The “American Challenge” of von der Leyen and today’s Europe

In her latest State of the Union address, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, deliberately used a language more suited to a battlefield than to a parliamentary chamber. She began by declaring that “Europe is engaged in a struggle.” She was not only referring to the events of the previous hours on the eastern borders, with Russian drones penetrating Polish territory, nor solely to Ukraine and Gaza, two issues to which she rightly devoted a large part of her speech delivered in the Strasbourg hemicycle. Instead, she meant more generally “the freedom and the ability to write our own destiny,” and thus “a struggle for our future.”

It’s a future that runs through Ukraine and Gaza as well as car factories and data centers, through classrooms and research laboratories, and inevitably across the Atlantic—since “when we talk about competitiveness and independence, we must talk about our relations with the United States.” Except that the President of the European Commission referred to this exclusively to fiercely defend the trade deal signed with President Trump, without really embracing what, in 1967, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, founder and editor of the French magazine L’Express, called in a widely influential pamphlet, The American Challenge.

That was a long reflection on Europe that had no qualms about borrowing military terms, since “there is no development without challenge. Progress is a battle, just as life is a fight.” After all, Servan-Schreiber had truly fought in a real war—the Second World War—giving up his studies at the École Polytechnique, where he had just been admitted in July 1943, to enlist in the Free French Forces and fight for the independence of his country, risking his life daily as a fighter pilot.

More than twenty years later, with atomic peace achieved, the great French journalist and manager believed that “the clash of civilizations now takes place in the global arena of technology, science, and management.” His pamphlet began from a paradox that, incredibly, nearly sixty years later, appears exactly the same before our eyes: ten years after the Treaty of Rome, the main beneficiaries of the Common Market were not European companies but American ones, thanks to superior management skills combined with better technologies. In other words, “Europe created a market, not a power.” That is, the fundamental issue still on the table today—sadly symbolized in the handshake between von der Leyen and Trump at the latter’s Scottish golf club.

The illusion that the market, by virtue of the much-vaunted “Brussels effect,” could provide an almost unbreakable protective shield lulled both Brussels bureaucrats and politicians in the main European capitals into complacency for far too many years. Perhaps, then, it is worth going back to 1967 to recover a compass that now seems lost—and that not even the 2024 Draghi Report seems capable of restoring.

To address the problem of American companies’ greater competitiveness, which risked putting Europe into permanent dependence and economic and strategic inferiority, Servan-Schreiber certainly did not propose a return to the past, nor unjustified protectionism aimed at keeping American companies out—companies from which, if anything, there was much to learn. The only serious and rational path, he argued, was to federate certain national competencies in order to arrive at a genuinely European industrial policy in the most strategic sectors, from electronics to space and nuclear energy. As one can see, little of that need has changed in the meantime—mainly because far too little has been done over nearly sixty years.

In fact, through a curious twist of history, although many of the book’s recommendations remained more or less dead letters, in the following decades the gap between the United States and the European Union narrowed, approaching parity in the 1990s—apparently refuting Servan-Schreiber’s predictions. But it was precisely then, about thirty years ago, that the gap began to widen again, for two main reasons.

On one side, the arrival of the Internet allowed the U.S. to consolidate and fully exploit its superiority in the IT sector, giving digital platforms the opportunity to grow within a truly unified market—unlike Europe’s fragmented one. This was a model later followed by China, which at the time Servan-Schreiber was writing was among the poorest countries in the world, but which since the 1990s has forcefully re-emerged on the global stage, aided precisely by the U.S., and competing especially with European industry. Europe, given its industrial positioning and the weight of manufacturing in its economy and exports, was more exposed—starting with a manufacturing country such as Italy, but progressively affecting other EU Member States, most recently Germany.

If history gave us thirty years during which it seemed sufficient for European companies to adapt their management methods to those of American firms, and for governments to do the bare minimum of their homework, now the time has come to wake from the long slumber into which our ruling classes have fallen—and from which, despite all the rhetoric, they struggle terribly to awaken. The institutional framework, moreover, has become much more complex since the 1960s: both at the European level, with the expansion from six to twenty-seven member states without truly adapting decision-making rules and governance structures, and within individual countries, starting with France and Germany.

That is why, from a Commission president now entering her second and final term in such a critical moment, we would have expected not only the gravity of form but also the gravity of substance. Substance that, first and foremost, should impose rallying member states to urgently federate policies and investments in the main strategic technologies, so as to quickly reach—through decisive private-sector contributions—the critical mass necessary to aspire to global competitiveness.

For the other paradox of The American Challenge—to which one should only add the adjective “Chinese”—is that its analysis and policy prescriptions are far more relevant today than they perhaps were in 1967. Provided that those in positions of responsibility, beyond correctly interpreting the warnings of the past, also have the courage to say what must be said at decisive moments—such as a State of the Union address, the most solemn occasion in the European institutional calendar. Facing the fundamental issues, rather than listing a long series of measures that risk adding more noise than substance. For the time has come to write and embody The European Challenge—and no more time can be wasted because of the modesty of ambition in Brussels or in the main capitals.