Europe does not need Patrick Collison to ‘fix’ it

To expect a billionaire to stay out of politics is to misunderstand the meaning of power itself.At a certain level of wealth, financial power translates into political influence which shapes public debates. In Ireland, the Collison brothers, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick, have been using their influence to do just that.In the pages of The Irish Times, John Collison has argued that the State has become incapable of building. His essay last year offered us a reflection on what ails the country: it is the power shift from government to agencies and regulators that has rendered the State unable to perform its role. In many ways, John’s Irish arguments mirror the political project Patrick supports in the United States; formed by the belief that institutions which can be deregulated will be able to build more, and thus restore the state’s ability to deliver at all. READ MORENow, Patrick has moved his sights eastward of the United States and its economic outpost of Ireland, to Europe. Alongside Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, he will co-chair the new Rhine Group – an impressive network of elite economists, policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors created to tackle the many problems facing Europe’s stagnating economy. “The European growth model is fading, and we are increasingly at the mercy of external events we do not control. Decline is not inevitable, but it is the direction we are heading unless we take urgent action,” the group warns.Which begs a question: can a person who is trying to fix the United States also fix Europe? And another, more obvious one: what, exactly, qualifies Patrick Collison to reimagine the bloc?Among the reasons put forth by those who are exasperated by Europe’s uncompetitiveness, Patrick’s extraordinary technological and financial success in one of the world’s most challenging economies is usually mentioned first. His company, Stripe, has created unprecedented wealth for many of its employees and investors as it grew to more than a hundred billion dollar valuation. However commercial success should not automatically lend itself to political authority. Stripe is a privately held company which is not accountable to the European public. Collison has no democratic or institutional mandate, and yet here he is attempting to help redirect the future of Europe’s political economy. The people of Ireland are beginning to learn, perhaps at too high a price, what happens when economic efficiencies are used as a metric for assessing the worth of society. The Rhine Group’s members include around 50 fiercely intellectual leaders. Regardless of who has been picked to join this intelligentsia, Collison will learn that it is not possible to “brainstorm” our way out of structural problems, no matter how smart the thinkers involved. Given that Draghi’s report on the EU’s uncompetitiveness ran to several hundred pages long, the issue is not understanding the problem. It is having the political power and democratic mandate to agree on a structurally reformed solution.But let’s zoom out. Even if Patrick Collison could scale the European economy with the speed at which he scaled Stripe, there’s a more important question: is Europe’s problem that it is too regulated, as Collison appears to believe about the United States? Or is it that the EU is doing the thing it was actually designed to do – and quite well?The worldview that Collison brings with him to Brussels is, at its core, that of neoliberalism. And while Europe is indeed far too bureaucratic, his simplistic framework mistakes one large constraint – regulation – for the only constraint. His American policy agenda seems to suggest that if you remove the interventions that suffocate growth, the economy will accelerate and take care of itself. But Europe is not idly waiting for a billionaire to unshackle its economy – it has the world’s most talented people, billions of euro in savings and nearly half a billion consumers. What it lacks is a mechanism that can take these qualities and turn them into co-ordinated action at a continental scale. Which, ultimately, is not the same problem as the American one. The EU was designed around a specific historical problem: it intentionally sought slow co-operation as a tool to promote peace between nations. This system was created with inbuilt speed bumps in an attempt to prolong negotiations and remove centralised decision-making. The friction that slows us down was not always a bug; for decades it was very much a desired feature, removing our compulsions for war. And it is the mechanism through which member states have retained their sovereignty. So when someone complains about the EU moving too slowly, the answer cannot be to simply “move faster”. This is akin to telling an oil tanker to behave as a speedboat. Our slowness is not an outcome of bad driving, but a consequence of our design. For the Rhine Group to “fix” Europe into creating, say, continentwide energy infrastructure or the needed scale in AI and semiconductor start-ups, it will have to “fix” the problem of which state gets to decide on mandates and override the other national governments. But the Rhine Group will also have to acknowledge that deregulation is not the ultimate constraint on economic growth – the EU structure of member states and their fragmentation of sovereignty is. A more efficient Europe thus requires us to enter an era of a new political authority. For Europe to act differently, it would have to become different. Would that Europe be led by the Germans? The French? Or maybe Silicon Valley? If the Rhine Group is successful, we will find out what happens when people who were able to grow tech companies with extraordinary speed turn that expertise to a political apparatus whose stability relies on moving extraordinarily slowly. While there’s no doubt that Europe’s economic decay needs to be remedied, perhaps it should not happen at the direction of one of the people funding a think tank which wants to solve Ireland’s housing crisis, in part, with garden sheds.