Land of Hope and Glory

The Coronation March

Edward Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory" was written in 1902 for the coronation of Edward VII — for the British Empire at the height of its power, when a quarter of the world's land mass and a fifth of humanity stood under the British flag. It is the most triumphant hymn any European country has ever sung about itself. And it is a hymn that is performed today at the Last Night of the Proms — in a country that has lost its Empire, left Europe, lets its infrastructure decay, and whose National Health Service is collapsing.

But this essay is not about Britain alone. It is about all of Europe. For all of Europe is a Land of Hope and Glory — a continent that invented modernity, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, human rights, the welfare state, modern science. And that now watches as others build the future while it tends its museum.

Europe is 450 million people in the EU, 67 million in the United Kingdom, another 100 million in the Western Balkans, Switzerland, Norway, and Ukraine. Taken together, it is the world's second-largest economy. It has produced more Nobel laureates than any other continent. It has the finest universities, the deepest traditions, the richest cultures. And it barely manages to build technology companies with a market capitalisation above one hundred billion euros — according to the Draghi Report, not a single one among them was built from scratch in the last fifty years.

That is not bad luck. It is a pattern. And the pattern takes a different form in every European country — but always has the same core.

The Common Disease

Before we examine the symptoms country by country, it is worth naming the disease that underlies them. Europe suffers from a combination of five pathologies that reinforce one another.

First: demographic decline. The EU will reach its population peak in 2026 — 453 million — and then begin to shrink. Without immigration, one in three Europeans would vanish by 2100. Italy and Spain will lose half their populations by then. The EU loses a million workers every year. And the best, who could fill that gap, are arriving ever more rarely: the net inflow of technology professionals into Europe halved between 2022 and 2024 — from 52,000 to 26,000 per year.

Second: institutional sclerosis. Europe regulates more than it innovates. The Draghi Report of September 2024 summarised it in a single figure: the investment gap between the EU and the US amounts to 800 billion euros annually. Not because Europe is poor — but because its money does not work. The share of European venture capital funds in the global total: 5 per cent. The US: 52 per cent. China: 40 per cent. Europe's savers save more than Americans — but their money sits in fixed-term deposits rather than startups.

Third: energy policy self-mutilation. Europe's electricity prices are two to three times higher than in the US, gas prices four to five times. This is partly geography — Europe has fewer fossil resources. But it is also politics: the simultaneous abandonment of nuclear power and coal without adequate replacement, the importation of Russian gas to the point of dependency, the refusal to develop domestic resources.

Fourth: the talent exodus. Thirty per cent of Europe's most successful technology companies migrate to the US. Not because the weather is better — but because capital flows faster there, regulation is thinner, taxes are lower, and the willingness to accept failure is greater. Europe trains some of the world's brightest minds — and delivers them free of charge to its competitors.

Fifth — and this is the core: the inability to decide. Europe is not poor, not stupid, not uneducated. It is indecisive. Every reform is talked to death, every innovation regulated to death, every decision conferenced to death. Not from malice, but from a culture of risk avoidance so deep-seated that it is perceived as the normal state of affairs. Europe has forgotten that doing nothing is also a risk — and usually the greatest one.

Germany: The Engine That Stutters

Germany is Europe's biggest problem because it is Europe's most important country. A quarter of EU economic output, the industrial heart of the continent, the export champion, the stability anchor. When Germany works, Europe works. Germany does not work.

The diagnosis is well known and is not being made here for the first time: 215 billion euros of municipal investment backlog. 110 billion in railway maintenance arrears. Approval procedures that take decades. Sixteen federal states defending their educational incompetence as though it were constitutional law. A party system that systematically excludes outsiders. And above it all a mentality that Erhard called the welfare state and Kant called self-incurred immaturity: the conviction that the state will sort things out if one just keeps quiet enough.

What makes Germany Europe's main problem is not its weakness, but the fact that it exports its weakness. The German debt brake becomes European fiscal orthodoxy. German energy policy — the nuclear exit, gas dependency on Russia, the rushed energy transition — becomes Europe's energy price problem. And German decision avoidance becomes the benchmark for what Europe dares to attempt.

Germany has a choice between two roles: engine or brake. For at least fifteen years, it has chosen the brake.

