Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World, by David Marsh, Yale University Press, 515 pp, £25, ISBN: ‎978 0300273007.

This is a book that comes armed to the teeth. Its author, a former Financial Times European editor, has assembled thirty-six endorsements for a five-page overture, ten by central bankers, past and present, the rest by ambassadors and former ambassadors and all sorts of ‘global heads’ of whatever, senior fellows and advisers, the procession being led by Gordon Brown on the front cover (‘A privilege to read’) followed by, going by protocol, Lord David Owen. For good measure, a foreword is contributed by Joachim Nagel, president of Deutsche Bundesbank and, perhaps soon, of more.

David Marsh interviewed an astonishing 167 people, listed at the tail end of the book with their credentials described in loving detail, over two years from mid-2023 to mid-2025. Most of them, one is tempted to say, are from the Anglosphere but this is, after all, where things happen. Even larger is the share of those that are ‘from finance’ – private, semi-private, public, semi-public, national and international finance. Thirty are from Germany, none is from Russia; I will return to this later. Some were interviewed more than once, mostly at their place of residence but sometimes, if unavoidable, by video conference. Sociologists and political scientists, who in their humble ‘projects’ try to make sense of and extract something like ‘theory’ from a maximum of fifty ‘expert interviews’, can only express their admiration or abstain from doing so out of sheer envy.

Marsh’s people are the people who are supposed to be in the know, which, in the language of social science methodology, makes them informants rather than respondents, giving researchers a license to assume that what they tell them is what it is, which would render special efforts at sense-making expendable. Indeed, the book in parts looks like a vast collection of citations from the rich and powerful, the celebrities of finance and its politics – citations Marsh obviously considers deserving of being taken at face value, the source guaranteeing the truth. That all his informants basically agree with each other – that ‘Europe’ is going down the drain unless something is done and subito; that ‘we’ need to return to ‘healthy’ economic growth while saving the environment; that ‘we’ must catch up on competitiveness in general and artificial intelligence in particular – does not bother Marsh; he takes it as confirmation that when it comes to knowing Europe’s disease and the medicine it requires for survival, there is no alternative to what his friends are telling him.

So why, then, is this a bad book? Just as he relies on proof by prominence, gratefully taking for granted what his interviewees entrust to him as facts, Marsh never questions the premises that underlie their view of the real world, and the actions and projects they derive from it. Extracting hidden assumptions and inspecting them for their validity and the functions they perform for those who subscribe to them is, of course, the essence not just of critical scholarship but of critical journalism. Marsh opts for a kind of journalistic statesmanship, free of any subversive intention, that pays for access to the upper crust, not just by adopting their worldview but by accepting responsibility for making it that of the reading public.

Digging into Marsh’s voluminous book on what ‘we’ must do for ‘Europe’ to ‘survive’, those outside of the inside find themselves puzzled over who the ‘we’ are (just the banking community or also the foodbank one, far more numerous but miniscule in terms of economic and political purchasing power?); whether ‘Europe’ is larger than western Europe (shouldn’t Russia be in if, for example, Ukraine is, or Romania and Bulgaria, or the UK post Brexit?); what ‘survival’ (and ‘non-survival’, in other words, death) would mean for a collection of societies and states as diverse as those located in ‘Europe’, even excluding Russia and its friends; and what it is that ‘Europe’ will ‘need’ to prosper in a world that is moving toward a new order. Reading Marsh one learns again that an establishment is above all a community of assumptions, shared truths understood without further ado by those who belong. ‘We’ are those who can read Marsh without asking unnecessary questions, who find in documents like the latest ‘Draghi report’ nothing that would require elaboration or justify reflection on alternatives. ‘Europe’ is what is not Russia, all that is located west of the western Russian border; it will ‘survive’ if and only if it turns itself into an economic, technological and military superpower rivaling the United States and China, with centralised leadership and a battle-hardened military; and for this what it needs above all is economic growth, steadily rising productivity, technological leadership, a big army and political unity.

That survival, according to Marsh and his informants, is now at risk and can be secured, in critical times with uncertain outcomes, only under the proven direction of the financial sector and its political allies with their eternal slogan, TINA: There Is No Alternative. You can fail trying to get there, but there is nothing else to try for. A French friend, not unfamiliar with Marsh’s power-state sense of ‘Europeanness’, once in a conversation invoked the grim fate of Venice after the shift of world trade to the Atlantic, having turned the Serenissima into a ‘backwater of history’. What about, I asked, Tizian, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Veronese, above all Vivaldi, not to forget Casanova: Venus not Mars! – and the Chinese come in droves to hand over their hard-earned dollars, what a wonderful place a backwater can be!

