The Patient Who Does Not Know His Disease

I. The Best Diagnosis That Changes Nothing

In September 2024, Mario Draghi presented a report intended to frighten Europe into action. Four hundred pages, 383 reform proposals, one number that says it all: 30 percent. That is the GDP gap between the EU and the United States — grown from 15 percent in 2002 to double that within two decades. Productivity is declining. Of the world's 50 largest technology companies, four are European. In the last fifty years, not a single company with a market capitalisation exceeding 100 billion euros has emerged in Europe. Not one.

The diagnosis is brilliant. The figures are alarming. The analysis is interconnected, data-driven, intellectually honest. Draghi describes a vicious circle: a static industrial structure leads to lower research spending, which in turn reinforces specialisation in mature — that is, dying — technologies. Europe does not innovate too little; it commercialises too little. The ideas originate here; the companies emerge there.

And then — after 400 pages of razor-sharp analysis — the therapy: more investment, more integration, more coordination, more qualified majority decisions, more capital markets union, more common debt. 800 billion euros per year — more than the Marshall Plan.

More of everything. Except the one question that would make everything else unnecessary.

II. The Question Draghi Does Not Ask

In 1907, Franz Oppenheimer drew a distinction so simple it sounds almost trivial — and so sharp that the entire discipline of economics has kept it locked in its poison cabinet for over a century. He distinguished between the economic means — labour and voluntary exchange — and the political means — appropriation through coercion. Every state, Oppenheimer said, rests on the political means. Including the democratic state. Including the European one.

Read through this lens, something remarkable happens to the Draghi report: the diagnosis confirms Oppenheimer on every page. But the therapy contradicts him on every line.

Draghi describes an EU suffocated by regulation — and recommends better regulation. He describes decision-making processes that take 19 months — and recommends faster decision-making processes. The passerelle clause, which would extend qualified majority voting, itself requires unanimity. This is not a reform proposal. It is a Möbius strip.

The question Draghi does not ask is: What if the blockade is not a flaw in the system, but the system itself?

III. The Disease Is Called the Political Means

Draghi's report describes with impressive precision what happens when 27 states attempt to conduct a common economic policy while each protects its national interests. The result: fragmentation, duplication, over-regulation, paralysis. But he does not name the cause: the political means does not become more effective when multiplied across 27 states. It becomes 27 times more dysfunctional.

Draghi's solution: create a 28th coercive apparatus that stands above the others. More Europe. More central coordination. That is like prescribing better whisky to an alcoholic.

IV. What Really Distinguishes Europe from America

Draghi cites the number: 30 percent GDP gap. But he conceals — or does not know — where the American advantage truly originates. Not from better state coordination. But from the opposite: from the fact that in the United States, millions of people do things that no state has coordinated.

The American innovation engine works not because of the state, but despite the state. The garage in Palo Alto where Apple was born was not an IPCEI project. Google was not the result of European research coordination. Amazon was not financed by a capital markets union. Silicon Valley is the greatest laboratory of the economic means the world has ever seen: people who come together voluntarily, take risks, fail, start again — without waiting 19 months for a permit.

Draghi recommends Europe to coordinate better. He should recommend coordinating less. But he cannot say that, because then the report would be three pages long instead of 400 — and the European Commission that commissioned it would have no further justification for its existence.

V. The 800 Billion Euro Question

The real question is not whether Europe can raise 800 billion. The question is: who decides where it flows?

When the state decides — it is the political means. Lobbyists, bureaucrats, national interests and electoral cycles determine which technologies are funded. The history of European industrial policy is a history of such decisions: Concorde instead of software, diesel subsidies instead of electromobility.

When the market decides — it is the economic means. Millions of people decide with their money, their labour, their creativity. Bad decisions correct themselves — through losses, failures, learning processes. The bad decisions of the state do not correct themselves — they generate new programmes to repair the damage of the old ones.

Draghi wants 800 billion. The question is not the sum. The question is the means.

VI. What Draghi Does Not Know About Inventors

There is a blind spot in the Draghi report that is symptomatic of the entire document. The report speaks of innovation, technology transfer, commercialisation, the gap between research and market. But it never speaks of inventors.

Not once in 400 pages does the report ask: Why does a European inventor leave Europe? Why does he file his patent and sell it to America? Why does he found his company not in Munich but in San José? What happens to an engineer who develops a technology that could transform an entire industry — and then waits 19 months for a permit while a Chinese competitor is already producing his idea in series?

Every European inventor knows the answer. It is not: too little capital markets union. It is: too much state. Too much regulation. Too much political means. Too many people who do not invent, do not produce, do not trade — but who get to decide who may invent, produce, and trade.

Draghi does not know this because he has never been one. He was ECB president, Italian prime minister, Goldman Sachs adviser. He has spent his entire life in the engine room of the political means. He knows the levers, the valves, the pressure gauges. But he does not know the sea on which the ship sails.

VII. Lisbon, Europe 2020, Draghi — The Repetition

The Draghi report stands in a line. The Lisbon Strategy of 2000 aimed to make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010. The result: the financial crisis. Europe 2020 sought "smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth." The result: the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit, Covid. Now Draghi: 383 reform proposals, 800 billion per year.

The pattern is always the same: a brilliant report diagnoses the symptoms. It recommends more integration, more investment, more coordination. The member states nod. The Commission drafts action plans. Implementation fails on precisely the blockades the report diagnosed. Ten years later, the next report appears.

Why? Because none of these reports asks the fundamental question: What if the problem is not too little Europe, but too much state? The European Commission commissioned a report to explain why Europe needs more European Commission. The result is not surprising.

VIII. What Draghi Should Have Written

Let us imagine for a moment that Mario Draghi had read Oppenheimer. The report would have been three pages long. The diagnosis: Europe does not suffer from too little coordination. It suffers from too much political means. The result is the systematic obstruction of the economic means: voluntary cooperation, free exchange, spontaneous innovation.

The therapy: not more Europe, but less state. Not 800 billion in state investment, but the removal of obstacles blocking private investment. Not faster approval processes, but fewer approval requirements. Not better coordination between 27 bureaucracies, but the elimination of the need to coordinate at all.

But no one commissioned by the European Commission can write this report. Because this report would read: the solution is not you. The solution is your absence.

IX. The Real Illusion

A year after his report, Draghi said: "The year 2025 will be remembered as the year this illusion burst." He meant the illusion that Europe's 450 million consumers automatically translate into power and influence.

But the real illusion is a different one. It is the illusion that the problems created by the political means can be solved with more political means. That freedom can be replaced by coordination. That 383 reform proposals are better than a single freedom: the freedom to act without permission.

Oppenheimer called his goal the Liberal Cooperative — an order in which people cooperate voluntarily, without a state prescribing how. Draghi calls his goal a "renewed European partnership" — an order in which 27 states coordinate more efficiently what they would be better off not coordinating at all.

The difference is not one of degree. It is fundamental. It is the difference between the economic means and the political means. Between voluntary cooperation and organised coercion. Between what Europe could be — and what it is.

Draghi has diagnosed the symptoms. For the disease, he lacks the language. That language exists. It is kept in the poison cabinet.