# The European Dream Dawns in the East ## A family story of exile, return and Europe’s renewal Recently I left Munich for a trip. My journey took me first to Berlin, then with an unmarked bus to an airfield in the Brandenburg countryside for the [_European Defense Tech Festival_](https://eurodefense.tech/festival/). A few days later I finally arrived in Warsaw to network with the Polish eurofederalist scene, for the stock market debut of Thorium Space, for family, and above all for my father’s [60th birthday](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc08g1LDmJO/). All of them will play a role in this tale I want to tell you about Europe’s Century of Humiliation and its end, about the European Dream, about a new future shimmering on the horizon as a new dawn breaks for our continent. # Fabryka Norblina One evening during my visit to Warsaw I walked the city with a fellow eurofederalist media entrepreneur, [_The Polish Dane_](https://www.youtube.com/@PolishDane). We talked about building a united Europe and the growing eurofederalist media network, while taking a break to eat dinner at [_Fabryka Norblina_](https://fabrykanorblina.pl/budynek/) — the old Norblin metalworks, an industrial hulk of brick, steel and glass in the middle of the city. A century ago my great-grandfather worked in that building as a foreman, supervising men and machinery in the metallurgy, forging [silver spoons](https://muzeumfabrykinorblina.pl/?page_id=2143&lang=en) for palaces and bullets for the military. Another great-grandfather fired the latter as a cavalry officer in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921. Poland won that round of war against the Russians, but peace didn’t last long. In 1939 the Soviets and the Nazis made a pact and invaded Poland together from both sides. What followed were Nazi occupation, genocides, my great-grandfather barely escaping deportation, half of my great-uncles perishing as teenagers fighting in the resistance, Soviet occupation, Stalinist terror and purges again, communism, collectivisation, and eventually silence; the furnaces went cold and the halls emptied out. And now, a few decades later, a week ago, I was eating spring rolls and discussing building a united european future with a fellow eurofederalist in a food court built inside these halls, surrounded by preserved brick and restored machinery, cinemas, offices, shops and young people drinking and dancing to live jazz in the [piano bar](https://pianobar.com.pl/en/piano-bar-warsaw-en/), before stepping out into a cool night teeming with life and lights. # An Architecture of Ambition Warsaw has changed a lot. Where once were ash and ruins, today there is beauty and life; layer upon layer of Europe destroyed, buried, recovered, repurposed ... and somehow being reborn and reforged again and again. Glass, steel, marble, fountains, greenery, new businesses, new restaurants, new streets, cranes on the horizon where grey communist blocs disappear and new skyscrapers and shopping centers sprawl out. Above all of it now stands the 310-metre-high [_Varso Tower_](https://varso.com/en), the tallest building in the European Union, overshadowing even the Stalinist _Pałac Kultury i Nauki_. Coming from Germany, the contrast in aesthetics and expressed ambition feels somewhat embarrassing. How provincial does even my hometown Munich look like in comparison - even if Munich does in fact harbour much more high-tech research and financial capital than Warsaw; it just does not feel and not look like that. How old and uninspired does even Frankfurt’s Mainhattan look like compared to Warsaw? How dirty and dysfunctional is Berlin in comparison (still, despite improving a lot in recent years)? Germany was once a titan, it still is, but a stagnating one, where fax machines, decaying stations and construction projects measured in geological epochs have become a common occurrence; a place with deteriorating public infrastructure, increasingly neglected public space and an administrative culture that treats delay, dysfunction and control as normal. And then one arrives in the supposedly backward post-communist East to find a metropolis rising like an architectural explosion of ambition. Look just at the railway projects: _Stuttgart 21_, Stuttgart’s new central station, was first pitched in 1994 and is still not expected to be completed until 2031 after over three decades of planning, building and multiplying budgets. Munich's Second S-Bahn Trunk Line was supposed to open this year, now it is not expected to open before 2035, more likely 2037, at roughly three times its original budget. In roughly the same span in which Germany has turned major infrastructure projects into a generational psychodrama of consultations, lawsuits, exploding budgets and decade-long delays, Warsaw simply kept building: between 2015 and 2022 alone Warsaw opened 18 new metro stations, tunnelling beneath the Vistula and extending the network east and west, while from 2020 to 2025 it rebuilt its Western Station, _Warszawa Zachodnia_, Poland’s busiest railway junction. The projects are not technically identical, of course; but that is not the point. The point is: Germany increasingly spends decades deciding how to build something; while Warsaw just builds. Today’s Warsaw has little to do with the grey post-communist city I remember from my childhood; in spirit it probably resembles more the city experienced by my great-grandfathers. Before it was flattened