France: The Centralised Paralysis

France is the opposite of Germany in many respects — and arrives at the same place. Where Germany decentralises and blocks, France centralises and blocks. Everything goes through Paris, and Paris decides slowly, splendidly, and inconsequentially.

The Fifth Republic has created a system that can tolerate exactly one reformer at a time — the President. When the President reforms, the streets burn. When he does not reform, the country rots. Macron tried both: he pushed through labour market reform and forced pension reform — and lost the country's trust in the process. France now has a reformed labour market, a reformed pension system, and a National Assembly ground down between three blocs, none of which has a majority.

France's core problem is older than Macron: it is a country that considers state grandeur synonymous with national grandeur. Government spending exceeds 57 per cent of GDP — the highest of any major Western economy. The education system is egalitarian in theory and a class society in practice, where the Grandes Écoles reproduce an elite that has been recruiting itself for generations. The banlieues are places where French universalism stops — not de jure, but de facto. And industry, once the proudest in Europe, has undergone the same process of attrition as British and German industry, only under the cover of a state that presents itself as the guarantor of prosperity while slowly consuming it.

France's deficit in 2024 stood at 5.8 per cent of GDP — almost double the Maastricht limit. Public debt exceeds 110 per cent of GDP. And the political landscape is so fragmented that no government has a stable majority. The Grande Nation is a nation bloquée — a blocked nation that drowns out its blockage with rhetoric.

Great Britain: The Island That Left

The United Kingdom did something no other European country has done: it left Europe. Not geographically — the islands are still there — but politically, economically, institutionally. Brexit was Europe's most spectacular act of self-harm, and it weakened both sides.

Britain carried out Brexit to be free — free from Brussels regulation, free for its own trade agreements, free for a global role beyond the continent. Six years later, the balance looks different. The British economy grows more slowly than most EU states. Trade with the EU, still by far the largest trading partner, is burdened by customs bureaucracy that did not exist before. The promised trade deals with the US, China, and India have either failed to materialise or are irrelevant. And domestic regulation has not become less but different — often more complex, because it must replace the old EU framework without being allowed to copy it.

What Britain costs Europe is not merely the missing economic output — it is 67 million people who have fallen out of the common market. It is one of the world's best financial markets, no longer available to finance European innovation. It is a diplomatic heavyweight with a seat on the UN Security Council that no longer sits at the European table. And it is a signal to the world: Europe is not attractive enough to retain its own members.

Britain's own problems, meanwhile, are typically European: infrastructure that has been underfunded for decades, a National Health Service operating at breaking point, a housing market that has become the island's greatest wealth transfer machine, and a political class oscillating between nostalgic imperialism and bewildered pragmatism. Elgar still sounds. But the Empire he celebrated has long since become a museum exhibit.

Italy: The Beautiful Ruin

Italy is the European country that is hardest to criticise because one loves it most — and that simultaneously shows the clearest symptoms. Italy has the highest median age in Europe: 49 years, rising to 53 by 2050. It has the lowest birth rate in the EU. And it will lose half its population by 2100 — from 59 million to under 30 million, if nothing fundamental changes.

Italy's problem is not a lack of intelligence. It is the gulf between what Italians can do individually and what their institutions deliver collectively. The Italian Mittelstand — the small and medium-sized enterprises in the North, the craftspeople, the engineers, the fashion houses, the food producers — is one of the most innovative and adaptable in the world. But it operates within a state that gets in its own way: a judicial system where proceedings take decades, a bureaucracy that makes Kafka look like a realist, and a political system that has worn through over seventy governments since 1945 without pushing through a single structural reform that outlasted the government that enacted it.

The South — the Mezzogiorno — is Europe's greatest development problem, comparable to East German conditions but without the solidarity pact and the Treuhand. Youth unemployment in southern Italy stood above thirty, sometimes forty per cent for decades. Those who can, leave — for Milan, for Munich, for London. It is a brain drain within a country that hollows the country itself.

Italy's public debt stands at nearly 140 per cent of GDP. Everyone knows this is unsustainable. No one knows how it will end. The most probable answer is: as always in Italy. It will not end. It will carry on, beautiful and untenable, like an opera in its third act where the audience awaits the catastrophe that never quite arrives.

