Draghi: Europe must reinvent itself to meet the challenges of the US and China

"These three strands," explains the former banker, "should lead us to reflect on how to organise ourselves, what we want to do together and what to keep at national level (...) To ensure coherence between the different policy instruments, we should develop a new strategic instrument for economic policy coordination. If this is not possible in specific cases, we should be ready to consider moving forward with a subset of member states'.

Referring to the mechanism known as the '28th regime', which does not envisage regulatory harmonisation between countries but the emergence of a parallel legal regime, Mario Draghi cited the case of the capital markets union, a tedious topic that has been on the European table for years because it is blocked by conflicting national interests. In Gent in February, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire had urged to act quickly on this front, also by pursuing national collaborations.

The so-called '28th Regime' mechanism would circumvent the opposition to a tout court harmonisation of rules. In fact, it offers contracting parties the possibility of choosing between two systems of contract law. In the past, the mechanism was used to finalise the statute of Societas Europæa, or European Company. It was taken up by a former Italian prime minister, Mario Monti , in his 2010 report on the single market.

It is estimated that there is a savings pool in Europe of 33 trillion euro, and that 300 billion is invested abroad every year, particularly in the United States. The fragmentation of the single market is no longer justifiable. It has in fact become an obstacle to growth. On the capital market union front, Italy is on the same front as France. Cold are small countries that have made a raison d'être of their financial centre: Luxembourg, but also Ireland and the Netherlands.

While these countries fear increased costs and their eventual marginalisation, Germany appears to be in the middle of the road. For years Berlin has been cold to the idea of creating a financial union, probably due to unmentionable local interests, today the chancellor Olaf Scholz seems to have changed his mind (at least he seemed so at the European summit in March). It is now a matter for him to convince his finance minister, the liberal Christian Lindner .

"Our rivals are overtaking us because they can act as one country with a single strategy and align all the necessary instruments and policies," Mario Draghi concluded in La Hulpe. "If we want to be up to their standards, we will need a renewed partnership between the Member States, a redefinition of our Union that is no less ambitious than what the Founding Fathers did 70 years ago with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community.