The Perpetual Diet

I. Regensburg, 1663

On 20 January 1663 the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire convened in Regensburg. The occasion was the Turkish threat; the emperor needed money and troops. But the assembly became entangled in a dispute over the rights of the imperial estates. Because nobody could agree, nobody went home. The Diet sat for 143 years, until 1806. It was called the Perpetual Diet.

The princes soon stopped coming in person. They sent envoys who had to obtain instructions before they were allowed to vote. Sessions were held twice a week, with two to three months of holidays a year. Much time went into questions of rank. In 1769 Hamburg quarrelled with Bremen over who might sit in front in the council of cities. When Prussia invaded Saxony in August 1756, the Diet needed almost five months to decide on imperial action against the aggressor. At the Imperial Chamber Court in Wetzlar, where the young Goethe sat as a trainee in 1772, thousands of cases awaited judgement, some for generations.

Contemporaries judged harshly. Samuel Pufendorf called the Empire in 1667 an irregular body resembling a monster. Hegel wrote in a manuscript around 1800: “Germany is no longer a state.”

Fairness also requires the other verdict, that of more recent scholarship. For a century and a half the Empire kept the peace between Catholics and Protestants, because in matters of faith nobody could be outvoted. It protected small principalities and imperial cities against the large ones. It was a legal order, not a power state. Some historians see it as a forerunner of the European Union. That is precisely why a look at Regensburg is worthwhile.

II. Brussels, 2026

This week the EU heads of state and government meet in Brussels. On the table is the budget for 2028 to 2034. The Commission had proposed almost two trillion euros, 1.26 per cent of the Union’s economic output. Last weekend the Irish Council Presidency turned this into 1.83 trillion, eight per cent less in real terms. Chancellor Merz rejected it at once: it was “no basis for an agreement”. Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria want several hundred billion less. Sixteen other states want no cuts at all. The decision must be unanimous.

So is the EU a Moloch devouring ever more money? Measured in money, no. Its budget is a little over one per cent of economic output; the German federal budget alone is twice the size of an annual EU budget. In 2025 Germany paid in a net 22 billion euros or so, half a per cent of its economic output. It is becoming more expensive mainly because from 2028 the Covid debts must be repaid, debts all member states took on together in 2020, Germany included.

The real scandal lies not in the total but in the distribution. In the Irish compromise, competitiveness, research and defence are cut by 13 per cent, the networks for transport, energy and digital by ten billion. Agricultural policy and cohesion funds lose only three per cent and still make up more than half the budget. An EU diplomat called it a “financial la-la land” serving twentieth-century priorities. This is Mancur Olson at European level: the well-organised vested interests of the past defend their share, and the future has no lobby.

III. The Slow Agony

Two years ago Mario Draghi calculated what the EU lacks: 750 to 800 billion euros of additional investment per year, more than at the time of the Marshall Plan. His warning was blunt: either Europe acts, or a slow agony awaits. The German answer came promptly from the finance minister of the day: Germany would not agree to this.

A year later Draghi took stock. Europe was in a worse position than before; its growth model was fading. “That is not governance, it is complacency.” Of his 383 recommendations, according to an independent count, just over eleven per cent had been fully implemented. At least in March 2026 the EU substantially cut back its reporting obligations on sustainability and supply chains. So it can correct itself. It just does so more slowly than the world is changing.

In February we examined Draghi’s report in “The Patient Who Does Not Know His Illness”: the diagnosis is brilliant, the therapy prescribes more of the same. State programmes do not correct themselves; they generate new programmes. Nothing has changed. The money is not only lacking; it flows into the wrong pots and stays there. And what is invented in Europe scales elsewhere, as four investigations showed in “Europa erfindet, andere skalieren” (German).

IV. Paris: Bankruptcy in Slow Motion

France has had five prime ministers since 2022. One of them, Sébastien Lecornu, resigned in October 2025 after fourteen hours and was reappointed four days later. Since the dissolution of parliament in 2024 the National Assembly has been split into three blocs, left, centre and Rassemblement National, and none has a majority. The government passed the 2026 budget only by invoking three times a constitutional article that bypasses a vote. On Friday the finance committee rejected the revenue part of the 2027 budget by 31 votes to 3. On Tuesday the plenary debate begins.

The figures are unsparing. Public debt stands at 119 per cent of economic output. The deficit will reach 5.4 per cent this year; three would be allowed. Next year France will spend 91 billion euros on interest alone, more than on education and far more than on defence. Ten-year bond yields rose in early October to almost five per cent, the highest since 2002. And France now pays more interest than Italy and Greece. Ten years ago nobody would have thought that possible.

The European Central Bank has an emergency instrument for such cases, but it comes with conditions: a country in an excessive deficit procedure that fails to correct course has no claim. France is in an excessive deficit procedure. In April 2027 the country elects a new president. Marine Le Pen may run and polls at 31 to 36 per cent in the first round.

V. Berlin: The Heart and Its Rhythm

Germany is in better shape, but not in good shape. Public debt is 63.5 per cent; growth is expected to reach 1.3 per cent this year. It is carried by the 500-billion-euro special fund, that is, by debt, while companies have recently cut their investment in machinery again. The deficit is rising from three per cent last year to an expected 4.7 per cent in 2028. The economics minister says: “The situation remains fragile.”

Politically the situation is not fragile but cracked. In the October ARD-DeutschlandTrend only ten per cent are satisfied with the federal government, fewer than ever. The AfD stands at 27 per cent nationally, the Union at 20. In Saxony-Anhalt the AfD reached 43.8 per cent in September; a state premier will be elected there in December. What we described in “Heart Disease. And Nobody Operates.” is not a peculiarly German problem. It is only the German edition. And Berlin long used Brussels as an extension of its own interests. In 2013 the chancellor personally prevented stricter CO₂ limits for cars, as we described in “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies”.

