Decoding the news. Mario Draghi and Patrick Collison are trying to move Europe’s competitiveness debate from diagnosis to implementation.
- The new initiative is called the Rhine Group. Draghi, the former European Central Bank president and Italian prime minister, and Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, are its co-chairs. Luis Garicano, the Spanish economist and former MEP, is the group’s executive director. The group describes itself as a gathering of leaders from government, academia and business, built around the idea of turning evidence into action.
Why it matters. Europe does not lack reports on its economic weakness. It lacks the political and industrial machinery to act on them.
- That is the space the Rhine Group wants to occupy: not as an EU institution, nor as a substitute for the Commission or national governments, but as a place where people who usually sit at different tables can work through the reforms Europe says it needs but often struggles to deliver.
- The starting point is the 2024 Draghi report on European competitiveness, prepared at the request of the European Commission. That report warned that Europe could no longer rely on the same external conditions that supported growth in the past and laid out recommendations to move the continent onto a different trajectory.
The big picture. The Rhine Group’s argument is economic and strategic.
- According to the group’s founding statement, only four of the world’s fifty largest technology companies are European, while the continent is weak across the emerging technologies likely to shape the coming decades. It links stagnation directly to Europe’s ability to finance defence, healthcare, pensions, education, climate investment and social protection.
- The group’s diagnosis is familiar but sharper in tone: for decades Europe benefited from expanding global trade, the American security umbrella and dependencies that appeared manageable.
- That environment, the Rhine Group argues, has changed. The United States has become more protectionist, China is a tougher competitor both abroad and inside the European market, and strategic dependencies have become more exposed.
Between the lines. The novelty is not another call for Europe to “wake up.” It is the attempt to create a bridge between research, political feasibility and industrial execution.
- The group says its discussions will be based on research papers distributed in advance and held under the Chatham House Rule. That suggests a format closer to a working policy network than a conventional public-facing think tank.
- Its message also reverses a defensive reading of European sovereignty. The goal is not simply to protect what Europe already has, but to rebuild the capacity to innovate, scale companies and compete globally. In the group’s own words, Europe is not a middle power but “the world’s second-largest market.”
Expert take. As Stefano da Empoli said to Formiche.net, president of I-Com, the Rhine Group should be read less as a traditional think tank than as a laboratory for ideas and alliances. In his view, the initiative inherits the logic of the Draghi report and tries to give it a political and operational life: Europe’s competitiveness problem is an existential question for the Union.
- Da Empoli notes that the world has moved far away from the post-Cold War optimism in which globalisation, open trade and American security made the language of national competitiveness seem almost misplaced. Today, with great-power competition back at the centre of international politics, Europe’s weaknesses in technology, scale, capital and decision-making carry strategic consequences.
- The challenge, he argues, will be to avoid turning the Rhine Group into an exclusive club and instead make it a platform able to connect institutions, companies, academics and other actors around a difficult but still possible mission: restoring Europe’s capacity to innovate, grow and compete.
The Italian angle. Among the members listed by the Rhine Group are Andrea Pignataro, founder and CEO of ION Group; Lucrezia Reichlin, the economist at London Business School; Francesco Giavazzi, professor emeritus at Bocconi; Francesco Decarolis, professor of economics at Bocconi; Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons; and Vittorio Colao, former Vodafone CEO and former Italian minister.
- That matters because the competitiveness debate is often framed in Brussels, Paris or Berlin. The Rhine Group gives Italy a visible place in a discussion that connects technology, finance, industrial policy and economic security.
What to watch. The test will be whether the Rhine Group can help translate the Draghi agenda into reforms that governments and EU institutions are willing to carry.
- The European Commission says the Draghi report is already feeding into its work on sustainable prosperity and competitiveness, including the Competitiveness Compass presented in January 2025.
- The harder part begins now: moving from consensus about Europe’s weakness to choices on capital markets, energy, digital infrastructure, defence, productivity and industrial scale. That is where the Rhine Group wants to place itself – between the warning and the decision.
