Draghi in Leuven, Europe must become a power

Europe can no longer live as if the postwar order still holds. That was the blunt message delivered by Mario Draghi in Leuven, where he received an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven. 

The choice facing the EU, he argued, is no longer theoretical or distant. Europe can remain a vast, well-regulated marketplace, or it can become a political, economic and strategic power. It cannot be both.

The diagnosis is clear. The international system that took shape after 1945, built on shared rules, open markets and American security guarantees, allowed Europe to specialize in prosperity rather than power. That system, Draghi said, has fractured. Geopolitical rivalry has returned, technology has become a battlefield and force is once again a tool of statecraft.

In this new environment, Europe’s strengths and weaknesses are sharply exposed. Where integration has been real, trade policy, competition rules and the single market, the EU punches above its weight. Where fragmentation persists, in defence, foreign policy, energy security and industrial strategy, it remains vulnerable and slow.

Europe’s choice between scale and irrelevance

Draghi avoided the familiar language of pro-European exhortation. His argument was narrower and more political. Fragmentation, he said, is no longer sustainable. Strategic dependencies, from critical raw materials to advanced technologies, and the Union’s inability to respond quickly to crises reveal the limits of a system that still relies on unanimity and struggles to translate economic scale into power. 

To continue along this path is to accept gradual marginalization, caught between the United States and China in a world that rewards speed, scale and resolve.

From that diagnosis follows a proposal that is deliberately pragmatic. Europe should move toward deeper integration in key areas through differentiated paths, allowing groups of willing countries to pool sovereignty in defence, industry and foreign policy without being held back by vetoes. 

This would not be a leap of ideology, Draghi argued, but a recognition of political reality.

He pointed to the euro as precedent. Monetary union began with a core group and expanded over time. For Draghi, that experience remains the most credible model for closing the gap between Europe’s ambitions and its capabilities.

The most pointed part of his message was also the simplest. Europe must abandon the illusion that it exists outside history. Becoming a power does not mean renouncing its values, he said, but acquiring the means to defend them. Without genuine political, economic and security integration, the EU risks remaining a regulatory superpower in a world increasingly shaped by actors who do not share its rules.