Less than a century ago, in 1942, Stefan Zweig, in a hotel room during his forced exile in Brazil, completed his Memoirs of a European. He wrote nostalgically about the Europe he had known and that was no longer:

“When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up… I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability… No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason”.

What seemed impossible soon became a tragic destiny: two world wars followed in rapid succession, shattering centuries of seemingly immutable stability.

That history is rhyming with our present.  

On 16 September 2025, Mario Draghi warned, with sobering honesty, that just a year after he published his agenda for European competitiveness, the European Union’s is in a “harder place”. As another President would put it, our Europe has become more mortal.

Let me describe that situation. We are squeezed between two spheres of influence, the United States and China; we are more dependent on their technology and energy, while our growth model is becoming obsolete, and our growth rate cannot sustain our aging population.

The future of Europe hinges on a choice between courage and complacency.

What should leaders do now?

First, as Europeans, we must admit that our political realities have changed. We need common sense.  

Common sense requires having sufficient means to achieve a given end. Today, Europe–at best a confederation of States too uncoordinated to act as a Union– doesn’t have the geopolitical leverage, the internal cohesiveness, or the technological and energy independence to be a global challenger.

Common sense also requires that the right capabilities are invested in the right job. When it comes to innovation, for example, “Implementation must rest with expert project managers—not bureaucrats”, as Draghi correctly stated. This requires creating institutions inspired by the American DARPA—the agency responsible for the birth of the internet and GPS —where innovators have the freedom to innovate, by taking concentrated bets on high-risk, high-reward scientific and technological programmes that can yield true breakthroughs.

With honesty and humility should come the pragmatism that Draghi has called for, so many times.

Our most important institutions often have the tools to make a difference–they choose not to use them. For instance, sizable public procurement, equal to 14% of the EU’s GDP, can become a tool to spur innovation. If spent to de-risk deep tech markets and scale startups, public procurement can attract more private capital to the industries of the future. Instead, it is treated like a vending machine regulated by complex processes, too absurd to be attractive for small companies.

What European leaders lack is the courage to give ownership to innovators, “to break our taboos… and remove self-imposed constraints,” in the words of Draghi.

Common sense requires courage. It requires making concentrated bets on the exponential technologies that will define our future. Applying old competition frameworks to industries that follow a different logic is a recipe for planned obsolescence. Upholding the delusion that the “Brussels effect” has geopolitical leverage in a world where the US sets Europe’s digital policy and China has grown its trade surplus by 20% is planned obsolescence.

When I hear speeches by European leaders, it often seems like Europe is facing an innovator’s dilemma: why change what works when you are a leader in the market? In fact, today Europe faces the boiling frog dilemma: the temperature is reaching a deadly point, and we are not jumping fast enough to save ourselves.

The European Union that we live in was an act of courage, a bold vision that overcame the fall of the Golden Age of Security and the outbreak of two World Wars. Our present demands the same inventive and selfless leadership. But our politics and institutions seem too busy presenting inertia as respect for the rule of law, rather than revealing a fear of losing power.

I was born European, grew up European, served as a European civil servant, and I continue to work in the hope that European ideals survive our historic changes. But being European is different from when I grew up: it requires being skeptical of how the European Union works today.

Without courage and common sense, Europeans may have to once again write about Zweig’s world. That is: The World of Yesterday.

Article originally published on Linkiesta.it