into dust and ash in the second World War, Warsaw was often called the _Paryż Północy_, the _Paris of the North,_ due to its blend of French-inspired architecture, cosmopolitan culture, and vibrant street life. The comparison was meant as a compliment. I don’t think this would work as a compliment for Warsaw nowadays as well as it did once. Paris remains magnificent; few cities in Europe hold as much accumulated old beauty. But increasingly Paris, like much of Western Europe, feels like the magnificent ruin of a disappearing civilisation: monumental, rich, beautiful, but dirty, chaotic and exhausted, increasingly scared of the world, drifting mentally into retropias of xenophobia and degrowth, living off an inheritance accumulated by people considerably younger and more ambitious than those now administering it. Paris and Vienna visibly draw on what they inherited; Warsaw increasingly projects what it is becoming. And this emerging dynamism in the East is starting to outshine the inherited grandeur of the West of our continent. Which is why, walking out of the factory-turned-third-place, I was haunted by the spectre not of the past, but of a present that was taken from us, a world that never existed: _What the hell would this city and our continent look like if Poland had not been robbed of half a century?_ But I also began to wonder whether what I was seeing was not merely Poland catching up, but the beginning of something larger: the end of a century of European humiliation. But first things first. # The Europe That We Lost What would Warsaw look like today, if it had not first been almost completely destroyed by the Nazis and then, instead of being allowed to recover freely, handed over to the Soviets, from one bloodthirsty totalitarian empire to the next? What would Prague look like, or Budapest, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Kyiv? What would Europe look like if the Iron Curtain had never descended across the continent, if the eastern half of our continent had never been betrayed and abandoned at Yalta for the Soviet vultures to feast upon us? Or even better: What if the World Wars had never happened in the first place? It is hard to imagine how much more prosperous we might be today, had not so much been lost. We cannot know the Europe that we have lost. But we know what Europe had to suffer through, especially its Eastern half. A large part of our European continent was occupied by Russian Soviet Empire, trapped behind barbed wire; businesses were expropriated, capital markets abolished, entrepreneurs criminalised and murdered, intellectual life censored, universities subordinated to soviet ideology, democratic and liberal dissidents imprisoned, borders sealed. Many of its most talented people fled the terror, emigrated, draining our continent of its capabilities. # **Europe’s loss became America’s gain** Andy Grove, born András Gróf in Budapest, survived both the Nazis and Stalinism, fled Hungary after the crushing of the 1956 uprising, reached the USA. There he became the third employee and defining CEO of Intel, helping create Silicon Valley. Similarly Charles Simonyi fled communist Hungary and ended up at Xerox PARC before architecting Word and Excel for Microsoft. Before he co-founded Google, Sergey Brin’s family got him out of the Soviet Union. Max Levchin’s fled Soviet-occupied Ukraine; Łukasz Nosek’s fled Poland; both became co-founders of PayPal and members of the PayPal Mafia. Jan Koum left Ukraine and later built WhatsApp in California. Obviously this does not mean Silicon Valley and its companies like Intel, Google, PayPal or WhatsApp would have been founded in Warsaw, Budapest or Kyiv had the second World War and soviet occupation never happened; history is not that neat. But Silicon Valley became so successful, because it drew in migrants fleeing from our burning continent (and from all over the world), offering liberal and democratic structures, deep capital markets and enormous concentrations of technical talent, and an almost pathological willingness to gamble absurd sums on improbable ideas. While in California the future was built, half of Europe did not even have capitalism nor basic democratic rights. US-Americans like to tell these kinds of immigrant stories as evidence of American greatness, and they are. They are equally the evidence of our European catastrophe. America became in the 20th century a magnet for global talent and capital, for innovation and progress, because Europe became a centrifuge. Successive waves of persecution, nationalism, antisemitism, nazism, fascism and communism drove extraordinary quantities of European talent abroad. The Nazis and Communists expelled and murdered our intellectuals; millions were murdered in the Holodomor and the Holocaust. We Europeans bombed each other, our own laboratories; we flattened our industrial cities; we squandered generations of young men in trenches; we partitioned the continent. No wonder many intelligent and capable Europeans looked at this mess, and decided to cross the Atlantic and build the future somewhere else, somewhere better like under the californian sun in the West. The great scientific minds Einstein, von Neumann, Fermi and many more fled to the USA and helped it gain a technological lead, inventing nuclear weapons and advanced computers. The 20th century rise of North America cannot be separated from the 20th century suicide of Europe. It would be easier to dismiss all of