They call them the “Eurostar Generation.” They are the young French professionals who have bought one-way tickets on the Eurostar train from Paris to London.
And when they get to London they are often amazed at how quickly they can find jobs.
Politicians are noticing, as Anne Applebaum reports. The highlight of the current French presidential election has to have been the election rally of candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in London to a crowd of 2,500 French expats.
He called London “one of the great French cities,” and with 300,000 French living and working in London, he may be right.
The French ex-pats, along with the notorious “Polish plumbers,” are wrecking the social welfare state that the left has tried to mandate in Europe.
For the past decade, French, German and other European leaders have tried to unify European tax laws and regulations, the better to "even out the playing field" — or (depending on your point of view) to make life equally difficult everywhere.
But humans are a wandering species, and they naturally migrate abroad to find greener pastures, whatever the dictates of the rich and the powerful.
Up to now, the new Europe has lacked a European “idea,” according to Applebaum.
Almost by accident, the European Union may have created a new kind of European citizen instead: mobile, English-speaking, Internet-using, perhaps with the same nostalgia for Krakow or Dijon that first-generation New Yorkers feel for Missouri or Mississippi but nevertheless willing to live pretty much anywhere.
And that could be the way that Europe shakes off its lassitude and finds a new cultural and economic vigor.
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