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 set up from scratch in the EU has grown to a market capitalisation exceeding 100 billion euros. 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. The university researches; Silicon Valley earns.

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. He describes national blockades — and recommends overcoming them through instruments that are themselves subject to precisely those blockades. 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. He describes the result: fragmentation, duplication, over-regulation, paralysis. But he does not name the cause: the political means — the ability to redistribute resources through coercion — does not become more effective when multiplied across 27 states. It becomes 27 times more dysfunctional.

Every single blockade Draghi describes is a manifestation of the political means. The 19-month legislative process: 27 states fighting over whose coercive apparatus prevails. The absent capital markets union: 27 national regulatory bodies protecting their jurisdiction. The inability to issue common debt: each state wants to deploy the coercion of others without surrendering its own. The flood of regulation: every rule is the trace of a political compromise between 27 coercive apparatuses neutralising one another.

Draghi's solution: create a 28th coercive apparatus that stands above the others. More Europe. More central coordination. More common governance. In other words: potentiate the political means in order to solve the problems that the political means has created.

This is like prescribing an alcoholic better whiskey.

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. Not from more industrial policy. Not from cleverer regulation. 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 Los Altos 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.

This does not mean the American state plays no role. DARPA, NIH, the defence budget — all have sparked innovations. But they sparked them; they did not coordinate them. The difference is fundamental: sparking means throwing a stone into water and letting the waves do what waves do. Coordinating means prescribing to each individual wave where it may move.

Draghi recommends that Europe coordinate better. He should recommend that it coordinate 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 reason to exist.

V. The 800 Billion Euro Question

The report's boldest demand: 800 billion euros per year in additional investment. More than the Marshall Plan. A volume not seen since the 1960s. Draghi's logic: Europe needs an investment surge that boosts productivity, which creates the fiscal space that finances the investment. Even the report admits this calculation is circular.

But the real question is not whether Europe can raise 800 billion. The question is: who decides where they flow?

If the state decides — then it is the political means. Then lobbyists, bureaucrats, national interests, and electoral cycles determine which technologies are promoted, which companies receive subsidies, which sectors count as "strategic." The history of European industrial policy is a history of such decisions: Minitel instead of the internet, Airbus instead of software, diesel subsidies instead of electric mobility.

If the market decides — then it is the economic means. Then millions of people decide with their money, their labour, their creativity where resources flow. Not all decisions are good. But the bad ones correct themselves — through losses, bankruptcies, learning. The bad decisions of the state do not correct themselves — they generate new programmes to repair the damage of the old.

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. It speaks of technology transfer, commercialisation, the gap between research and market. It speaks of start-ups, venture capital, scaling. 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 not: too few common bonds. 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. He was Italian prime minister. He was vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. 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 — the millions of people who work, invent, trade, and who are best left alone.

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, and the warning that Europe is losing its "right to exist."

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 has diagnosed. Ten years later, the next report appears. The diagnosis is sharper. The therapy is the same. The outcome will be the same.

Why? Because none of these reports asks the fundamental question: What if the problem is not too little Europe, but too much state? What if the 19-month legislative process is not an optimisation problem but a system error? What if the solution lies not in better coordination but in coordinating less — and permitting more?

This question is never asked, because it would abolish the commissioner. The European Commission has commissioned a report to explain why Europe needs more European Commission. The result is — unsurprisingly — a report that recommends more European Commission.

VIII. What Draghi Should Have Written

Let us imagine for a moment that Mario Draghi had read Oppenheimer. Not as intellectual history. Not as a footnote. But as what it is: an analysis that explains everything the Draghi report describes but does not understand.

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. Twenty-seven states, each with its coercive apparatus, its bureaucracy, its regulatory agencies, its subsidies, its protective measures. The result is not fragmentation — fragmentation is merely the symptom. 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 a capital markets union through regulation, but capital market freedom through deregulation. 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. For 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 competitiveness strategy for Europe" — 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 stands in the poison cabinet.