Mario Draghi returned to Europe’s stage on Monday, without a government or a central bank behind him. Together with Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, the Italian economist opened the Rhine Group, an alliance of roughly fifty-five economists, executives and former officials built around a single raison d’être. Only four of the world’s fifty largest technology companies are European, a gap the group treats as an existential warning.
Its membership already spans Nobel laureates in economics, the chief executives of Shopify and Klarna, and a former Estonian president. The roster seeks to project a reach no single capital could match alone. Patrick Collison built his own credibility steering Stripe into a payments giant, and his co-chair, the Spanish economist Luis Garicano, now oversees the group’s daily work.
Geneva hosts the venture under Swiss law, and American firms supply the servers behind its website. Some members’ own ventures have recently stumbled too, details that jar with a project selling European self-reliance. Discussions inside the group operate under the Chatham House rule, allowing ideas to circulate without attribution to whoever raised them. Even so, the substance of its ambition still warrants a closer look.
Draghi wants Brussels to borrow together, spend together and eventually decide together, an agenda his detractors have long labelled federal.
Pragmatic Federalism, Defined by Draghi
The Rhine Group did not appear from nowhere. It builds on a diagnosis the former central banker delivered two years ago in a report commissioned by the European Commission. The report totalled upwards of a hundred and seventy proposals covering common borrowing, energy policy and defence spending. As president of the European Central Bank, he pledged, over a decade ago, to spare no measure preserving the currency, a pledge that held.
Since then the economist has sharpened his language. Addressing an audience in Spain last year and again in Belgium earlier this year, he termed his method “pragmatic federalism.” The phrase describes a gradual pooling of power among willing partners, sidestepping any single treaty overhaul. It wagers that raw necessity will persuade where speeches never did.
Brussels Moves Slower Than Advocates
Delivering on Draghi’s diagnosis has proved harder than announcing it. Officials in the European Commission maintain they have already enacted over half of the competitiveness agenda drawn from the original report. An independent audit found only sixty of the 383 recommendations fully in place, undercutting Brussels’ own tally.
Funding supplies its own proof of the gap between ambition and delivery. Negotiations over the next seven-year budget persist after a summer of wrangling, pitting Germany and the Netherlands against fifteen states defending old spending habits on farming and regional aid. A joint European purse remains an aspiration long before it becomes an instrument of statecraft. Even so, joint defence borrowing already exists in miniature, the Commission’s own hundred and fifty billion euro loan scheme approved last year for weapons and cyber-security investment.
Politics Supplies Its Own Momentum
Economics alone rarely rewrites a treaty. Politics has now lent Draghi’s project an ally he did not design. Hungary’s outgoing premier, Viktor Orbán, whose vetoes blocked support for Ukraine and sanctions on Moscow for sixteen years, lost his post in the spring. Of forty-eight vetoes cast by member states over a decade, Budapest alone cast twenty-one, a tally that made Orbán the bloc’s most reliable obstacle.
His departure freed Ursula von der Leyen to revive a proposal she had floated for years. She has since pressed fellow leaders to replace unanimous foreign-policy votes with a qualified majority, insisting that a single capital should no longer paralyse twenty-six others. Her case borrows the same reasoning driving the Rhine Group, since scale rewards those willing to act without full agreement. The centre-right’s Manfred Weber has pressed the same case, calling looser rules on vetoes simple enforcement of existing treaties.
Federalism Built by Necessity
Nothing here amounts to a superstate arriving on schedule. Treaty change still needs the unanimous consent it seeks to abolish, an irony its proponents rarely mention aloud. What Draghi and his allies have built looks instead like a lobbying platform for a slower kind of pooling, sector by sector, crisis by crisis.
The euro grew from currency turmoil. The joint pandemic loans grew from lockdowns. Common defence financing grew from war on the continent’s edge. Each step occurred because delay proved dearer, an equation Europe keeps solving again.
Judged against Europe’s own record, the Rhine Group reads as a persuasive footnote to a case the continent keeps proving, one budget line and one veto at a time. The clearer gauge sits in Brussels’ budget hall this autumn, where the same governments funding Draghi’s ambitions must decide how much sovereignty they will trade for it.
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