The Slow Granary: The Planning Horizon of Europe

Europe mobilises against acute threats, whether a rival causes them or a condition does, but it does not keep a future against slow ones: drought, ageing and the slow capture of land and housing. Following the essay Grenier ou musée ?, this note asks why no granary against slow threats has been built at European scale. It argues that the deciding variable is tempo, not authorship. The EU Treaty gives acute threats a majority route through Article 122 and places the core decisions of every slow granary (water quantity, land use, social security, property) under unanimity or outside the Union's competence. Three cases, water, social insurance and housing, and a comparison with the generation of granaries built between the 1920s and the 1950s support the claim. The Affordable Housing Act proposed in September 2026, which licenses use restrictions for five years at a time while recommending land policy only in soft law, shows it in legal form. The note states conditions and refutation tests rather than a programme.