Book Review: Can Europe Survive?: The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World by David Marsh, 2025 (528 pages)

Two decades ago, the exceptional nature of the European Union prompted considerable excitement among academics and policy analysts. It was clearly something new under the sun: much more than an international organization, yet something less than a fully formed federal state. Its mastery of economic integration while eschewing traditional military power was seen as the harbinger of a new era. The world in the last decade of the twentieth century appeared to be moving inexorably toward free trade and free societies, all free from great power competition.

Capitalist development in China and Russia, it was thought, would surely bring about durable democracies as property owners demanded political rights. Mutual trade dependencies would moderate conflicts, subordinated to a thriving rule-based world order. The prosperous, peaceful and eco-conscious social democracies perfected by Europe would be models for global development. The EU’s advanced regulatory apparatus would prove an asset as European companies gained first mover advantage in this new world of similar rules designed by global elites. The magic of the “Brussels Effect” meant all would look to Europe for best practices, and seek reciprocal access to the EU’s enormous internal market.

Wasn’t it pretty to think so? Mark Leonard’s 2005 book Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century was the highwater mark of this optimism. Twenty years later, David Marsh offers us a sobering corrective with his magisterial work Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World.

During his long career as a financial journalist and expert commentator, Marsh appears to have befriended nearly everyone who matters, and now invites us along to see inside the key episodes that led to the current fraught moment in European politics. He depicts the messy art of policy making, where good intentions collide with political reality, and awkward compromises fall far short of durable solutions. All compounded by the awkward status of the European project between “state” and “not a state.” What once captivated policy wonks is revealed by Marsh to be a profound weakness: the strategic ambitions of the EU are constantly undermined by the sovereign prerogatives of its member states.

Three crises form the core of March’s narrative, and the first is still the most pressing: the problem with Russia. During the Yeltsin years, the EU could indulge in its preferred image of Russia as a new democracy eager to join the “common European home.”¹ Its hydrocarbons would fuel European industry and enmesh the former Cold War adversary in a web of commercial ties and treaty arrangements.² Yet as Marsh relates, the seeds of Russian revanchism were planted during the contentious negotiations over German unification. A unified Germany in NATO was opposed by Russia, which gave way as economic calamity and political dysfunction undermined the Kremlin’s negotiating position.³

A further humiliation saw Moscow’s former Warsaw Pact allies welcomed into the NATO alliance. Putin drew hard conclusions from the Yeltsin years: cooperation with the West meant subordination; only power and aggression could protect Russia. His aim to return Russia to great power status through the subjugation of its neighbors has been clear to Europeans since his disquieting lecture to them at the 2007 Munich Security Conference.⁴ But over a decade after Russia first seized Ukrainian territory, the European Union remains riven by internal conflicts and an inability to generate the resources needed to support its declared aim of unconditional support for Ukraine. Belgium declines to release frozen Russian assets without complete indemnification from the EU; Hungary refuses to allow the EU to borrow the funds needed to save Kyiv from bankruptcy.

The Eurocrisis has gone quiet since it nearly wrecked the common currency fifteen years ago, but the ongoing budget crisis in France shows that the structure of the Eurozone is still in desperate need of fundamental reform.⁵ Marsh takes us through the fraught bailout negotiations that saved the Euro a decade ago, culminating with European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s declaration of “whatever it takes.” While this rescued the Euro from the bond markets, it didn’t provide the necessary foundations for long term durability. The currency union has no fiscal union behind it, and no executive empowered with taxing authority over the €16 trillion Eurozone economy or the right to issue debt. Marsh provides us the gruesome details of the tedious all-nighters that birthed bailouts and brutal austerity regimes, but never a full-fledged fiscal and banking union. Marsh cites an unpublished Bank of England analysis showing that currency unions unaccompanied by political union tend to fail. A French bond default would likely collapse the Eurozone.⁶

Brexit remains an open wound in the self-image of the European Union. Its largest military and second largest economy decided in a single vote to abandon the great project of European integration. Marsh ascribes the 2016 result, which turned on less than 2% of the electorate, to a series of misperceptions and tactical failures by David Cameron. He did not see the adverse impact of immigration on working class voters in the industrial midland and misjudged his ability to extract fundamental concessions from Brussels. Neither Cameron nor his counterparts on the continent believed that the UK would vote to leave, and so no such concessions were forthcoming. Cameron was left touting Remain as nothing much more than a confirmation of Britain’s traditional carve outs and exemptions from EU law. His loss came as a shock to Europe, who assumed that the march toward a collective European identity was inexorable. The fury with which Brussels unleashed its revenge on Britain for its disloyalty was a rare moment of European unity, albeit one that has convinced the EU that democratic expression must be managed and populism results from malign forces rather than legitimate grievances.

