Waking the Sleeping European Giant
Coordination and mobilization of existing resources would transform the continent into a superpower. The ongoing failure to do so is largely the fault of narrow-minded technocrats.
Europe1 has a far larger population than the U.S. (~500 million vs. ~340 million) and an economy far larger than China’s ($26 trillion vs. $21 trillion). It also has a large and sophisticated manufacturing sector, with world-beating producers in aerospace, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, machine tools, motor vehicles, and weapons. If material considerations were all that mattered, Europe would be a military superpower.
Yet this potential remains latent because “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).
The result is that Europeans are unable to protect their interests from a rapacious neighbor and an increasingly undependable ally. But this is a solvable problem. Europeans can mobilize their abundant financial and real resources, and deploy those resources to where they are most needed, if they choose to do so. And while it may be a challenge to get European publics to agree that their common aspirations and fears are more important than their relatively trivial differences, it is not the most pressing one. Rather, the biggest immediate hurdle is that Europe’s elites are blocking the kinds of policy innovations necessary for the continent to meet this moment.
The rest of this note, based in part on my experience attending a stimulating conference hosted by the Centre for European Reform, will focus on three specific points:
Europe’s national militaries are insufficiently coordinated in their deployment and procurement decisions
The European Commission is poised to strangle Germany’s rearmament and investment push before it has a chance to bear fruit, which has implications for everyone
The European Central Bank (ECB) is constantly undermining governments’ efforts to mobilize the Russian government’s frozen assets to support the Ukrainians