The last piece is extremely important. Being able to raise money and hire across the EU with no friction would be fantastic, but it means nothing if actually selling into different EU markets has massive language barriers (average people in many neighboring EU countries cannot communicate with each other beyond the level of a 4 year old). English fluency is massively overstated by people who only have visited European tourist capitals.
That tension has always struck me as deeply paradoxical. In the post-Brexit era, we have had a very visible case study in what happens when shared European frameworks are removed. The UK has spent years scrambling to recreate institutions, regulatory mechanisms, and coordination structures that had previously been provided at the EU level. One might expect that experience to have clarified the value of those structures. It largely hasn’t.
A significant part of the problem is deep lack of understanding. "EU bureaucracy" is a common target of criticism, yet it is remarkably rare for critics to have any concrete sense of what that bureaucracy actually does. The EU tends to appear in public discourse only when politicians argue, or when a regulation is framed as an intrusion on national sovereignty.
The everyday, unglamorous work of harmonization, reducing friction, enabling cross-border activity, and making markets function at scale—remains almost entirely invisible.
This creates a structural communication failure. The benefits of integration are mostly preventative and cumulative: things that don’t break, costs that don’t arise, barriers that quietly disappear. These effects are hard to convey through headlines or sound bites. Dry institutional reports are a poor match for a public sphere with limited patience for complexity. The result is a persistent undervaluation of the very mechanisms that make large, integrated markets possible.
Language barriers are often invoked in these discussions, and while they are real, their relevance is frequently overstated in this context. In white-collar professions, English proficiency is generally passable to good. This is especially true in software engineering, where English is effectively the working language of the field.
That said, proficiency is often domain-specific: people may read and write technical English fluently while still struggling with more active uses such as negotiation, persuasion, or conflict resolution.
In typical blue collar-type professions, by contrast, language barriers are substantial and unavoidable.
Where the problem becomes genuinely self-defeating is in the insistence that using English as a shared working language represents some form of cultural submission or imperialism. This view, rooted more in nationalist romanticism than in economic reality, adds pointless friction. It is beyond stupid to waste resources publishing official documents in 24 different languages. But eliminating this waste is a hard sell when you ask the muggles.
It brings us back to the central contradiction: the same people who regret Europe’s inability to produce globally dominant software companies often support attitudes and policies that fragment markets, raise transaction costs, and make such outcomes far less likely.
Europe cannot simultaneously expect to realize the benefits of scale and reject the mechanisms that make scale possible.
In the past, center-left and center-right coalitions were able to find win-win compromises out of this contradiction. But now that everyone has moved outward on the political spectrum and gone populist on both sides, it's a stalemate.
The pro-central planning folks are now anti-business and anti-growth since private capital represents a threat to their utopian authoritarian dreams (this truth will be masked with religious appeals to the poor and the environment of course).
The pro-business, pro-growth folks are conversely anti-central planning, since government represents a threat to their utopian libertarian dreams (central planners might kill the unfair arbitrage opportunities they've found, and central planners tend to overspend and expect the private sector to pay for it).
While central planners are terrible capital allocators, strong central planning is the only way to create well functioning markets. For example, the US Federal government wields total control over US state governments in basically everything.
What Europe needs is a center coalition of pro-business and pro-government wonks (basically what the neocons were), but the phrase 'neocon' has become a bizarre internet meme for conspiracy theorists and there exists very little interest in moderate viewpoints these days.
I'm guessing we'll all be dead before any of these issues are solved in Europe (if ever), absent a full-scale Russian or Chinese invasion forcing the EU to integrate.