Institutional density

Every few years a wave of civic energy moves through European public life. A cause finds its moment, people who had never organised anything organise something, and for a season it seems that a great deal is about to change. Then the season ends. The people involved return to their careers, the networks dissolve, and the next wave begins from approximately nothing.

This is usually described as a failure of will or of leadership. It is more accurately a failure of institutions. Energy without institutions is weather. It arrives, it is remarked upon, and it passes. What converts weather into climate is a set of standing arrangements: places where people are identified early, formed seriously, introduced to one another across borders and professions, and then kept in contact for decades.

The United States built such arrangements over the course of the twentieth century, and whatever one thinks of the results, the machinery is real: fellowships, seminars, journals, summer programmes, alumni networks that supply people to institutions and institutions to people. Europe has fragments of the same machinery, scattered across national systems that rarely speak to one another and almost never in the same language.

The fragmentation is not incidental. It follows from a continent of national publics, national universities, national parties and national media. A talented twenty-nine-year-old lawyer in Lisbon and a talented twenty-nine-year-old editor in Tallinn are, for practical purposes, unable to meet. Nothing prevents it. There is simply no occasion for it, and no institution whose business it is to create one.

The reply is not another conference. Conferences produce contact without formation and acquaintance without trust. What is required is longer, harder and smaller: a residential setting, difficult texts, several days of argument, shared meals, and the specific kind of trust that comes from having been wrong in front of other people and having said so.

That is a modest proposal in one sense and an immodest one in another. Modest, because it involves forty people at a time. Immodest, because if it is done consistently for a decade, the result is several hundred people across a dozen countries who know one another well, argue well, and are positioned to build things. That is what institutional density means, and it is built one cohort at a time.