On 20 May 2019, Émile Servan-Schreiber shared a Le Point opinion asking whether the organisation of collective intelligence could guide a more intelligent Europe. His English article, “How to make Europe smart again”, followed on LinkedIn on 4 July. It proposed treating Europe’s differences as a source of knowledge, then changing how that knowledge enters decisions.
The argument had a precursor in his 10 November 2018 share of Bruno Le Maire’s remarks at the French German Business Forum. Servan-Schreiber’s response asked how Europe might organise the collective intelligence it already possessed. The 2019 essay offered his answer. The essay offered a governance proposal: institutional rules could help turn differences among Europeans into useful contributions to shared decisions.
Differences need a way into decisions
The English article described the Union of its time as 28 member nations with 24 official languages. These are historical figures in a pre-Brexit argument. Servan-Schreiber saw the variety of national experiences as a potential advantage in solving problems, rather than merely an obstacle to agreement.
Drawing on Scott Page’s work on diversity, he argued that imperfect viewpoints can still contribute useful differences. He proposed combining judgments through averaging, voting or prediction markets, while warning against conformity. His extension from forecasting and group research to the European Union was an argument about institutional design, rather than a mathematical proof that any particular enlargement or voting reform would succeed.
His most direct institutional proposal was to replace unanimity with qualified-majority voting where unanimity blocked decisions. The Council already used qualified-majority voting for many matters. Its January 2018 explanation described a double majority of member states and population. His proposal can therefore be read as extending majority decisions to areas requiring unanimity; that is an interpretation of the essay’s broad wording.
Increasing communication across borders
The essay’s second thread concerned the quality of communication. It drew on the 2010 collective-intelligence study by Anita Woolley and colleagues, whose group-performance factor correlated with social sensitivity and more equal conversational turn-taking. Servan-Schreiber applied that idea to the limited attention Europeans give one another across national borders.
He suggested increasing people-to-people exchange and making English a common second language alongside each country’s own language. He also supported transnational European election lists as a way to make candidates address voters beyond their home nation. Civic service and a European army appeared as possible ways of widening interaction, rather than as experimentally established routes to greater intelligence.
These are the author’s proposals, with questions of legitimacy, implementation and effectiveness still to answer. Their forecasting connection is the demand to hear independent information and combine it deliberately. Our account of the later Europe as a Task discussion in Prague follows a different application: bringing human and AI forecasts into strategic decisions.
