In 1949, atop the Viennese Prater carousel, Orson Welles put into the mouth of Harry Lime a sharp reflection on civilizations. Looking at pedestrians as tiny points from above, Lime stated: “In Italy, during thirty years of Borgian domination, there were wars, terror, murders and massacres, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had fraternal love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what was the result? The cuckoo clock.” The line hit the mark: civilization can also become a mechanism. Or, put another way, it can stop being a promise and become a habit.
Seventy-seven years later, that carousel keeps turning. If Harry Lime climbed aboard today and looked not toward the postwar divided Vienna but toward Brussels, perhaps he would again see orderly dots: officials crossing glass-walled corridors, ministers arriving on time, MEPs voting dossiers, jurists redrafting drafts, statements condemning, regulations tempering, etc. Europe has learned, after centuries of fanaticism, civil wars and millions of deaths, to function like a clock. It is reliable, precise, civilized. The problem is that clocks do not decide the hour, they merely announce it.
“Donald Trump had turned the calendar into a threat: if Europe did not ratify before July 4, trade penalties could return”
The week of June 15–20, 2026 offered a small practical treaty on this European condition. On Tuesday the 16th, the European Parliament approved by 440 votes the legislation implementing the tariff agreement with the United States reached in August 2025. The Union removed tariffs on American industrial products and granted preferred access to certain agricultural and fishing products, while Washington kept a 15% levy on most European exports. Donald Trump had turned the calendar into a threat: if Europe did not ratify before July 4, trade penalties, especially on cars, could return. Europe complied, with more punctuality than enthusiasm, and once again, the machinery worked as it should.
Two days later, European leaders debated how to respond to the growing trade imbalance with China. The EU deficit with Beijing now exceeds 360 billion euros annually, a figure that, translated into political language, means more than a billion a day in dependence, potential deindustrialization, and strategic vulnerability. The response was, again, impeccable in institutional terms: ask the Commission to reinforce instruments, explore measures, deepen dialogue, and prepare new tools for diversification. The following Monday it was announced that the European Commissioner for Trade, Maroš Šefčovič, would receive the Chinese minister in Brussels. Everything was set in motion, but the question was not whether Europe had an agenda, but whether it had the will.
That same week, the European Parliament approved a resolution condemning the incursions of Russian drones into airspace and the infrastructures of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. The MEPs spoke of a deliberate and systematic threat to European security, resilience, and sovereignty. They also urged strengthening the eastern flank of NATO and the EU from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Meanwhile, Ukraine and Moldova had just advanced in their accession processes with the opening of the fundamental negotiating block. The European door was opening eastward, but the eastern sky remained porous.
Three decisions, three times the cuckoo clock should have chimed, but stayed at home. In one week one could have advanced on three fundamental pillars (trade with the United States, competition with China, and security against Russia). The Union did not stay silent, did not disappear, did not breach its procedure. It acted according to its nature, and therein lies the problem: no one can say that Europe does not work. The problem is that it works too well for a world that has ceased to function according to European rules.
The stability of the European project is one of the greatest political achievements of modern history. After two world wars and the Cold War, Europe achieved something no former empire had managed: turning a continent of hereditary rivalries into a community of law, commerce, welfare, and liberal democracy. The Union can never be deemed a failure for merely debating a budget for months; it should be seen as a miracle precisely because former enemies discuss budgets instead of borders. Nobody should prefer the Borgias to the Committee of Permanent Representatives.
“No one can say that Europe does not work. The problem is that it works too well for a world that has ceased to operate under European rules”
But prolonged peace has side effects: it yields contented societies, cautious governments, and a strange form of strategic anesthesia. Postwar Europe was built to neutralize tragedy, to prevent sovereignty from becoming a license for violence again, to stop history from being rewritten with tanks, and to prevent politics from being redefined as the decision about the enemy. That design worked inwardly. Outside, however, history did not transfer any directive to its stock.
Can Europe turn will into power?
The Draghi report was important because it broke, for an instant, that bubble of complacency. Its diagnosis was not merely another technical note on competitiveness, but an existential warning: Europe is falling behind in productivity, technology, investment, energy, and industrial capacity. The gap with the United States and China is not only economic, it is political. Whoever controls critical technologies, patient capital, affordable energy, adequate defense, and resilient supply chains controls the fate of the rest.
The reaction to the multiannual financial framework (MFF) 2028–2034 reveals the core problem. The MFF should be the instrument that translates grand words (strategic autonomy, competitiveness, defense, digital transition, economic security) into money, priorities, and sacrifices. But whenever Europe must turn a common crisis into a common bill, the old moral geographies of the continent reappear: north versus south, net contributors versus recipients, cohesion versus conditionality, agriculture versus innovation, defense versus welfare. Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina by diagnosing this problem: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.
“Every time Europe has to turn a common crisis into a common bill, the old moral geographies of the continent reappear”
It is no small matter. In the end, politics begins where unanimity ends. As long as objectives remain abstract, all European governments want more sovereignty, more industry, more defense, more innovation, more cohesion, and more green transition. When those objectives clash, European sovereignty becomes a room full of clocks, each showing a different national time. Germany fears for its export industries, France for political primacy, Spain for cohesion, Poland for the Russian threat, the frugal for debt, the Baltic states for the skies, Italy for the fiscal margin. Each concern is legitimate, but together they produce paralysis.
The great European question is no longer about the issue of federalization. The real question is whether a civilization built to curb power can learn to wield it without betraying itself. Because Europe does not need to become imperial in the vulgar sense. It does not need Borgias, Caesars, or Richelieus. It needs a republican form of power: the capacity to safeguard common goods, bear costs, punish abuses, invest at scale, defend borders, accept risks, and decide in time.
That implies abandoning the illusion that normative virtue always compensates for material insufficiency. European regulation has been an immense source of influence. The Brussels effect allowed for years that the EU exported standards to the world. But behind the standard there must be a dynamic market, scalable companies, critical infrastructures, financial muscle, and military security. A rule without the capacity to back it up ends up merely a recommendation.
The Prater carousel works precisely because it forces you to choose the moral height from which you look. Harry Lime saw points, not people. Europe was born to be the opposite, so that no leader could ever again look at citizens as disposable points in an imperial geometry. Humanism is its greatness and it must not lose it. But from outside, other actors do view Europe as a set of points: markets, ports, cables, data, factories, votes, blocking minorities, energy dependencies, and vulnerable elections.
“Europe was born so that no leader could ever again look at citizens as disposable points in an imperial geometry. Humanism is its greatness and it must not lose it”
Being the inventors of the cuckoo clock should not be a sentence: it can also be a conquest of the continent’s trust and its parliaments, and thus alter its collective memory of Cainite assaults. The forgettable is not about functioning well, but about believing that functioning suffices. European peace does not have to justify itself by having brought welfare rather than heroes and martyrs, but if it wants to survive in a world of ultimatums, massive subsidies, hybrid wars, and trade blackmail, it will have to add will to the mechanism. Not to return to the bloody history it sought to rise above, but to prevent others from writing it for it.
The question is not whether Europe must choose between the Borgias and the cuckoo clock. That solution would deserve Harry Lime’s cynicism. The real question is whether a pacified democracy can produce power without producing brutality. Or, in other words, whether it can remain civilization without becoming ornament. The carousel keeps turning. Brussels, seen from above, may look orderly. From below, however, one begins to hear more than the ticking.
