19 April 2026
Let us continue the analysis of the report by Mario Draghi.
By the scale of its presentation and the political level at which it was introduced, this is clearly more than just an expert document. It is an attempt to recreate an effect comparable to the one once produced by the report of the Club of Rome.
As a statesman with extensive experience, Draghi is undoubtedly well acquainted with the history of that report and the impact it had on the political and intellectual elites of its time. It is entirely possible that he sought to provoke a similar reaction with his own report. Not merely to present an analysis of the situation, not merely to expose problems, but to create a sense of a historical turning point — to shake European elites and society itself.
How successful has he been?
The Club of Rome challenged the very idea of infinite growth, confronting the dominant economic doctrines of its era. Draghi’s report, despite all its ambition, remains confined within the boundaries of the current economic paradigm. It identifies the crisis of the European Union, yet offers no solutions that move beyond the very logic that produced this crisis in the first place. In this sense, it resembles Mikhail Gorbachev, who attempted to “restructure,” “restart,” and “accelerate” the Soviet system without touching its political, ideological, or economic foundations.
The report was prepared with the participation of specialists from various sectors of the European economy. However, there are strong reasons to believe that the key intellectual contribution came from the expert environment of the European Central Bank, which Draghi headed for many years. This becomes evident above all from the substance of the report itself. In particular, it completely ignores such areas as cryptocurrency, blockchain technologies, and decentralized financial systems — developments that today are attempting to shape an alternative architecture of the global financial order. Such an “omission” hardly appears accidental. Rather, it reflects the position of European financial institutions and the political establishment, which prefer not to notice phenomena capable of calling into question their own role and functions.
This approach is well known in the history of ideas. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his Philosophy of Religion, examined in detail the religions of India and China, nature cults, fetishism and animism, as well as the beliefs of Eskimos and Native Americans. Yet he effectively “overlooked” Islam, a religion which by that time had already spread across vast regions of the Middle East and Asia. He did so for what might be called “good reasons”: Islam simply did not fit into the philosophical architecture of the Absolute Spirit he had constructed, the culmination of which, in Hegel’s view, was Christianity.
In this sense, the omission of contemporary financial realities from Draghi’s report represents a form of institutional self-defense, whereby everything that cannot be integrated into the “ideal” conceptual framework is simply excluded from consideration. In doing so, the system protects not only its interests, but also its own worldview — one in which no place has been reserved for fundamentally new phenomena.
The European approach differs sharply from that of the United States, which on the contrary made several concrete steps toward the legalization of new financial instruments, effectively moving the cryptocurrency market from the periphery into the mainstream of the financial system. President Donald Trump even signed an executive order concerning dollar-backed stablecoins secured by U.S. government debt instruments.
But let us return to what is actually contained in the report, rather than what is absent from it.
Draghi takes particular pride in the fact that Europe has created a Single Market encompassing 440 million consumers and 23 million companies. Europe owes this achievement primarily to the consistent efforts of the politicians of the postwar era — from Charles de Gaulle to François Mitterrand, from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl — as well as to the architects and ideologues of European integration such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman.
It was they who laid the institutional foundations of a united Europe. Their vision made it possible to create not merely a common market, but an entire system of interdependence in which former enemies succeeded in building a sustainable model of cooperation. Thanks to their efforts, Europe was transformed into a space where the very possibility of armed conflict was pushed out of a continent that had once been the epicenter of two world wars.
Long ago, Max Weber described how social systems evolve. First come enthusiasts and reformers capable of destroying established assumptions and creating new meanings. They are followed by organizers, those who transform these ideas into stable institutions. After that begins the process of bureaucratization: the system hardens, becomes overgrown with norms, procedures, and regulations; there is ever less room for risk, creativity, and bold ideas. The system begins to resist change and increasingly rejects those who act outside established frameworks.
At this stage, as Joseph Schumpeter argued, continued development requires “creative destruction.” In other words, the emergence of new personalities capable of undermining established structures and restarting the dynamics of growth. Yet the system resists. It begins to reject — and even persecute — precisely those individuals who by their nature most closely resemble the reformers who once created the system itself. As Ernest Renan once observed metaphorically, if Jesus Christ appeared today, we would crucify him again.
The European project is highly illustrative in this regard.