this as history if I were not reminded of the same dynamic every time I speak to friends who have left not 80 year but just a few months ago. One of my closest friends is doing a PhD at Harvard; another went to Silicon Valley in search of venture capital; another accelerated her career doing robotics research for American Big Tech. And, like a stereotypical Pole, I do have relatives in Chicago earning multiples of what many equally qualified Europeans make at home. Sooner or later the questions and invitations come up: _Why are you still there in Europe? The money is here. The capital is here. The ambitious people you like are here. Things happen faster here. Stop trying to repair an old continent and come build something with us here._ Sometimes they almost convince me. But then I think of my father. # The European Dream The primary reason I was in Warsaw was my father’s 60th birthday. His life story is very different from the story of the USA brain draining Europe. He too fled from Warsaw as a young man. In the 1980s, as Poland was suffering under communist rule and rallying against martial law, he was persecuted for his own anti-communist activism. Like many ambitious young Europeans before him, he wanted out and then to go to America and build a new life. But on his way he became a stateless refugee, ended up receiving political asylum in West Germany and stayed there. America did not get him. The free half of Europe did. My father arrived in the 1980s with essentially nothing and built himself up from there: from stateless refugee having to learn German and re-do school exams_,_ to successfully becoming a German citizen and climbing the career ladder up to board member of an international corporation. Then, three decades later in the mid-2010s, history folded back on itself and he returned to a free Poland, regaining his Polish citizenship, bringing back the knowledge and capital he had accumulated in the West and putting it into the country, becoming an investor and business angel. Which is also why I found myself standing next to him on the floor of the Warsaw Stock Exchange when [Thorium Space](https://thorium.space/) entered the market: a Polish deep-tech company building sovereign satellite communications, listed on a European exchange with European capital, part of it belonging to a man the communists had chased out of that city forty years earlier. My great-grandfather was a foreman in a Warsaw metal factory. My father was driven from the same city, given refuge and opportunity in Germany, made himself from nothing, and came back as an investor. That is also Europe: not only the continent that lost Grove, Brin and Levchin to the USA, but the one in which a stateless Pole could arrive with nothing in Germany and still make it. And there are many similar stories, not only of Poles, but also Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Czechs, Ukrainians, but also of Turks and Syrians who came to Western Europe, especially Germany, as _Gastarbeiter_ or Refugees and made it their home. This Germany is currently fading away after years of stagnation and suffocating under its overregulation, as xenophobia and populism grow, as the AfD is starting to win elections, but it is not gone yet; it can be saved, its democracy renewed; and opportunities across Europe are not fading, but shifting and growing elsewhere. There are parts of Europe that suffer today, but if you look at the whole of it, our continent is actually still recovering from the World Wars and the division of the Cold War, growing back together, benefiting from the European Union and the freedoms we have gained; the trend is upward, even if it has slowed and stagnated partially. Perhaps that is the European Dream. Not merely that you can move freely around the continent; but that you can actually make it here again. That Europe can again be a place where an ambitious person thrives and can build from nothing and live up to its potential, be it in business, research or culture; not being afraid of tyranny. America has spent more than a century telling the world that if you are talented and hungry and reckless enough, you should come. Europe is capable of fulfilling the same promise again. Our European Dream carries a second dimension: we are not merely building new prosperity, but rebuilding an interrupted civilisation. Warsaw is not Shenzhen or San Francisco rising out of almost nothing; Budapest is not Dubai; Kyiv is not a frontier settlement founded one or two centuries ago. These are ancient, millennia-old European cities whose development was violently broken by war, occupation, dictatorship, exploitation, isolation and decades of squandered human potential. Eastern Europe has spent the last thirty-five years not merely developing, but catching up with the future it was denied. Europe is a continent of wasted potential; but it doesn’t have to be that way and it is rapidly changing. Many people, especially in Western Europe, lament a decline of Europe, but I think Europe is not declining, at least not in absolute terms. Something more complicated is happening: the continent is growing together and rebalancing itself. For decades, movement within Europe followed an obvious gradient from East to West — from Poland toward Germany, from poorer post-communist economies toward richer Western ones. In 2024, for the first time since records began in 2000, more people moved from Germany to Poland than from Poland to Germany: 