Reading Can Europe Survive? is an adventure. On 351 pages we find roughly 1,800 quoted passages and attributed statements, more than five per page, endnotes not counted, mostly citing the haute volée of international finance and politics, relating to readers the small details of great moments, like the face Helmut Kohl made when George Bush allowed German unification, or what Winston Churchill said to Harry Truman, or Mao Zedong to Helmut Schmidt. There are lively chapters on how Vladimir Putin spoiled the atmosphere between Russia and ‘the West’, on German unification, the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and ‘the trouble with Britain’ and its crazy politicians. Quite funny at times, but always on the surface of current events, it is richly adorned by Marsh’s ever unerring judgments based on his conviction that, with the help of his interviewees, he had almost been in the room when it happened, whatever it was. We also learn about that strange beast, ‘Putin’, with ‘multiple oscillating personalities. Alternatively beguiling, bemoaning, berating, this deliberate political chameleon, with killer’s eyes, able to move from sensitive soul to hard nut in one blink’, featuring a ‘personality mix of technocracy, tenacity and thuggery’. Read by the renowned psychologist, John McCain, in 2008: ‘I looked into Mr Putin’s eyes and saw three letters, a K, G and a B.’ ‘Very cold, small piggy eyes,’ according to a British ambassador, that showed ‘homophobia in some ways, although not antisemitism … a cunning intelligence, full of suspicion and vindictiveness …’ And so on.

Much else could be learned from and said about Marsh’s book, and others have done so at length. But to this reviewer, all depends on what sociologists would call Marsh’s, and Marsh’s Europe’s, agency problem. Who is the Moses who will lead Europe, a motley bunch of ‘Western’ and not-so-Western nation states on the edge, facing Russia as a Carl Schmittian ‘existential enemy’ into the glorious future Marsh, in spite of everything, wishes for it and ‘us’? Europe, to live up to the Draghi to-do list, needs leadership, but Marsh and his informants have seen enough to know the EU cannot provide it and never will. No hope that the big supranational superstate competing on an equal footing with the US and China will grow out of the sort of ‘European integration’ that the EU may once have been set up for but has failed to bring about. As Marsh explores who would and could make it their objective to secure what Europe needs, he ends up settling for a second best: an alliance of nation states grouped around one of their kind. Technically an empire, for public consumption an emerging democratic superstate, kept together by a hegemonic nation state at its centre, Europe would find itself lined up behind a collective interest, defined on its behalf and, if need be, enforced on it by its state-in-chief.

Who, then, is to be that state, commanding as it must superior ideological, economic and, perhaps, coercive means, sometimes working through the supranational bureaucracy-cum-judiciary of the EU, leftover from ‘European integration’ and sometimes not? Marsh’s candidate, as the United States are on their way to new playgrounds, is not France and certainly not the venerable French-German ‘tandem’ but Germany. Not ideal, Marsh knows, but better than nothing, he seems to say, if what is needed is a Europe as a ‘strategically sovereign’ third power competing successfully with the US and China. ‘Europe’ surviving as a German Europe without transatlantic moorings, left to its own devices by its forever patron the United States? How desperate can one get?

It is here that we approach the hard core of Marsh’s and his friends’ view of the world. While Germany is bigger than France, it is hardly big enough to turn ‘Europe’ into what before 1945 was called by German imperialists a German ‘zone of influence’ (Einflusszone). One wonders why Marsh, a former FT correspondent in Berlin, should not know this. True, Friedrich Merz, unlike his predecessors, sometimes does claim a ‘leading role’ for Germany in the EU and, perhaps, beyond. But Merz claims a lot when the day is long. He also may not be aware that rhetoric of this sort will give rise to calls for Germany to prove that it will be not just a hegemon but a benevolent one. Keeping an empire together and in line is demanding in moral, economic and military terms: weaker countries must be kept happy with all sorts of subsidies; countries on the periphery must be prevented from political flip-flopping, Orbán-style, if need be, by locating military bases on their territory; and local political classes, if not electoral majorities, must be bought and socialised into the cultural-political ‘values’ for which the empire and its centre presumably stand. All of this is much more expensive than before unification in 1990 when Germany, already the largest EU member state, served, in the eyes of a growing section of the German public, as Europe’s more or less voluntary paymaster.