Spain: The Halved Recovery

Spain is Europe's positive surprise of recent years. Growth exceeds two per cent, employment is rising, tourism is booming, diversification into higher-value services is making progress. Of the major European economies, Spain is the only one behaving like a country that believes in its own future.

But the recovery is halved. Halved because it does not touch the underlying problems: youth unemployment that has fallen but still stands above 25 per cent — double the EU average. A housing market that has become unaffordable in the major cities. And a demographic problem scarcely less severe than Italy's: Spain will lose almost half its population by 2100 if the fertility rate remains at 1.2 children per woman.

Spain's political landscape is also fragile. The central government in Madrid exists in permanent tension with the autonomous communities, particularly Catalonia, whose independence movement has subsided but not vanished. And the political polarisation between left and right that has shaped Spain since the Civil War has intensified in recent years, without either side having the strength or the ideas to fundamentally reform the country.

The Netherlands and Belgium: Small but Paralysed

The Netherlands is a peculiar case: one of the richest, most innovative, and best-organised countries in Europe — and yet increasingly dysfunctional. The nitrogen crisis demonstrated how a small country can regulate itself into a corner from which there is no exit without breaking the law or denying reality. The housing market is one of the most overheated in Europe. And Geert Wilders' election victory and the right-wing government carried by his PVV, which collapsed in 2025, have plunged the country into a political identity crisis that shows even Europe's most tolerant societies are reaching their limits.

The Netherlands also has a shadow problem: it is Europe's largest tax haven. A significant portion of international capital flows passing through Dutch shell companies comes at the expense of other EU states that lose tax revenue. The Netherlands profits from the EU and undermines it simultaneously — a contradiction it is reluctant to discuss.

Belgium is the extreme example of institutional fragmentation: a state consisting of two nations that do not speak to each other, do not read the same newspapers, do not vote for the same parties, and sometimes go months without a government. In 2010/11, Belgium needed over 500 days to form a government — a world record. It works anyway, somehow, as if the absence of government is sometimes less harmful than its presence. But it is not a model for Europe.

The North: The Model Ages

The Nordic countries — Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland — were considered for decades to be what Europe ought to be: prosperous, egalitarian, innovative, transparent, well-governed. And much of that is still true. But the model is ageing — literally and figuratively.

Sweden has lived through an immigration crisis that shook the foundations of Swedish self-understanding. Integration has failed, violence in the suburbs has exploded, and a society that considered itself the most open in the world has enacted the most restrictive immigration laws in Scandinavia — under a government supported by the Sweden Democrats, a party considered unacceptable just ten years ago.

Finland has been in recession since 2023 — a rare phenomenon for a Nordic country, caused by the loss of the Russian market after the Ukraine war, a shrinking population, and an industry that never fully recovered from the Nokia shock. Denmark is growing, but not fast enough, and carries a cluster risk in its pharmaceutical industry that could materialise at any time. And Norway, one of the richest countries in Europe per capita thanks to its oil fund, lives off a resource whose future is finite — and has failed to use its wealth to build a post-fossil economy worthy of the name.

The Nordic model still works. But it works like a machine from the nineties: solid, reliable, and increasingly outdated. In a world that changes at Chinese speed, Scandinavian thoroughness is no longer enough.

Poland and the Visegrád Group: The Eastern Promise

Eastern Europe was Europe's great hope after 1989 — and in many respects it has fulfilled that hope. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Baltic states: they all transformed from planned economies to market economies in a single generation, joined the EU, modernised their infrastructure, and dramatically raised their living standards.

Poland is Eastern Europe's success story: GDP growth that has continued almost uninterrupted for thirty years, a growing middle class, a booming startup ecosystem, a young and well-educated population. Poland's economy is expected to grow by 3.4 per cent in 2026 — faster than any other major European economy.

But Poland too pays a price. Since joining the EU in 2004, over two million Poles have left the country — most of them young, most well-educated, most bound for Britain, Germany, and Ireland. This brain drain has eased but left its marks. And Poland's dependence on EU structural funds and on German industry as a customer makes it vulnerable: when Germany catches a cold, Poland gets the flu.