90,807 against 82,082, leaving Germany with a deficit of 8,725. Even among German citizens the balance tipped eastwards, by some two and a half thousand people, and Poland now ranks among the more significant destinations for German emigrants. The number of Poles living abroad has fallen by nearly 200.000 in seven years. Wages in Poland rose manifold, the economy grew 3,6 % in 2025 and is forecast to grow 3,5 % this year, Poland became the sixth-largest economy in the European Union. For decades the obvious European success story was to leave the East for the West. It is no longer obvious. Increasingly, neither is staying in Germany the self-evident choice for a German. Poland is a remarkable example because it gives us a glimpse of how much latent potential political and economic systems can suppress — and how quickly some of it can return once those constraints disappear. Thirty-five years of freedom and two decades of EU support took a country - that the Nazis and Soviets had wrecked - and made it the 6th largest economy in our European Union, and it is still growing. And Poland is not finished; neither are the other post-communist states. Much of the East lost decades to occupation, dictatorship and isolation and is still converging; much of the West possesses extraordinary accumulated wealth and institutional capacity but has spent years growing slowly and building too little. Europe’s problem is therefore not simply decline. It is an enormous mismatch between what the continent already possesses and what it currently manages to do with it. There are cities still to transform, industries to recreate, defence and robotics companies to build, our space industry to expand, capital markets to deepen, energy systems to reconstruct, and whole technologies in which nobody yet holds an insurmountable lead. There are cities and countries from Warsaw to Kyiv whose economic trajectories are radically unfinished. There is massive potential waiting to be unleashed, once the fragmentation of our capital markets and institutions is overcome. We are not standing at the end of European development. We may be standing near the beginning of the next acceleration. My father did not need to go to the USA to realise his American Dream. He realised a European one. He made it here — and three decades later, instead of looking across the Atlantic at what America has to offer, he pays back by investing in Europe. That is the answer I should give the next time a friend who left for America asks why I am still “wasting” my time here: _Come Home, We’re Building_. I am not wasting it. I do not think the opportunity has passed us by; because I think the largest European opportunities still lie ahead and we owe it to whose that came before us to make use of these opportunities. America has already had its century of harvesting European ambition; but the tide is turning. I would rather spend my time helping Europe to keep it, to lift and unleash the potential that got wasted so far. Yet the broader problem remains. The Iron Curtain is gone, but the flow of talent continues; especially Germany, the sick man of Europe once again, has recorded net emigration of its [own citizens every year since 2005, and the outflow is widening rather than closing](https://www.merkur.de/wirtschaft/auswanderung-so-viele-deutsche-wie-nie-verlassen-das-land-94333604.html). While the rise of Trumpism has slowed the brain-drain down and slightly reversed it in some fields, many of Europe’s brightest talents are still emigrating to the USA. Countless Europeans go abroad and create new businesses and job with unicorns like Stripe, Datadog, HuggingFace in the USA, instead of in Europe. Europe educates; America still harvests. We spend fortunes producing mathematicians, physicists, programmers, engineers and scientists, and then watch them discover that the grants are juicier at MIT, the investor they need is in Menlo Park, the salary they want is in New York and the capital market most capable of valuing the company [they dream of building is the _NASDAQ_](https://youtu.be/3vM41t67b2c?si=gyxq16p5XLcEzivp). Europe produces human capital and exports ambition; while somewhere in Brussels someone publishes another report wondering why we have no Google. # The Century of Humiliation I have come to believe that future historians may describe the epoch beginning in 1914 and ending somewhere around our own time as _Europe’s Century of Humiliation_: a century in which the continent that had dominated much of the world lost tens of millions of its people, destroyed enormous quantities of its own wealth, divided itself between foreign powers, surrendered much of its strategic autonomy and gradually ceased to believe that it ought to shape history rather than merely adapt to it. This century of humiliation is similar to China’s, that had to endure a century of humiliation from 1839 to 1949, a period in which European, Russian and Japanese imperial powers inflicted military defeat, foreign concessions, partitions and political dependency upon a civilisation that had considered itself the centre of the world. There is a bitter irony in imagining Europe eventually understanding its own 20th century through the same lens. The histories are not identical, most of the humiliation Europe had to endure was self-inflicted. We began it by slaughtering ourselves. The European wars of 1914–1945 consumed millions of lives, incinerated centuries of accumulated capital, annihilated