A Europe of capital, not just funds. Monnet, Draghi and Polish improvement dilemma

This is not another Brussels fresh written in a fresh language, over which you can turn to the agenda. This is simply a diagnosis in which “stage” is changed by all cases, and the spectrum of technological marginalization of the Old Continent ceases to be only a publicist figure threatening at night economists.

We like to think that movement is life. That as long as the production tapes are buzzing and the trucks are leaving the logistics hubs under Strykow or Poznań, we're safe. With the warm blanket of GDP growth, we are utilized to the function of “the premus of transformation” without noticing that the planet around us has started playing a completely different game. This comfort, however, can be treacherous, acts like morphine, relieves the pain of delay, but does not cure disease. Mario Draghi broke into this dream communicative of European success with a bang. A year ago, a man who erstwhile "saved the euro at all costs" placed a study on the table thick with facts, and let's face it, without mercy.

This is not another Brussels fresh written in a fresh language, over which you can turn to the agenda. This is simply a diagnosis in which “stage” is changed by all cases, and the spectrum of technological marginalization of the Old Continent ceases to be only a publicist figure threatening at night economists. erstwhile you read into these respective 100 pages, between the poems about decarbonization and digitization you can hear the echo of Jean Monnet's thought, which, if he were alive, would have celebrated his 137th birthday in November. After all, the founding father of the Community knew perfectly well that integration is not a given state erstwhile and for all, but a process that feeds on a concrete action, "facts of solidarity." Today, these facts are brutal. Poland is in an uncomfortable split. We are in a safe but increasingly little profitable function of the “European assembly plant” – an efficient subcontractor of another people’s ideas. The second is simply a shy effort to put innovation where the margins are advanced and the hazard even higher. Can we realize that the pillars of the changes that Italy is writing about are not bureaucratic requirements, but our only chance to decision forward?

Jean Monnet, 1 of the founding fathers of integration, liked to repeat that "Europe will forge itself in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted against these crises". The crisis that Europe has entered present is not a form of spectacular breakdown, but a slow slide down the table. For 2 decades, we have been utilized to “do our own” and will catch up with the West. Draghi says it's over. The planet has accelerated, and Europe is stuck in half a step, besides mediocre in hazard capital, besides costly in energy, besides fragmented in regulation to produce fresh technological giants. If Monnet were writing his manifesto today, alternatively of steel, he would most likely compose about capital. Draghi, however, focused on a more advanced phase of integration. His diagnosis leaves no area for illusion: without a genuine union of capital markets, Europe does not stand a chance against technological leviathans from the US or China. Green transformation and digital leap will stay only a sphere of declaration if they are not followed by a river of money, which is inactive crossed by national egoisms in Europe. Egoisms which Poland, with a strong position of European leader, could address. Unfortunately, we will gotta wait for this position.

Draghi sees a systemic mistake in this phenomenon, going far beyond the Polish backyard. The scale of the challenges we face is staggering - we are talking about investments of hundreds of billions of euros per year, equivalent to nearly 5 percent of EU GDP. It is simply a burden under which all national budget will bend separately, and each, even the most efficient, local market. That is why the call for a deepening of the Capital Markets Union is so powerfully called for to replace twenty-seven shallow, drying puddles with 1 deep ocean of capital. In practice, this means agreeing to a stronger European supervision and free movement of savings, which, alternatively of being over-eaten or worse, could feed innovation across borders, thereby implementing Monnet's will in the digital, focused on the mobility of capital of the age. For years we have fed on a communicative in which “Polish capital funds Polish companies” and state agencies proudly cut ribbons at subsequent incubators. However, this model, though safe and familiar, reached the wall. Let's face it with the example of ElevenLabs. This is our people, Polish intellect and technology, which delighted the world, but erstwhile it came to playing for the position of a global unicorn and dominance in the AI sector, it was not the Vistula fund that put decisive cards on the table. The backing round, which catapulted them to the top league, was led by players specified as Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia Capital. This is simply a painful lesson of humility: no native fund, even with the most sincere intentions, has the force of demolition to control from day to day to SoftBank. So if we want global companies to be born in Poland, we must dare to let them deep into the European and even global financial circulation.

This is where Monnet's spirit calls for attention. His imagination of integration was never an abstract dream of “federalists from Luxembourg” but a derivative of iron, merchant logic. If we have demolished the customs walls for goods and opened borders for workers, how do we inactive keep the most crucial natural material of the 21st century in national cages – capital and risk? This can be seen as in Polish dilemmas: we are wasting time on idle disputes about whether another innovation is being treated with a grant drip or a fresh speciality, while transnational capital reflects on our doors. Not due to the fact that he won't come in, but due to the fact that we can't open them wide.

It is so time for the Polish debate on innovation to grow out of short shorts. alternatively of getting excited over and over again about another "starter program", we request to focus on what is the core of both Monnet and Draghi's thoughts: strategy architecture. Monnet was an engineer of necessity; he knew that the most lasting binder was not a declaration of friendship, but an institution that forced cooperation, offering in return a premium for scale, whether in steel or in agriculture. Draghi carries the same logic into digital realities: he designs mechanisms that are expected to lower the cost of capital and combine distributed national efforts into critical mass capable of competing with the world. First of all, we must halt treating the Capital Markets Union as an exotic novelty and start seeing oxygen for our economy. Joint debt-taking by the EU institutions under mechanisms specified as Rearm Europe is simply a good step towards standardisation of deeper integration. However, this requires broader and far-reaching, in modern climates, courage in politics: from the actual beginning of the national marketplace to specified a redevelopment of regulations as to guarantee that pension funds or insurers cease to be just guardians of safe assets and become fuel for innovation.

That's how Draghi's study ceases to be a method paper that we put on the shelf. It becomes a proposal for a fresh civilization agreement, in which the historical step-by-step method enters the decisive phase. This time coal is not at stake, but the ability to make the future. For a country suspended “between montownia and the innovation center”, it may be the last minute to halt chasing the bunny and start co-deciding on the moving route. However, if we shake our arms, considering this as another "Bruxel elaborate", we will stay what we are: an elegant, modern monument in the heart of Europe. With the beautiful highways, the fresh halls and the full baggage of unfulfilled ambition we'll get in the package.