliament. The first part is called the European Stability Mechanism, or ESM, for short. It is a guarantee fund for sovereign debts but also a fund to grant loans to states which no longer have the trust of the financial markets. This fund, the ESM, is replenished by eurozone Member States proportionally with their GDP, that is to say with their wealth. The second part is developed in a new treaty: the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, TSCG, which journalists have nicknamed the Fiscal Compact. The states are committing themselves to reducing their debt, they commit to fiscal discipline and are liable to possible sanctions determined and accepted in advance. This treaty confirms and goes further in the ordoliberal orientation outlined by the Maastricht Treaty on Economic and Monetary Union in 1992 and by the Stability and Growth Pact established by the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997. Ordoliberalism is a politico-economic doctrine developed in Germany in the 1950s. This doctrine is not to everyone's taste. It is especially not to the taste of Keynesian economists, named after Keynes, an economist who supported reflationary policies, or sovereignists who more or less want to leave the European Union and focus more on state sovereignty. Some criticize the ordoliberal orientation, especially since they tend to consider that it was inspired by a German vision of economics. A famous German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, was renowned for his defense of European cosmopolitanism. He published an essay in 2013 entitled "German Europe", which many Europeans identified with. The crisis reminds us that the EU is a voluntary association of nation-states. These nation-states are communities or countries which were built on the belief of their people in their country's sovereignty and in the importance of their national territories. Contrary to a nation-state, the European Union is only a form of government, it is based on law. This Union only exists through its institutions and public policies. If France changed its form of government, from a republic to a monarchy, from the Fifth Republic to the Sixth, France would still exist. Remove all European institutions, there is no European people. If the adhesion to the European institutions and public policies stops in the name of an alternative vision of the national interest, the European construction could crumble almost overnight. Various scientific studies tend to show two situations. Firstly, the Europeanization of our ways of life is a tendency which will be visible on the long term. People all over Europe tend to have more similar ways of life. Secondly, the Europeanization of our ways of life goes hand in hand with the persistence of national political cultures. Each of these political cultures depends on a hierarchy of values. For instance, each European country is characterized by a strong homogeneity within itself in its tolerance to inequalities or to immigration. It is only one example which shows that public opinions and political debate are still considered on a national rather than European scale. Of course, since 1945, after an incredibly barbaric time period, the durable discredit of nationalism has made the European construction possible. However, in a peaceful European Union, but where many countries face a structural crisis, the weight of national cultures might tip the scales in favor of solutions and policies on the scale of the nation-state, which would lead to a sort of fossilization of the European construction. The European space is structured by three main types of socioeconomic inequalities. Firstly, inequalities remain between the more prosperous Western regions and the less prosperous Eastern regions. Other inequalities exist between various Norths and Souths. The effects are visible on two different scales, on a national scale, but also on a regional scale within each country. The crisis revealed that the Southern countries have more fragile economic foundations than in the North. Nevertheless, the crisis also revealed that there is a growing gap in every country between the North, the regions structured by metropolization, where the dynamism and growth factors are concentrated on one hand, and the less dynamic South which depends on the North. The last inequality is transnational between the core of the European space which is also at the heart of globalization and the European peripheries. However these inequalities create less division since a process of convergence and economic adjustment is currently ongoing in all Europe and the EU still remains, in spite of the crisis, a worldwide center of prosperity. However, in a peaceful European Union, but facing a structural crisis, unemployment, extremely weak growth, the weight of national culture will tip the scales in favor of solutions and policies on the scale of the nation-state and a fossilization of the European construction. This evolution would be paradoxical since the European construction arouses more and more interest and curiosity all over the world.