countless ancient communities and infrastructure, and ended Europe’s position as the centre of world science, finance, industry and power. We did that to ourselves. Then came partition. The East fell under Russian imperial domination. The West entered an American order. While the USA did not abolish Western European democracy, but defended it from the Soviets, that protection came at a steep price of dependency. Western Europe outsourced its security to the US Army; then its technology and its digital infrastructure to Silicon Valley, its capital markets to Wall Street; eventually its imagination to Hollywood and Big US-Tech. One half of Europe was imprisoned by Moscow; the other was protected but financially and culturally vassalized by Washington. Russian domination and American hegemony were not morally equivalent, but from the point of view of European sovereignty, our continent spent generations vassalized between two external centres of power. After 1989, Europe was handed an extraordinary historical opportunity: the continent was largely reunited, the Soviet empire had collapsed, the United States remained friendly, and Western Europe was richer and safer than almost any civilisation in history. But instead of seizing the moment, many in Western Europe, especially Western Germany, declared history finished and laid back. Germany dismantled its army, bought Russian gas, relied on American security, imported Chinese manufacturers, ran US software, stored our data on US clouds, financed our own promising companies with American money. The Americans built the present and the future with new companies like Google, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Anthropic and OpenAI - partially financed by European savings, that went to US-capital markets instead of the fragmented and inefficient European capital markets. The Chinese built industrial supply chains on a scale Europe now struggles even to comprehend. We wrote regulations, and called ourselves a _normative superpower_ — an exquisitely European euphemism for impotence packaged as moral superiority. The actual superpowers accumulated carriers, rockets, datacentres, satellites, fabs, warheads, control over information flows and industrial capacity; we became world leaders in telling other people how the products we can no longer build ourselves ought to be labelled. It was comfortable. Then the bills for this hubris started arriving. # The Turning Point is Ukraine On 24 February 2022 Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv and history came back into the attention even of those, who had managed to ignore the war in Ukraine since 2014 - burnt cities, mass graves, mobilisation orders, young Europeans dying in trenches under skies buzzing from drones and thundering from fighter jets and artillery shellings. Trumpist USA then delivered the second shock from the opposite direction by withdrawing support, destroying the comforting assumption that however weak we allowed ourselves to become, Washington would remain our benevolent custodian forever and honor its security guarantees. There is a grim historical irony in the possibility that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump may become two of the unintended catalysts of European awakening. For decades european federalists wrote manifestos, organised conferences, collected grants and explained the economic benefits of integration; yet Putin achieved more for European strategic consciousness with tanks, and Trump achieved more with threats and his self-destructive tariffs. Suddenly in the publics understanding defence matters again, borders matter, energy matters, industrial capacity matters, Europe matters, Ukraine matters, Greenland matters; strategic autonomy, long treated as [an eccentric Gaullist fantasy](https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/the-return-of-gaullism), is now intoned solemnly into cameras by politicians and academics who spent years dismissing it. Good. Better late than never. Only now, with the walls gone and blood filling trenches on our eastern frontier, are we beginning to understand something horrifying: we had been bleeding the entire time. Not only literal blood, that was spilled already in 2008 in Georgia and in 2014 in Ukraine’s East, but also talent, capital, companies, patents, confidence, power, ambition; engineer after engineer, founder after founder, firm after firm, for decades since 1945. Probably because decline measured in percentages of global GDP and departing PhD candidates is less photogenic than a burning apartment block, we barely noticed until the apartment blocks burned and russian tank columns blew up on screens all over the continent. # The Renewal Is Coming from the East It is a bit ironic, but Europe’s renewal is coming from the East. For most of the post-war era Western Europe looked eastward with arrogance and pity. The West was modern, the East was backward; Paris, London and Munich were the future, and Warsaw, Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Budapest, Prague, Kyiv and Bucharest were supposed to catch up. Western capital moved east, Western institutions moved east, Western experts travelled east to explain how a modern Europe works. The East was the pupil; and while it has still much to learn - the democratic backsliding under Fidesz in Hungary and PiS in Poland are stark reminders of how a democratic culture does not rebuild itself overnight - the