"Museum Europe": too expensive to maintain!

On Europe Day, the messages from European leaders were not very convincing. In Bucharest, the presidential message was somewhat shaky and articulated in a different tone than necessary for reaffirming the values and benefits of our membership in the EU.

Across Europe, the noise of politics covers what once was the symphony of economic and industrial engines. There is a strange silence that has settled over the major production centers of Europe. It is not the silence of satisfaction after a job well done, but the metallic silence of factories that are about to close and of investments that seek to migrate. While in the illuminated corridors of Brussels new regulations and sets of norms are being discussed, the "Brussels effect" – that magical ability of the Union to dictate the world's standards – is starting to resemble more and more a curse of self-isolation.

If European industry is dying suffocated by the vise of the US-China relationship and the Union turns into a vast open-air museum, a luxury tourist destination with idyllic landscapes and historic buildings, but without a competitive economy, a brutal question arises: who will pay the salaries and expenses of the vast bureaucracy in Brussels? China? The United States?

The economic history of the present is being written in the form of a dangerous asymmetric triangle. The United States innovates at a dizzying pace, transforming artificial intelligence and biotechnology into engines of growth. China aggressively subsidizes, building production capacities that flood global markets, from photovoltaic panels to electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the European Union does what it knows best: it regulates. The hermeticism of European bureaucrats has created a bubble in which noble goals – such as climate neutrality or absolute data protection – are pursued without taking into account the realism of means. We want a green Europe, but we have become dependent on imports of critical technology from countries that do not share our values. We want citizen protection, but we have created a legislative maze that stifles European start-ups before they can compete with giants from Silicon Valley.

Under the specter of imminent de-industrialization, over 70 leaders from vital sectors signed the Antwerp Declaration in 2024: a survival manifesto. The real economy can no longer breathe under the weight of incoherent European policies and demands a simple yet revolutionary thing for the mindset in Brussels: harmonizing climate goals with economic competitiveness. You cannot ask a steelmaker to become "green" overnight while increasing energy costs fourfold compared to American competitors and imposing bureaucratic reporting that consumes thousands of hours of non-productive work. Without this economic realism, we risk becoming a region that "exports" pollution simply by closing our factories and importing the same products from areas where environmental standards are non-existent. It is ecological hypocrisy financed by economic suicide.

Moreover, a dangerous arrogance manifests in the idea that our standards will remain relevant regardless of our economic power. In reality, the power to regulate comes from the power to buy and produce. If Europe becomes industrially irrelevant, the "Brussels effect" will evaporate.

I cannot help but ask: Who will finance the European social state, education, and health systems when the industrial tax base disappears? If the EU becomes a fragile entity, sustained by external capital, who will dictate the rules? A scenario in which China finances European infrastructure to secure its distribution routes or in which the US turns Europe into a mere technological and security protectorate is no longer speculative political science. It becomes a mathematical possibility. No one pays the bills of a museum without demanding the right to decide what exhibits are displayed and, especially, who is allowed to see them.

To avoid decline, Europe must step out of its legislative ivory tower. Economic realism requires two directions of action: First, the formation of European champions. EU competition policy must stop being an arbiter that punishes local excellence. We must allow mergers that create entities capable of competing on equal footing with Chinese or American giants. The scale at which we operate must be global, not limited to the fragmented borders of the internal market. Then, there would be the integration of energy at the heart of competitiveness. Energy is not just a utility, but the raw material of the future. Without abundant, cheap, and clean energy, ambitions for reindustrialization are merely rhetorical exercises.

It remains for European bureaucracy to understand that, in a world of competition for economic supremacy, a museum has no chance against a laboratory of innovation or a modern factory. If we do not become a producing continent again, we will be condemned to be a continent that only consumes, until the resources of others are exhausted or, more likely, until they decide that the "museum" is too expensive to maintain.