Among the costly expectations that Germany as hegemon of a West European state system would have to meet would be an exemplary implementation of the 3.5 to 5 per cent defense budget. ‘Europe’ has promised this not just to the United States but also to itself, so Germany can locate more infantry divisions in Eastern Europe, like the 5,000-strong brigade it is already stationing in Lithuania, which is expected to cost €1 billion per year once complete. Moreover, a German European hegemon will have to stabilise the economies of peripheral states to prevent them from falling into the hands of ‘anti-European’ forces. It will also have to underwrite, in whatever form, the ballooning public debt of countries like France and Italy. Imperial hegemony, however, cannot for domestic reasons be a loss-making enterprise forever; at some stage a hegemon will, like the US today, need to claim its expenses so that returns balance costs, and perhaps even exceed them, to make hegemony palatable to its citizens. Will a hegemonic Germany ever be able to increase the fees it charges its proteges – its imperial rent, in whatever form – so that they equal or exceed those outlays?

Add to this that Germany is not a nuclear power. There are two such powers in Marsh’s Europe, France and the UK. France has, since the 1960s, tried to get Germany to reimburse it a share of the costs of its nuclear arsenal, claiming it protects not just France but also Germany. But France was never willing to allow Germany a say on when and where and to what end French nuclear arms would be used, which was why Germany never agreed to any cost-sharing. The UK’s nuclear force is deeply intertwined with that of the United States. It is also said to be dismally underfunded and in urgent need of technological upgrading, for which the UK depends, again, on the US. Recently, France and Britain, in something like a Marshian spirit, suggested that they jointly provide a nuclear umbrella to Germany and ‘Europe’ as a whole, outside of EU and Nato. This would mean that Germany – whose conventional army would be in the first line of fire in a war with Russia, most likely in the Baltics – would depend for cover on two other countries in the kind of land war for which ‘Europe’, in whatever incorporation, today claims to have to be ready in less than five years.

On the one hand, while Germany is no nuclear power, it is not entirely without nuclear arms – only that these are not German or European but American. As a legacy of the second World War, the US has approximately 40,000 troops stationed in Germany with an additional 25,000 family members and 17,000 civilian employees, more than anywhere else in the world except in Okinawa, Japan. Dispersed all over Germany, the US maintains 181 military bases, the largest being Ramstein in Rhineland-Palatinate and Grafenwöhr in Bavaria. Ramstein was the operational headquarters of the US in the War on Terror, which, among other things, coordinated the shuttle flights for prisoners to Guantanamo (‘extraordinary rendition’). It continues to be the command post for US interventions in the Middle East, including the bombing of Iran. And, not least, US bases in Germany host an unknown number of nuclear warheads, some of them set aside for the German air force to drop on US-specified targets in Russia using US-certified fighter bombers, under the auspices of what is called ‘nuclear participation’ as compensation, it seems, for Germany having alongside Japan signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty of 1968.

But has the US not more than once announced that it will withdraw from Nato and Europe to be able to ‘Make America Great Again’ at home? Here is the other elephant in the room that Marsh fails to notice: the limited power of the government of the US over its deep state, its ‘military-industrial complex’. If Trump, or any other president, were to order the American military to return home, in particular from Germany or Japan, the chiefs of staff would at the very least sit back and wait for the next presidential election. But, in fact, there will be no need for insubordination. Why, if the intention was non-interventionist, should Trump and his ‘Department of War’ recently have asked the Congress to increase the gigantic so-called defence budget from an unbelievable $1 trillion in 2026 to $1.5 trillion in 2027?