lessons are now increasingly travelling the other way. Some of the differences are almost comical when viewed from the West. Zealous anti-communism is not some eccentric affectation of elderly conservatives here; you encounter it even among young, academic urbanites with green-dyed hair who grew up long after communism itself disappeared. The same difference in temperament appears in smaller things. Poland allows you to put up a small family house on your own land without first securing a building permit, using a simplified notification procedure instead. To a German raised in a state where moving a garden shed triggers an avalanche of monthlong paperwork, even the concept of permit-less building is faintly psychedelic and would probably make the heads of some German bureaucrats explode were they made aware of it. These things are easy to caricature, and Poland has plenty of bureaucracy of its own. But beneath them lies a difference in instinct: the eastern european societies that spent decades trapped inside Russian-controlled totalitarian states, retain a certain yearning for freedom and a suspicion of being told that nothing may happen without permission. The West taught the East prosperity and institutions. The East may now have to remind the West that sometimes you are simply supposed to build the damn thing. And Ukraine, under conditions unimaginable to comfortable Westerners, has turned the brutal necessity of the invasion into an extraordinary display of courage and an engine of military innovation: drones, software, communications, autonomous systems, machines redesigned overnight in response to what happened on the battlefield yesterday. The societies given the least reason to trust history have retained the strongest belief in the future. This should not surprise us. The further east one travels, the less abstract history becomes. In Paris, Berlin or Brussels, Russian imperialism can still be a seminar topic, a policy paper, a debate on semantics; in Warsaw, Tallinn or Kyiv, and not to mention Kharkiv, it is every day life. People there remember occupation, deportation, the tanks, which neighbours disappeared. For years that memory made Eastern Europe look paranoid to parts of Western Europe. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, it turned out that what Berlin had dismissed as paranoia was real. The East had remembered and sees everyday now precisely what the West had forgotten: hard power still exists and matters. Borders still matter, factories still matter, armies still matter, having enough ammunition still matters; and freedom, in the last instance, is not some abstract value inscribed in a treaty or performatively listed in speeches but something that only survives if the people fight and sometimes die for it. Liberty is not a God-given gift, but something that has to be wrested from the bloody grasp of tyrants, kings and oligarchs time and again. The East spent three decades catching up with Western Europe economically. Western Europe now has to catch up with the East psychologically. Wealth without ambition and will is merely inheritance; prosperity without confidence calcifies; peace without the willingness to defend it is an invitation to become enslaved again by foreign imperial powers. This is why Warsaw affects me the way it does. By every conventional logic of 20th century history the city should be exhausted. The Nazis tried to erase it physically, Stalinism to deform it politically, communism impoverished it, Russian imperialism stole decades from it. And yet there it stands: cranes over the skyline, glass towers rising around Stalin’s grotesque _Pałac Kultury_, start-ups, restaurants, capital, young people. The _Varso Tower_ is basically a 310-metre middle finger raised at historical determinism. Lost decades stay lost. Lost decades do not require a lost future. Looking closer there is an entire new philosophy of Europe, of a European Dream, contained in _Fabryka Norblina_. The ruins of the past have not been bulldozed; nor have they been embalmed. They have been built upon. The old machinery stands while offices and businesses fill the halls around it; the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries occupy the same square metres. That is what Europe should be: not a museum but a palimpsest; old stones with new machines inside them; history as foundation we build upon rather than as chain that holds us back. # Berlin A few days before I sat in Fabryka Norblina with _The Polish Dane_, I saw what a revived Europe might look like. On the way I had stopped in Berlin. Berlin itself is also changing, not as fast as Warsaw, but the wounds of the cold war division are visibly healing. As recently as 2019, when I interned at the German Parliament, Berlin was dirtier, more run down, plagued visibly by poverty. Today it has become cleaner; the buildings more beautiful; its population has grown and become more prosperous, its startup scene has matured into one of Europe’s major technology ecosystems, and even some of its most stubborn social indicators, such as child poverty and dependence on transfer payments, have begun to move in the right direction. Perhaps that should not be surprising. Berlin was the city in which the division of Europe was once very concrete — as a concrete wall was literally running through streets, families and lives — and it may simply have taken a generation or two after that wall disappeared for the city to begin healing