Starting in January 2007, the École Nationale d’Administration has been using its international structure to create a new cursus, the Higher European Studies Course (CHEE). The decision to create it was taken by the Interdepartmental Committee on Europe on 19 December 2005, and owes much to the report by Jean-Pierre Jouyet (at the time, Head of the Finance Inspectorate). The aim is to extend the network of personalities with a deep awareness of European questions and to develop a centre of excellence for these questions. Modelled on the Institute for Higher National Defence Studies (IHEDN), this course is attended by some 40 participants from widely differing backgrounds in monthly modules of three or four days of lectures and discussions, over a period of one year. For the first course, the Ministry of Defence was represented by an Army colonel and a senior armaments engineer, who joined participants from the civilian sector. It was an undoubted success, reviving an appetite for European affairs. It answered a need and revealed the rich complexity of Europe, without hiding the handicaps or the challenges.

Who really knows Europe? With the exception of those whose work is directly connected with Europe, for the great majority of us, our knowledge of Europe is limited to a few dull arguments about dreams of enlargement, disconnected from economic and strategic realities, or worse still, to sterile criticism of the Brussels bureaucracy. Because they don’t really know Europe, or because they only know of the ‘scapegoat’ issues, 55 per cent of the French voted against the Constitutional Treaty. Amongst the younger generation, intellectual, political or economic, Europe is for some a constraint and for others an obvious fact of life. But progressively fewer of them believe that it is still a campaign to be fought in order to maintain the triumphant fact of what Europe has brought us in the last 60 years: peace, and the development which is its corollary.

In a Europe of 27 states, drawn towards the free trade temptation, so easy to implement, with its lack of constraints and with no sentiment of solidarity, France’s influence, and the values that it has proclaimed since the Treaty of Rome, demand an effort to train the new generation of officials, together with the creation of networks of like-minded people. To achieve this, France’s European policy, currently in a state of ‘back to business’, must be comprehensible, so that the political, administrative and economic decision-makers are up to the task of defending, influencing or simply understanding the French vision of Europe. This implies an adaptation of political and administrative structures, and a renouncement of dissipated effort.