Good News about EU?
Ursula von der Leyen and Mario Draghi. Photo: European Union, 2024
Make Europe grow again Simon Nixon / Sep 2024
The good news, writes Simon Nixon, is that European leadership appears to have reached a real inflection point on the need for closer cooperation on defense and security.
Jean Monnet, a founding father of the EU, famously noted that “Europe will be forged in crisis.”
Well a crisis is here: Trump trade wars, stalling economies, underserved defense sectors, high taxes, high energy prices and outsized debts.
The first is the arrival of Friederich Merz as a key player on the European stage.
Merz’s insistence that Europe needs “independence from the USA” aligns him with Emmanuel Macron, who has long advocated “strategic autonomy.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has announced proposals that could unlock up to €800 billion in extra defense spending
via a new EU lending facility
and by relaxing the bloc’s fiscal rules to exclude spending in this area from national borrowing limits.
EU has traditionally tried to achieve unanimity, even where this isn’t strictly required by EU treaties.
A good rule of thumb is that in any European crisis, the centripetal will eventually but invariably beat the centrifugal,
that the forces driving integration are stronger than the forces of disintegration.
Simon Nixon Bloomberg 14 March 2025
Simon Nixon is an independent financial commentator and publisher of the Wealth of Nations newsletter on Substack.
“Europe will be forged in crisis and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.”
Dagens EU, konstaterar Annika Ström Melin, kan inte förstås utan hänvisning till Monnets personlighet
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