properly. In that sense Berlin, too, belongs to this story: the former frontline of a divided continent slowly becoming a capital of one that is growing back together. # The European Defense Tech Hub I visited Berlin to visit the _European Defense Tech Festival_ taking place on an airfield nearby, where I crossed paths with the entrepreneur [Felix Hosse](https://youtu.be/JZFoI47GT3U?si=eqaCyK0qVF8DOsEj) and the EDTH co-founder [Benjamin Wolba](https://youtu.be/W-ZFgjEe0tY?si=FGRPjoFf-Hso_OJG) among investors, young founders, Ukrainian officers straight from the frontline, and engineers showcasing prototypes of drone systems. The festival in the hangar was buzzing with excitement, people discussing autonomous systems, sensors, communications, production, feedback-loops between brigades and development, and all the practical problems that decide whether somebody survives on the battlefield. It did not feel like the Europe I hear people complaining about. What struck me most was how truly European but also international the attendees were. Not only Ukrainians, Poles, Balts and Germans — the nations one expects to take Russian power seriously, because geography leaves them no choice. There were founders from Spain and from Portugal; people whose homes lie about as far from Donetsk and Crimea as one can get without leaving the continent, and who had nevertheless come to Berlin to build machines intended to stop Russia from deciding Europe’s future. There were also several first generation non-european immigrants from Asia and the Middle East who wanted to contribute their skills to the security of their new home. A Portuguese engineer working on European defence alongside a Ukrainian soldier and a Tunisian immigrant is a more meaningful act of European integration than another thousand pages of declarations about European identity. Political communities are built by shared danger, shared work, shared money, shared technology, shared sacrifice, shared sense of belonging: a shared dream - and that European Dream of a more ambitious, more secure and sovereign Europe was omnipresent. # The End of Europe’s Century of Humiliation Perhaps historians will place the end of Europe’s Century of Humiliation neither in 1989, when the Wall fell, nor in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. Those moments brought liberation, but liberation is not yet sovereignty. Perhaps the real turning point was 24 February 2022: not only the day Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the day Europe began waking from its geopolitical coma, shaking off its stupor and starting to stand up for itself again. Kyiv fought; Warsaw and Baltics armed and supplied; Sweden and Finland joined NATO; and slowly the rest of the continent has started to move; even the old titan Germany is rising slowly from its slumber and started investing seriously in a joint European future and security. The old walls are gone, the old protector is becoming unreliable, and the old moscovite enemy is again at the gates. And above government buildings from Helsinki to Lisbon flies a blue flag, with a circle of twelve golden stars. For decades we treated it as administrative branding — a logo on passports, a backdrop for press conferences, something printed beside funding notices, agricultural subsidies and Erasmus brochures. Only now are we collectively beginning to grasp what it could become: a standard, a flag we can rally around; a new [european patriotism](https://leveret-pale.de/zum-europatag-fuer-einen-paneuropaeischen-patriotismus-randgedanken) arises. # Civilisation Is an Act of Recklessness Europe still possesses almost everything required for positive greatness: hundreds of millions of educated people, enormous accumulated wealth, great universities, aerospace expertise [as just demonstrated](https://www.youtube.com/live/Ss1DUqLjecc?si=gXijFivbkhgrf_Be), nuclear technology, advanced manufacturing, ancient commercial centres, dense infrastructure, and one of the richest intellectual inheritances any civilisation has ever assembled. What we lack is not potential, but the will to make it manifest. Too many Europeans have become terrified of scale. When a company grows large, the bureaucrats want to regulate it. A building grows too tall, NIMBYs file an objection. A technology looks dangerous, our parliamentarians regulate and ban it. An entrepreneur becomes ambitious, he gets called greedy. A new railway is planned, and stakeholders get consulted for fifteen years. An infrastructure project becomes grand, and it becomes buried under feasibility studies. We have confused caution with wisdom for so long that we have forgotten something fundamental: civilisation itself is an act of recklessness, an insane escape from the brutal, naked existence of the jungle into a world crafted by human will. Civilisation itself is an act of defiance against the limits imposed on us by nature — against scarcity, distance, darkness, disease, gravity and the assumption that the world must remain as we found it. Cathedrals were reckless. Railways were reckless. Rockets were reckless. Magellan was reckless when he sailed west in 1519 on the expedition that became the first circumnavigation of the planet. Civilisations advance because occasionally a group of lunatics becomes convinced that the fact something has never been done is the reason why it would be freaking awesome to just do it. Europe was built by people arrogant enough to believe the world