In the absence of a profound and coherent revision of the geo-economic approach adopted by the Commission, the deterioration of European security appears to be difficult to reverse. Not due to a lack of values or institutional tools, but due to insufficient strategic rationality in the actions of its main decision-maker, write Pasquale Preziosa and Dario Velo.
The geostrategic crisis currently affecting the European Union cannot be understood by resorting to generic categories that attribute to “Europe” an indistinct political subjectivity. Such an approach, however rhetorically reassuring, ultimately obscures the central issue of decision-making responsibility. The strategic weaknesses that are now emerging with increasing clarity can be traced primarily to the actions of the European Commission, the body responsible for legislative, economic, and commercial initiative and, in practice, the main architect of the Union’s geo-economic choices.
Over the past decade, these choices have progressively eroded the material foundations of European security, undermining its original function of promoting economic growth and structural convergence among Member States, from which the very legitimacy of the integration project derives. The Commission’s management of the green transition, its inability to negotiate economic relations with the United States effectively and symmetrically, and its adoption of strategic postures poorly calibrated to global power dynamics have produced an accumulation of systemic vulnerabilities that now manifest themselves on political, industrial, and strategic levels.
Any rigorous analysis of European geo-strategy must therefore begin with a clear methodological premise: the European Union, as such, does not act as a unified political actor endowed with autonomous decision-making capacity. The function of initiating, directing, and implementing the Union’s main economic, industrial, and commercial policies is exercised primarily by the European Commission. It is the Commission that shapes industrial policy, defines the common commercial strategy, sets the framework for the energy and climate transition, and conducts negotiations with external actors within the limits of the mandates it receives.
Indiscriminately attributing the consequences of these decisions to “Europe” amounts to dissolving political responsibility into an abstract entity. This produces a narrative that tends to absolve institutional decision-makers, obscuring the causal link between specific geo-economic choices and the Union’s progressive strategic weakening. In reality, the quality of European geo-strategy depends directly and inescapably on the quality of the geo-economic framework designed by the Commission.
Within this context lies the proposal—advanced by the Commission and ultimately rejected—to allocate frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine. Beyond the contingent political motivations, such an initiative would have entailed significant systemic consequences, undermining the Union’s reliability as a legal and financial space and further weakening its strategic credibility in an international system marked by competition among major powers. The failure to adopt this measure represents, in effect, a political defeat for the line promoted by the President of the Commission and by those governments that supported a maximalist approach insufficiently anchored in legal constraints and global power balances.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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