Hungary under Viktor Orbán has chosen a different path: illiberal democracy, the deliberate undermining of independent institutions, the redistribution of EU funds to government-allied oligarchs, and the foreign policy blackmailing of EU partners. Orbán has demonstrated that one can be an EU member while simultaneously rejecting the core of European values — and get away with it. That is a problem not only for Hungary but for the credibility of the EU as a whole.

The Czech Republic has quietly and efficiently industrialised — and in the process become almost entirely dependent on the German automotive industry. If the German car industry shrinks, the Czech Republic shrinks with it. Slovakia has the same problem in intensified form. And both countries face the question that confronts all of Eastern Europe: What comes after the EU structural funds? What comes after the cheap labour market? How does one become an innovator when one has so far been the supplier?

The Balkans: The Waiting Room

The Western Balkans — Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo — is Europe's waiting room. For over twenty years, these countries have been promised EU membership. For over twenty years, they have been waiting. And while they wait, they lose their populations.

Serbia's population shrank by more than half a million between the 2011 and 2022 censuses — from 7.2 million to 6.6 million. Albania has over a third of its population abroad. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a state that is not really one — three entities, two alphabets, three peoples, one Dayton Agreement that was intended as a provisional arrangement and still applies thirty years later because no one has the courage to replace it.

The Balkans are Europe's Achilles heel. Not because they are poor — they are — but because they make visible the void between Europe's promises and Europe's actions. The EU promises enlargement and delivers holding patterns. It promises stability and delivers frustration. And it wonders when China and Russia advance into the vacuum it has left behind.

The Baltics: The Front Line

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are Europe's front line — geographically, demographically, and existentially. They border Russia. Their populations are shrinking fast — Lithuania's is expected to decline by over 20 per cent by 2050. And they know that their existence as independent states depends on NATO and the EU.

This makes them simultaneously the most European and the most vulnerable states on the continent. Estonia has built the most digital public administration in the world — a model that all of Europe should copy and no one does. Lithuania has positioned itself as a counterweight to Chinese influence and accepted economic disadvantages for doing so. Latvia struggles with a Russian-speaking minority and an economy hollowed out by emigration.

The Baltic states show what Europe can be when it wants to: courageous, innovative, determined. But they also show what Europe does not offer: a guarantee that this courage will be rewarded.

Greece and Portugal: The Survivors

Greece and Portugal are the survivors of the euro crisis — the countries that paid the heaviest price for mistakes that were not only their own. Greece lost a quarter of its economic output in the crisis, an amputation comparable to no peacetime catastrophe in any developed country. Portugal was forced under the rescue umbrella and endured an austerity regime that drove an entire generation abroad.

Both countries have recovered — formally. Growth figures are positive, deficits under control, tourism booming. But the recovery is a surface beneath which the wounds remain open. Greece's public debt still exceeds 150 per cent of GDP. Portugal's population is shrinking — and could decline by almost a third by 2050 if emigration continues. And in both countries, an entire generation has vanished: the brightest, most energetic, best-educated young people are in Berlin, in London, in Amsterdam — and they are not coming back.

Greece and Portugal show what happens when Europe breaks its promise. The promise was: convergence. It said: the weak will grow stronger when they join the club. It said: the euro is an instrument of convergence. The reality was: the euro was an instrument of divergence. It helped the strong and punished the weak. And the punishment was so brutal that it damaged the legitimacy of the entire project — to this day.

Austria and Switzerland: The Comfortable Spectators

Austria and Switzerland are Europe's spectators — prosperous, educated, stable, and profoundly convinced that the problems of others are none of their concern.

Austria is a country that lives well as long as it does not have to make decisions. It has strong industry, high quality of life, a functioning administration — and a political culture that oscillates between coalition proportionality, FPÖ populism, and a deep-rooted aversion to any change. Austria profits from the EU more than most member states — as an exporter into the single market, as a recipient of labour from Eastern Europe, as a hinge between West and East. And yet it behaves as though it were a victim of Brussels.

Switzerland stands outside the EU and lives better than most who are inside. It has one of the highest per capita incomes in Europe, the finest direct democracy, the most efficient administration, and an economy that works as precisely as the watches that made it famous. Switzerland proves that one can succeed outside the EU — provided one is small enough, rich enough, and clever enough to negotiate every bilateral treaty individually. It is a model that works for 9 million and does not scale to 450 million.

