The EU is losing its relevance. Draghi is right

Mario Draghi has never been one for theatrics. When he speaks, he chooses his words with the same precision that once steadied the eurozone through its darkest hours. That’s why his recent speech at the Meeting di Rimini deserves far more attention than it has received.

His warning was blunt: 2025 will be remembered as the year Europe’s illusion of geopolitical relevance vanished.

It wasn’t a line meant to provoke headlines. It was the sober conclusion of someone who has seen the inner workings of European institutions and knows their limits. Draghi’s message was clear: Europe is no longer a serious global actor.

We are not taken seriously in Washington, increasingly ignored in Beijing, and consistently outmanoeuvred in regions we once sought to influence. Despite having one of the largest economies on the planet, the European Union has become marginal in the world’s major decisions. We fund wars but aren’t invited to peace tables. We react to crises rather than shaping outcomes. We preach values we can no longer enforce.

This is more than diplomatic failure. It is existential.

Draghi’s speech deserves to be read not just as commentary, but as an obituary of a Europe that believed its size, ideals, and integration were enough to guarantee global weight. That belief is now dead.

To understand how we arrived here, it’s worth turning to Max Weber, the German sociologist and political economist whose work remains essential to understanding institutional power.

Weber argued that the legitimacy of a political order comes not just from ideals or values, but from its ability to act, to command, to deliver, to shape reality. Power, in Weberian terms, is not the presence of structures, but the capacity to impose will through them.

Europe has misunderstood this for decades.

The EU has focused on rules, treaties, and summits. It has built one of the most intricate bureaucracies the world has ever known. But it has failed to equip itself with the institutional force and unity necessary to respond to an era of great power politics.

In Weber’s eyes, we have all the instruments of a modern state but none of its spirit.

The result is an actor paralysed by procedure. A bloc trapped in a permanent committee meeting. And in a world that is accelerating, fragmenting, and militarising, that is fatal.

For years, Europe convinced itself that its market size and regulatory influence were enough. That being the world’s largest trading bloc gave us a seat at every table. That funding development was as important as defining security. That diplomacy could substitute for strategy. That illusion is gone.

In 2025, Europe was side-lined in Ukraine peace negotiations, absent in responses to new Middle East escalations, and caught flat-footed as China consolidated its grip on critical mineral chains. Even Africa, once seen as Europe’s natural sphere of influence, is now tilting toward China and Gulf capital.

The brutal truth is this. Economic mass does not automatically translate into geopolitical power. If anything, our fragmented policies and lack of political will have made us more vulnerable, not less.

Draghi’s central point wasn’t that Europe’s values are flawed. On the contrary, they remain the world’s most aspirational: peace, democracy, social protection, sustainability. But the question now is: Can we defend them?

If the EU cannot protect its borders, invest in its own defence, lead in innovation, or secure its energy future, then its values become hollow. As Draghi put it: “Scepticism is not about our principles; it’s about our ability to uphold them.”

And that, again, echoes Weber. Authority must be embodied. It must show up in action. Otherwise, it is dismissed. And that is exactly what’s happening to Europe in the eyes of the world.

Draghi called for what few European leaders have dared to say; a radical overhaul of the EU’s institutional machinery.

A shared fiscal capacity to invest in defence, digital transformation, and energy security.

A genuine capital markets union to unlock private investment.

A shift from intergovernmental paralysis to federal-level decision-making in core areas.

Political leadership that speaks the language of power, not just partnership.

It is not a call to abandon the EU. It is a call to finally complete it.

Because without transformation, the EU won’t collapse. That’s not how systems like ours die. Instead, it will fade; into irrelevance. Into a relic of a more hopeful age. Into what Draghi described so starkly—a spectator, not a protagonist, of history.

The tragedy of Europe today is not that it lacks ideals, it’s that it lacks agency. And as Max Weber reminds us, in politics, ideals without action are indistinguishable from impotence.

Draghi has done his part. He has spoken truth to power, as only someone with nothing left to prove can do.

The question now is: Will anyone in Brussels listen?

If not, history will not be kind. It rarely is to empires that drift into decline believing they were still relevant.