A Western European state system led by Germany as a regional power state would continue to be dominated by the US through its domination of Germany. Rather than going for ‘strategic sovereignty’ by getting out of the non-proliferation treaty, Germany has, under Scholz, agreed to buy thirty-five F-35 American fighter bombers at a price to be unilaterally determined by the US government at the time of delivery. Their purpose is to replace the allegedly ‘outdated’ Eurofighter licensed by the US as carrier of American nuclear warheads. The US announced in 2024 that from 2026 it would start deploying long-range, land-based Tomahawk missiles in Germany on a bilateral basis circumventing Nato. Included would be hypersonic missiles that could reach Moscow in a matter of minutes, equipped with conventional warheads while, one could presume, capable of being refitted for nuclear ones. It is treated as something like a state secret whether the deployment was asked for by the Germans or presented by Biden to Scholz as a fait accompli, not to be negotiated, only to be informed of. Either way, the issue speaks volumes about Germany’s prospect of ‘strategic autonomy’. As does the fact that Trump’s unannounced cancellation of the deployment made the German defence minister beg the US to be allowed to buy the Tomahawks and set them up in Germany at German expense.

What does all this mean for Marsh’s ‘survival’ of an autonomous ‘Europe’? As a heavily armed military platform of the US, Germany will continue to depend on American protection. As a result, it will be unable to seek a rapprochement with Russia, for itself or on behalf of Western Europe as a whole. Rather than leaving Europe, the US will continue to lord over its state system, if less directly than in the past, then indirectly through Germany, with the UK serving as regional watchdog over the wider geopolitical interests of the US. Nor is it likely that the US will object to the UK, in the tradition of Boris Johnson, doing what it can to persuade the Ukrainian ruling oligarchy not to give up in the war with Russia, with Germany as leading supplier of money at first and then, perhaps, of living bodies. As a welcome side-effect, turning the western border of Russia into an Iron Curtain 2.0 will put to rest the old Anglo-American nightmare of a regional Eurasian order founded on peaceful coexistence between its two major powers, Russia and Germany, potentially resulting in Gorbachev’s ‘common European house’ or Yeltsin and Putin’s ‘Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok’.

Moreover, as the war will drag on, the US arms industry will enjoy an effectively captive market in Europe, outcompeting the French, in cooperation with German arms producers investing in Ukraine and building up an arms industry with local billionaires. By making Germany maintain the pressure on Russia, promising Ukrainian nationalists a victory plus membership in the EU and compensation for any damages incurred by fighting for Western ‘values’, the US will force China to divert military and other resources to its Eurasian borders to protect Russia from a defeat even it cannot help it avoid. Why should the US go home from a place as paradisical as this?

Realistically, Marsh’s scenario of a European survival under German leadership is one of German leadership under US leadership, with the White House as commander-in-chief, the UK as first lieutenant, and Germany as local sergeant where the blood is let. This doesn’t appear entirely new, and indeed Marsh doesn’t in the end put much money on ‘Europe’ getting better soon, even with the competent advice of the leading lights of international finance who have read – or, in any case, endorsed – his book: ‘The last few years have been difficult for Europe,’ writes Marsh, ‘before it gets better, Europeans should brace themselves for worse.’

Appropriately, among the book’s central themes is that of ‘resilience’, a concept that had hardly been known a few years ago but now is commonplace, the principal euphemism of the era of polycrisis. Google Ngram tells us that its popularity in English-language books, after decades of meek existence on the linguistic periphery, skyrocketed between 2005 and 2020. In Germany, where the word had to be imported from the English, it appeared first, hardly noticeable at the turn of the century; after a short peak in the wake of the financial crisis, it entered on a steep climb in 2013, steeper even than in the Anglosphere, a climb that seems to be continuing. From ChatGPT we learn that resilience means ‘the ability to recover, adapt, or bounce back after difficulty, stress, shock or change’. Having migrated from materials science to people science, its core meaning is summarised as ‘not avoiding problems, but recovering from them well’ in a world, one is tempted to add, where the problem is not problems but recovering from them. Politicians and other manufacturers of consent used to promise growth, prosperity, stability and peace but now, in the era of forever crisis, they wisely limit themselves to demanding resilience as the highest virtue of individuals and societies – a revolution of diminished expectations started from above by those who have run out of better offers. And one that may work, at least for the time being. Recently on German television a man showed a reporter his basement, full of bottles of olive oil and packets of spaghetti. It was enough, he said, for weeks of cooking the pasta in oil, no need for potentially contaminated water, and a contribution, the man proudly said, to resilienz in the adverse times that he saw coming. Voting Merz out – or, if that was possible, which it isn’t, von der Leyen – did not seem to him an alternative, and indeed how should it be? ‘Can Europe survive?’ With citizens like him, it will at least go down in style.