Marsh concludes with a downbeat but realistic appraisal of the EU’s capacity for institutional reform. The union is stagnating economically, with its biggest economy Germany suffering from the decline of its export markets and the loss of cheap Russian energy. Germany could once paper over any number of EU disputes with cash, but now it finds it cannot fund its own future social welfare obligations.⁷ France desperately needs to pare back its spending, but remains stymied by a volatile citizenry grown accustomed to state support. Italy is no longer the stuff of nightmares for European central bankers, yet its banks are still stuffed with wobbly government bonds and still not backed by a common European deposit insurance program.⁸ Marsh, like many observers of the EU, is clearly frustrated by policy solutions that are well known, but politically unachievable. Granting the EU executive taxing and borrowing authority would solve the problems with the Euro at a stroke, as well as unlocking revenues the EU needs if it is to carry Ukraine financially. Euro-federalists know this but cannot overcome key member states who decline to underwrite common debts.  What was once an appealing midpoint between international organization and federal state has become a trap that the European project has yet to escape.

“Ever closer Union” has not given birth to an EU executive with the power to take military action, collect taxes, issue debt, or even protect the common Schengen frontier from migrant inflows. What this union has done is bequeath Europe with a regulatory structure that cripples the capacities needed to compete in this pugnacious new world. Top-down environmental rules have jacked German electricity prices to among the highest in the world and impose ruinous costs on the country’s exporters. Net Zero will require an estimated €3 trillion in grid, storage and generation upgrades from already strapped national budgets. Worker productivity has fallen to 80% of American levels as capital investment stalls. Regulatory compliance is an increasingly expensive exercise that shifts corporate investment to China, Turkey, or the US. “More Europe” has in practice meant less prosperity. 

Can the EU adapt to a world defined by neo-mercantilism, military power, and bellicose assertions of national interest? Marsh ends with his hope that Europe may enter “an age of resilience” that will allow it to cope with the myriad challenges posed by Russian militarism, Chinese manufacturing prowess and American disengagement.⁹ Yet thriving in this new world order will require Brussels to pry from its member states the key aspects of sovereignty enjoyed by its competitors. Marsh offers us hope that the EU preference for economic integration and cooperation will ultimately prevail and knit a fractured world back together. Left unsaid is a grimmer alternative: an EU ill-equipped to compete in a harsh new world will lose its powers to populists determined to end the dreams of Euro-federalists forever.

1. David Marsh, Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 132. ↩︎
2. Jeffrey Kahn, “Russia, the Council of Europe, and the Rule of Law: Building and Dismantling ‘Our Common European Home,’” in The Rule of Law under Pressure: A Transnational Challenge, ed. Gregory Shaffer and Wayne Sandholtz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 284–315. ↩︎
3. Mary E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 1. ↩︎
4. Daniel Fried and Kurt Volker, “Putin’s 2007 Speech Was a Wake-Up Call for the Post-Cold War Liberal Order,” Politico, February 18, 2022. ↩︎
5. Ana Nicolaci da Costa, “Fall of yet another premier will make it hard for France to fix its finances. What’s behind its debt problem?,” CNN, October 8, 2025. ↩︎
6. Thomas Kohlmann, “Could France’s political turmoil spark eurozone debt crisis?,” Deutsche Welle, October 7, 2025. ↩︎
7. Mohamed Moutii, “How Germany Became the World’s Worst-Performing Economy,” The Daily Economy, November 3, 2025. ↩︎
8. Lorenzo Codogno, “Italy’s economic miracle is not what it seems,” OMFIF, April 9, 2024. ↩︎
9. David Marsh, Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 27. ↩︎