The former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi produced his much-awaited prescription for how to reboot Europe’s economy last year. The Draghi report was rightly applauded as a rude awakening for a European Union that is far too complacent about its own obsolescence. Draghi concluded that an €800bn-a-year public spending boost would be needed to end years of stagnation. If Europe did not catch up with its rivals, he warned, it would face a “slow and agonising” decline.
And yet, one ingredient was missing from Draghi’s recipe. In his nearly 400-page roadmap for rescuing the EU, the word “democracy” is mentioned only three times (once in the bibliography). By contrast, “integration” is used 96 times and “defence” 391 times. It’s true that Draghi’s report was explicitly devoted to the future of European competitiveness (and not more widely to the Europe of the future). But if the EU can’t find a way to better engage its citizens, it will be difficult to achieve any more of the integration that Draghi says is indispensable to make a still-fragmented single market more competitive and Europe more capable of defending itself.