Modern Europe was created by people for whom democracy, human rights, and freedom were not abstract categories, but part of deeply lived personal experience. This experience was forged through real ideological, political, and military confrontation both with nationalism, which in Germany and Italy took the extreme form of fascism, and with the communist project implemented in the USSR. These values emerged from inner doubts and ideological struggles; they were shaped through intense debates, suffering, and hardship, becoming part of profoundly lived personal experience. As famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky once wrote: “We did not learn dialectics from Hegel — it burst into our poetry through the clash of bayonets.”
That generation of fighters, visionaries, and builders has passed into history. In its place came a new generation: officials and bureaucrats. For them, liberal principles are no longer part of personal experience or existential reflection. They have become a learned canon, definitions from a textbook. The process resembles what often happens in religious traditions: words that once resonated deeply within the human soul gradually turn into mechanically repeated formulas, devoid of inner tension or the effort of faith.
Today’s generation of Western politicians consists largely of people raised in the comfort of prosperous societies and stable institutions. They grew up in environments where the foundations had already been created and secured. They did not have to pass through wars or radical crises of values. Nor did they even experience the turbulence of the 1990s in the way it unfolded in the USSR, Yugoslavia, or other parts of Eastern Europe — turbulence that generated entirely new social phenomena for Europe. In essence, this is a generation that entered politics within an already established order, one for which they neither fought nor which they themselves created. They were born into a ready-made system — or, as one says of royal children, with a “golden spoon in their mouth.”
Under such conditions, a particular type of European leader has been cultivated — one for whom the central concern is not ideas or values, but procedures. The meaning of political activity, in this mindset, lies not in living action but in the perfection of bureaucratic mechanisms.
Once, I arranged a meeting with a mid-level official from the European Commission. She was, I believe, Bulgarian, though her nationality is irrelevant. She suggested meeting in a café nearby. There she carefully explained why we could not meet inside the European Commission building. To do so, it would be necessary, months in advance, to complete a range of procedures: register through a special portal, enter the organization into the official register, and await approval by the relevant services. After the approval of the legal entity, another procedure would follow: obtaining a separate one-time pass for each representative of the organization. Only then could representatives of the organization gain access to the building.
According to her, even meeting not inside the European Commission building but in a café in central Brussels represented a serious political, legal, and reputational risk. Contact with a representative of a Belarusian organization not listed in the European Commission’s official registry could, in her view, be interpreted through the prism of conflict-of-interest regulations and potentially constitute a violation of existing rules and internal instructions.
Well, one may say that such fears are understandable in the case of a low-ranking bureaucrat, that often fear even their own shadow. But let us take Ursula von der Leyen, the highest-ranking European official. Last year she made a speach in Aachen on the occasion of receiving the prestigious Charlemagne Prize. In her speech she said many correct things about European unity and about the need to strengthen it. To illustrate her points, she repeatedly referred to the life experience of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis during the Second World War.
The experiences of Anne Frank undoubtedly possess immense historical and artistic value. But what struck me was something else. In that speech, there was nothing about Ursula von der Leyen’s own experience, her personal struggles, or her inner conflicts. At some point, it seemed to me that perhaps she simply had nothing to say. It appeared as though her life had contained no profound upheavals; she had never been forced to make an existential choice, never stood, in the words of Martin Heidegger, “in the clearing of Being” or “at the edge of Nothingness.”
Do not misunderstand me. We can only welcome the fact that a contemporary European politician is a person born into a prosperous society, in a developed country, surrounded by comfort, care, and security. And in order to establish any emotional connection with the audience, such a politician must rely on stories drawn from the lives of others.
The real question is different. Is such a person truly capable of understanding those who, for the sake of values, had to choose between life and death, freedom and prison, prosperity and the loss of everything? Those who endured prisons, beatings, and torture? Can such people be understood not from books and diaries, but through personal experience itself?
And here again comparison with the United States arises naturally. A month ago, we arranged meetings at the White House with the head of the National Security Council, Andrew Baker, and two special assistants to the president, Charles McLaughlin IV and Wayne Wall. Upon entering the White House, I needed only a paper ID document — and even that requirement, I was told, had been introduced because of the beginning of the war with Iran. Before that, entry into the presidential administration could be obtained simply by presenting a driver’s license.
No registrations in official registries. No multilayered procedures. And certainly no fear that the mere fact of a meeting might later be interpreted incorrectly by someone. To enter the building of the United States Senate for a meeting with Senate President Chuck Grassley, no documents at all were required — it was sufficient simply to pass through a metal detector.
