It is time for Europe to become something the rest of the world takes seriously again.
Curiously, most people seem convinced that Europe can only matter if it eventually becomes a single political superstate, speaking with one voice, governed by one bureaucracy and steadily dissolving the sovereignty of its nations into an ever larger administrative machine.
I have come to believe almost the exact opposite.
When Austria joined the European Union in 1995, I was enthusiastic.
I welcomed our accession.
I welcomed the Euro.
Like many others, I genuinely believed that Europe had discovered a new model—one that would preserve peace while allowing prosperity to flourish.
Looking back, I think I was naïve.
Not because cooperation between European nations is undesirable.
Far from it.
Europe has always benefited from cooperation.
What I failed to appreciate was the enormous difference between cooperation and centralisation.
The greatest strength Europe has ever possessed was not its uniformity.
It was its diversity.
Europe is a continent of dozens of nations, languages, cultures, legal traditions and political systems. That diversity was never merely a curiosity for tourists. It became one of the greatest engines of innovation the world has ever seen.
For centuries, Europe was the most dynamic region on Earth.
States competed.
Cities competed.
Merchants competed.
Universities competed.
Inventors competed.
Kings competed.
Ideas competed.
Sometimes that competition produced astonishing advances in science, engineering, philosophy, finance and the arts. Much of the modern world was born from that relentless contest between European societies trying to outperform one another.
Competition creates adaptation.
Adaptation creates progress.
Of course, Europe’s history was hardly idyllic.
The same competitive forces that produced extraordinary innovation also produced extraordinary violence.
Empires rose.
Empires fell.
Borders shifted.
Wars became unimaginably destructive.
Europe spent centuries proving that human ingenuity could build magnificent civilizations while simultaneously inventing ever more efficient ways of destroying them.
The two World Wars brought that tragic trajectory to its absolute conclusion.
By 1945, Europe was exhausted.
Its cities lay in ruins.
Its economies were shattered.
Its populations had paid a price almost beyond comprehension.
The appetite for another continental war had largely burned itself out, and the post-war security order helped ensure that exhaustion did not once again erupt into catastrophe.
That experience changed Europe profoundly.
What concerns me today is something entirely different.
The European Union increasingly appears to confuse harmony with uniformity.
Competition between different national approaches is viewed as a problem to be managed rather than a strength to be cultivated.
Decision-making migrates ever further away from the citizens who must live with its consequences.
Rules multiply.
Directives accumulate.
Institutions expand.
The paperwork grows.
Meanwhile the continent that once thrived because it encouraged experimentation increasingly resembles a vast administrative machine whose first instinct is regulation rather than innovation.
A paper empire.
Heavy.
Slow.
Increasingly detached from the remarkable diversity that made Europe exceptional in the first place.
Europe does not suffer from having too many different countries.
It benefits from them.
Different tax systems.
Different legal systems.
Different industrial strategies.
Different educational models.
Different political experiments.
Some will succeed.
Others will fail.
That is precisely the point.
Competition is every bit as valuable between nations as it is between companies.
Without it, stagnation slowly replaces discovery.
Europe does not need to become more alike.
It needs to become more competitive again.
It needs nations that are free to pursue different paths, solve problems differently and demonstrate that there is more than one way to build a prosperous society.
That was always Europe’s comparative advantage.
Not uniformity.
Plurality.
Not central direction.
Creative competition.
If Europe wishes to matter again, it should rediscover the very quality that made it extraordinary long before modern bureaucracies imagined they could improve upon it.
Europe deserves cooperation.
It does not require uniformity.
And perhaps it no longer requires the European Union in its present form, either.