did not have to remain as they found it, but that it could be sculpted by the individual, that it could be changed. We need some of that arrogance back. Not the tyrannical arrogance to dominate other peoples — the heroic arrogance to refuse domination ourselves. We need a Europe able to tell Moscow _no_ and act on it militarily if necessary. We need a Europe able to tell Washington _no_ without wondering whether its entire security and IT architecture evaporates the following morning. We need a Europe able to face Beijing not as three dozen markets to be played against one another, but as another continental power. We need a Europe, whose best engineers do not feel the urge to calculate the salary premium for leaving; where the next Andy Grove stays in Budapest, the next Levchin builds in Kyiv, the next Nosek raises billions in Warsaw; where my friends do not have to cross an ocean to find a civilisation that still believes ambitious things can be built. I believe firmly, that we are today at the cusp of such a Europe emerging. For decades Europe retreated: from battlefields, from industries, from technologies, from responsibility, from power. For much of the last century, Europe had good reasons to distrust its own appetite for power. This continent inflicted and saw suffering on a scale so vast that merely trying to fathom it makes one weep. That demanded humility, restraint and remembrance. But virtues can become pathologies when carried beyond their proper limits. Humility can decay into self-contempt; caution into paralysis; pacifism into helplessness and passivity in the face of evil; prosperity into complacency. There comes a point at which sole remembrance without the ambition to also to act better turns into an inability to exercise power at all. Europe does not need to forget what it did, nor should it abandon the commitment to “never again”. But it needs also to remember that weakness carries moral consequences too. A civilisation incapable of defending itself, building at scale or protecting its political independence does not become virtuous; it becomes dependent upon those less hesitant to use power; it becomes unable to prevent crime and catastrophe to be inflicted upon the innocent once again. That is what we now face. So it is time to raise up in the name of civilisation and start beating back the genocidal lunatics and tyrants currently trying to divide our continent; time to raise the towers, build the reactors, fund the laboratories, arm the frontier, unify the continent, and bring Kyiv into it. Build capital markets capable of keeping our founders and universities capable of keeping our scientists; build industries capable of turning prototypes into millions of machines, and armed forces capable of keeping our enemies out and our civilians protected. Make it possible for the ambitious refugee to build his fortune in Europe, and for his children never to have to choose between Europe and ambition. Make Europe a place from which nobody has to escape in order to dream at scale. Because I do not want us to become a vast open-air museum whose highly educated waiters explain to American and Chinese tourists or Russian occupiers how important our civilisation used to be. I do not want Paris reduced to a monument to what we inherited. I do not want our great 21st century achievement to be regulating technologies invented in California and manufactured in Shenzhen. The Europe we lost is gone. Its dead will not return, its murdered communities cannot be resurrected, its cities cannot be unburned, and the decades stolen by fascism, communism, war, Russian imperialism and dependency cannot be handed back to the people who lived through them. But history has not stolen our ability to decide and shape the future. That remains ours. Warsaw proves it; Ukraine is fighting and bleeding for it; and from Berlin to Tallinn, from Warsaw to Kyiv, the part of Europe that history tried hardest to crush is pulling the rest of the continent back onto its feet. My great-grandfather stood among furnaces and metal presses in Warsaw. My father fled that city carrying almost nothing, built a life in Germany, and returned decades later as an investor. A generation on, I discussed the future of Europe in its halls with a like-minded media entrepreneur. For decades we Europeans have stared downward — at our ruins, our failures, our scars, our inherited catastrophes, our borders, our regulations, our limitations. Enough. Europe’s Century of Humiliation is coming to an end, and the sunrise is coming from the East. There are twelve golden stars above us. Beyond them are even more; it is time that we reach for them, that we think and dream and act boldly once again, not forgetting the lessons of the past, but also not being afraid of striving for a better world. It is time Europe became fucking reckless again. And looking at Warsaw, looking at Berlin and that airfield in Brandenburg, looking at the new eurofederalist generation — we are so back. And I, for my part, am back in Munich now - the city both my parents once arrived in with almost nothing, the city where I was born, and the city to which my family owes much of its European dream. For all my frustrations with it, I love Munich as much as I love Warsaw, and as much as I love Europe as a whole: not because any of them is perfect, but because all of them are home. And I love them too much to stop believing in what they could be, or to leave them behind.