I think what we ought to do, since the French,  German, and Italian left seem so bereft of ideas now, is to create a manifesto for them, a set of policy proposals that would seriously address the problems of slow growth and high unemployment, but in a way that preserves the traditional European commitment to social justice.

There's potentially plenty of material available - Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, for example, are all countries that have recently faced economic crises and recaptured economic dynamism without totally succumbing to neoliberal nostrums. We might examine what lessons they hold for the bigger economies. We might also investigate what left policy intellectuals have come up with.