VI. The Engine Sputters

For fifty years the EU was a compromise machine between Germany and France. When the two agreed, the others followed or were compensated. Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing made a phone call, shook hands, and it happened, as we described in “The Lost Courage”. Today the two cylinders run against each other.

In June 2026 Merz informed Macron that the joint fighter jet, the most important armaments project of both countries, was dead. On the trade agreement with South America, France voted against in January, Germany in favour. Berlin publicly rejects Macron’s wish for joint European debt. On the EU budget Germany leads the frugal camp; France demands an ambitious budget. And Merz seeks closeness to Giorgia Meloni in Rome.

That would be bearable if at least one of the two were strong. But Paris can no longer pass a budget, and Berlin can no longer push through a reform. An engine with two weak cylinders working against each other drives nothing. It idles. The European cloud GAIA-X, announced by Berlin and Paris in 2019 as the “Airbus of the cloud”, already failed this way. “The Lost Courage” contained the sentence that could also stand over Regensburg: integration has eroded national capacity to act without creating a European one. The result is a vacuum in which nobody can decide. When Berlin and Paris presented a joint definition of digital sovereignty in June 2026, it bound nobody, and their “sovereign” clouds run on American technology. We called this “The Borrowed Sovereignty”.

VII. Who Is Moving

While Berlin and Paris block each other, Europe’s centre of gravity is shifting north and east. In 2025 Poland spent almost 4.5 per cent of its economic output on defence, more than any other NATO country. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Denmark follow. From the European defence loan programme SAFE, Poland receives 43.7 billion euros, almost three times as much as France. Germany is not taking part in the programme.

Italy, long the problem child, has had a stable government for years, has cut its deficit to almost three per cent and now pays less interest than France. Spain grew by 2.8 per cent last year but votes again at the end of November. And in the new group of Europe’s five largest military powers, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom, which is not even an EU member, sit as equals beside Germany and France.

Where things moved too slowly for some groups of states, they have gone ahead before: with the unitary patent, with the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. The Europe of the future may arise not in the hall of the 27 but in such side rooms.

VIII. What Regensburg Teaches

The Holy Roman Empire did not perish from an attack. It outlived itself. While negotiations went on in Regensburg, others acted: Prussia and Austria as great powers within the Empire, France from outside. In 1803, 45 of 51 imperial cities lost their independence; in 1806 the south German states joined Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine. On 6 August 1806 Francis II laid down the imperial crown. Nobody fought for the Empire.

Three lessons can be drawn. First: a union that cannot decide is not abolished but bypassed, by its own strong members and by powers outside. Today they are called Washington and Beijing. In “What Shock Does Europe Still Need?” we put it this way: in an emergency the common institutions are not strengthened; they are bypassed. Second: where decision is lacking, ceremony grows. What the dispute over rank was in Regensburg is today the cultivated shallow talk of general helplessness, at summits as on television. And just as envoys sat in Regensburg instead of princes, in Brussels every contact with the grassroots is second-hand. In “Das Raumschiff, das nicht landen kann” and “Völlig schwerelos schwebt das Raumschiff” (both German) we described it like this: the apparatus talks to itself and calls it politics.

Third: debt takes away freedom. Nuremberg, the city where the imperial regalia were kept for almost four centuries and where, under the Golden Bull, every new king was to hold his first court, was so indebted in 1797 that an imperial commission took over its administration. Nine years later it was a Bavarian provincial town. A country that spends more on interest than on education does not lose its freedom at a stroke, but year by year.

And yet: for 143 years the Empire kept the peace between the confessions and protected the small against the great. The EU, too, is not nothing. It holds together peace, law and a market of 450 million people. The danger is not that it falls apart. The danger is that it remains, administers and sits, and that nobody listens to it any more. In “Half Wisdom” we wrote the sentence for it: every single step reasonable; the sum is disappearance.

IX. What Could Remain

Europe needs no new founding myth but a different construction. Three steps would be possible without waiting for the next treaty reform.

The first: spending with an expiry date. Every subsidy, every funding programme lapses automatically after seven years unless someone demonstrates its effect. What we proposed for German regulations applies all the more to the European budget. Agricultural support would then have to justify itself just like research, and the future would at least have a chance against vested interests. The expiry date is precisely the self-correction that state programmes lack. It means neither more Europe nor less, but a Europe that has to learn. In “Europa und die Megamaschine” (German) we called such rules negative feedback: brakes that engage by themselves, even when their inventors are long no longer watching.

The second: coalitions of the willing with an open door. Where unanimity blocks, the states that want to move ahead go further together, in defence, energy networks and research, and anyone can join later. That is no break with Europe but what has already worked with the unitary patent. What is meant is not the coalition of the willing for Ukraine, whose commitments have remained vague to this day, but groups that act bindingly. We described the tools for this in March in “What Europe Can Do Now”: eight measures for which nobody needs Hungary’s consent. Only the open door is new. It is a third way between a treaty reform that fails on unanimity and a dismantling that makes Europe smaller still.

The third is the most uncomfortable, because it begins with ourselves. Germany demands cuts and rejects joint investment while itself taking on 500 billion euros of debt for its own country. France demands European solidarity and cannot get its own budget through its own parliament. Both point to Brussels; Brussels points to the member states. As long as responsibility migrates in this way, no summit will help.

The Empire did not die of its enemies but because its largest members no longer needed it. Europe faces the same fate if Berlin and Paris go on believing that the other must move first.