But even Switzerland has a problem it is reluctant to admit: it is an island of prosperity in a sea of mediocrity. Its prosperity depends on Europe around it being stable enough for trade but weak enough not to force Switzerland to join. If Europe falls apart, Swiss comfort falls apart too.

What Is Missing

When one places all these countries side by side — Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Nordics, Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, the Baltics, Greece, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland — one does not see thirty different problems. One sees a single problem in thirty variations.

The problem is not poverty. Europe is rich. It is not stupidity. Europe is educated. It is not a lack of experience. Europe has more history than any other continent and has drawn a lesson from nearly everything — sometimes the wrong lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.

What Europe lacks is will. The will to decide. The will to take risks. The will to give up one's own comfort in favour of a future that could be better but is not certain. The will to loosen the shackles one has placed upon oneself — not because they are unnecessary, but because what they are meant to prevent is less dangerous than what they do prevent.

Every European country has its own version of this deficit of will. In Germany it is called risk avoidance. In France it is called centralism. In Britain it is called nostalgic exceptionalism. In Italy it is called political fragmentation. In Spain it is called territorial dissent. In the Netherlands it is called consensus paralysis. In Belgium it is called institutional splintering. In the North it is called model conservatism. In the East it is called dependency. In the Balkans it is called waiting. In the Baltics it is called fear. In Greece and Portugal it is called trauma. In Austria it is called Gemütlichkeit. In Switzerland it is called isolation.

But it is always the same: the refusal to pay the price of freedom. And the price of freedom is uncertainty.

What Europe Could Be

One need not be an optimist to see what Europe could be if it stopped getting in its own way. It would be the largest economy in the world — not the second-largest, and certainly not the third. The EU plus Britain plus Switzerland plus Norway together have a GDP comparable to that of the United States. If the single market were actually completed — not only for goods, but for services, capital, energy, and labour — the productivity gains would be enormous.

Europe would have the best starting position for the innovation economy of the twenty-first century. It has the universities, the researchers, the engineers, the cultural depth, and the institutional experience. What it does not have is the market: a unified space in which a startup from Tallinn can sell to a customer in Lisbon as easily as a startup from San Francisco can sell to a customer in Miami. To create that market — not merely on paper but in practice — would be the greatest economic reform of the century.

Europe would have the demographic mass to cushion ageing — if it treated immigration not as a threat but as a necessity. The EU candidate countries — Turkey with 85 million inhabitants and a young age structure, Ukraine, the Western Balkans — have precisely the population structure that the core union lacks. Enlargement is not an act of generosity. It is an act of self-interest. But Europe treats it as a burden.

Europe would have the geopolitical strength to play an independent role between the US and China — if it could agree on what that role should be. 450 million people, the world's second-largest economy, nuclear weapons, a common foreign policy — on paper. In reality, Europe has no common foreign policy. It has 27 foreign policies that sometimes overlap and often contradict. And it has a High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy who has less influence than the French ambassador in Washington.

The Coronation March, Once More

Land of Hope and Glory. Mother of the Free. How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?

These are the words sung every September in the Royal Albert Hall, with tears in the eyes and flags in the hand, by people who know perfectly well that the Empire they are celebrating no longer exists. It is nostalgia disguised as patriotism. It is the refusal to see the present because the past was more beautiful.

All of Europe sings this coronation march — only in different languages. The French sing of the Grande Nation. The Germans sing of Made in Germany. The Italians sing of the Dolce Vita. The Spanish of the Siglo de Oro. The Greeks of the Cradle of Democracy. The Poles of the Third Republic. The Swedes of the Folkhem.

They are all hymns to a past that was better than the present. And they are all hymns that prevent the present from becoming better than the past.

Europe could be the Land of Hope and Glory. It has everything it needs for that: the hope and the glory. What it does not have is the courage to deploy them. Instead, it sings its coronation marches — in empty cathedrals, for an audience that grows smaller, year by year.

The Draghi Report told Europe what it would cost to close the gap: 800 billion euros a year. Europe listened, nodded — and a year later had implemented ten per cent of the proposals. That is Europe's way: identify the problem, describe the solution, commission a report — and then do nothing.

Perhaps that is Europe's true anthem. Not Hope and Glory. But rather: We know what needs to be done. Just not now. Not here. Not us.

Elgar would not have written a melody for that.