This difference in approach is reflected most clearly in the technology sector, which requires minimal bureaucracy and relies upon a culture of risk-taking. Europe, with a market of 440 million people, has 23 million companies, while the United States, with a population of roughly 330 million, has around 33 million businesses.
Even more revealing is the fact that despite having 110 million more inhabitants, Europe has not produced a single company over the last fifty years with a capitalization exceeding 100 billion euros. During the same period, the United States produced 65 companies surpassing the 100-billion-dollar threshold, while China produced 12. Six American companies even crossed the one-trillion-dollar valuation mark.
This is no longer merely a matter of technological lag. Europe has effectively fallen out of entire sectors, such as digital platforms, which today determine the rules of the game and control access to markets, data, and users.
If a system lacks a culture that rewards risk, if risk is perceived even in the simple act of deviating from procedure, then the space for development, and especially for breakthrough innovation, inevitably narrows. Under such conditions, preference is given not to the new, but to what is already established. Mario Draghi’s recommendations fit precisely within this paradigm: the emphasis is placed on traditional sectors, above all industry, rather than on new and disruptive directions.
Thus, contrary to the classical thesis of Karl Marx that the economic base determines the political superstructure, we are increasingly witnessing the opposite relationship: it is the degree of freedom and the character of regulation that begin to shape economic reality itself.
The “bureaucratization of freedom” changes the very nature of the business environment. Where every deviation from procedure is perceived as risk, the willingness to experiment disappears. Where initiative requires endless layers of approval, initiative itself eventually ceases to arise. In such an environment, the entrepreneur no longer thinks in categories of possibility, but in categories of permissibility.
Draghi’s report contains what at first glance appears to be an attractive idea: reducing the role of bureaucrats in the allocation of funds, creating a kind of “ERC for institutions,” and introducing “EU Chair” positions in order to attract leading scientists by granting them the status of European officials.
Yet if the existing bureaucratic mechanisms remain unchanged, this will almost certainly lead to one of two outcomes: either the system will expel the scientist because he does not fit into its operational logic, or he will adapt and gradually become yet another bureaucrat, merely one with an academic title.
This applies to every sphere, from support for business, science, and innovation to support for democracy itself, where funding is often awarded not to those capable of taking intellectual or political risks, but to those who know how to fill out applications correctly and comply with formal reporting requirements.
Such approaches rarely produce the results for which they are supposedly designed. They do not create an environment for new ideas or new people. This is why neither Steve Jobs nor Elon Musk could emerge in Europe. They would be crushed by the bureaucratic machine. And in Belarus, they would most likely end up in prison altogether.
This is also why politicians of the stature of de Gaulle or Mitterrand have been replaced in Europe by figures such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron; why Adenauer and Kohl gave way to Gerhard Schröder and Olaf Scholz. These are politicians of a different historical type. To borrow a biblical image, they are “neither cold nor hot.” They lack the passion and political will that defined their predecessors. They are capable of managing an already functioning system, but incapable of transforming it.
And if figures comparable in spirit and character to the founders of postwar Europe were to emerge today, they would inevitably be perceived as threats to the existing order — because reformers are inconvenient. They demand action precisely where regulation and procedure have already become entrenched.
Let us return once again to the United States, where we see Donald Trump attempting to destroy conventional notions of political style and law, bringing back into politics not only the debate over the relationship between state interests and universal human values, but also the very capacity for action itself.
The military campaign against Iran, arrest of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and the effective maintenance of a blockade against Cuba provoke enormous controversy. So too does his dialogue with Alexander Lukashenko through John Coale. On the one hand, such engagement causes irritation because it can, in a certain sense, legitimize the unlawful ruler of Belarus. On the other hand, these efforts have resulted in the release of approximately five hundred political hostages — an undeniable humanitarian achievement.
These actions raise a fundamental question: what should be done in situations where a dictator commits political murders, imprisons people, employs torture, deprives citizens of property, and becomes the cause of mass emigration? What is to be done when the ruler of a relatively weak state, economically and militarily, openly ignores appeals from the leaders of the world’s major powers?
Are European countries capable of employing real instruments of pressure, or is all their strength dissipated in statements on social media? Are they capable of doing anything beyond posting condemnations on Twitter when thousands of young people are publicly executed simply because they opposed violence against unarmed demonstrators, as happened in Iran? Are they capable of finding an adequate response to the challenges identified in Draghi’s report?
“The answer, my friend,” as Bob Dylan sang, “is blowing in the wind.”
Or perhaps it is not blowing away after all. Perhaps they will still find an answer.
To be continued.
