Analysis

The Rhine Group: Draghi's Second Move for Europe

Mario Draghi and Patrick Collison have co-founded the Rhine Group, a private forum of 55 European leaders to turn the 2024 competitiveness report into reform. A look at who is in the room, who is missing, and what the group can plausibly deliver.

Build Sovereign Last updated 26 August 2026

On 24 August 2026 a quiet but telling announcement landed on a one-page website. Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president and ex-Italian prime minister, and Patrick Collison, the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, had co-founded a new forum called the Rhine Group. Within a week the press was calling it a “lobby group for competitiveness.” That label is partly right and partly wrong, and the gap matters.

This article pulls together who is in the room, what they want, how they got there, and what the group can realistically deliver before the European political cycle absorbs it.

The argument the Rhine Group is making

The Rhine Group’s own founding statement is unusually plain for a European policy initiative. The opening line: “We are not too late to change Europe’s trajectory, if we take the right steps today.” The body of the statement runs through a familiar Draghi diagnosis in a sharper register than the 2024 report allowed.

Four claims stand out.

First, the position-of-strength claim. “Of the fifty largest technology companies in the world, only four are European.” The statement does not name them, but the working list is SAP, ASML, Spotify and one of Ericsson, Nokia, Philips depending on the snapshot. The number, in either reading, is a public fact.

Second, the position-of-weakness claim. “In every emerging technology that will shape the coming decades, Europe is weak.” The list the founders imply, drawn from the 2024 report’s own structure, is artificial intelligence, quantum, advanced semiconductors, biotech, space, and the energy systems those depend on.

Third, the sovereignty claim. The Rhine Group frames weak growth as a sovereign risk, not a prosperity risk. A continent that cannot grow cannot fund defence, healthcare, pensions, education, climate investment, or safety nets for the workers displaced by transition. This is a deliberate re-framing of the 2024 report’s investment gap as a fiscal and security gap.

Fourth, the external environment claim. “The US has imposed its highest tariffs since Smoot-Hawley. China has become a fiercer competitor, in third markets and inside Europe itself.” The implication is that the post-1991 environment that cushioned European stagnation is gone, and the cushion is not coming back.

The closing sentence of the founding statement is worth quoting in full: “The alternative is to do what Europe has done before: compete, build, and grow again.” The word “again” is doing a lot of work. It is the argument that Europe is not becoming something new, but recovering something lost.

What Draghi actually did, and what the 2024 report said

The Rhine Group only makes sense against the report that preceded it. Three things are useful background.

Mario Draghi was President of the European Central Bank from 1 November 2011 to 31 October 2019. His 2012 “whatever it takes” pledge is the single line most associated with him. It stabilised the euro during the sovereign debt crisis, and the phrase has stayed attached to him ever since. He then served as Prime Minister of Italy from 13 February 2021 to 22 October 2022, after which he left front-line politics and returned to advisory and academic work.

In September 2023 Ursula von der Leyen asked Draghi to write a personal report on the future of European competitiveness. It was published on 9 September 2024 in two parts: a strategy paper (Part A) and a much longer in-depth analysis (Part B). The press settled on the title “The Draghi report.”

The report’s headline finding, in numbers Draghi himself used at the European Parliament presentation on 17 September 2024, was an annual investment gap of roughly 750 to 800 billion euros between the EU and the United States, with most of the gap in energy systems, digital infrastructure, and defence. Draghi framed closing the gap as the central competitiveness question for the EU.

The report’s substantive recommendations organised themselves into three broad pillars that have since become the working vocabulary of EU industrial policy.

  1. Closing the innovation gap. Draghi argued Europe is strong in research and weak in commercialisation. The proposed instruments were a serious scaling of the European Innovation Council, an EU-level patent system that actually works, faster standards harmonisation, and a single market in services that the EU has talked about for two decades and never delivered.
  2. A joint decarbonisation and competitiveness plan. This is the most expensive and most political pillar. Draghi proposed that the bulk of new clean-tech investment be financed through a combination of common debt at EU level, a carbon border adjustment mechanism used as a long-term revenue stream, and a coordinated industrial strategy in batteries, electrolysers, solar, heat pumps, and clean steel. He was explicit that the alternative was deindustrialisation in the energy-intensive sectors, starting with chemicals, refining, steel, cement, and paper.
  3. Defence and security as a competitiveness sector. The report argued that the EU’s chronic under-investment in defence was both a security problem and an industrial problem, because defence procurement is one of the few large-scale industrial policy levers member states still control. Draghi proposed joint procurement, a serious EU defence R&D programme, and treating defence as part of the same industrial base as the energy and digital transitions.

The reception of the report fell into predictable camps. France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and the European Parliament broadly welcomed it. Germany and the Netherlands were openly hostile to common debt and to the implied transfer of fiscal sovereignty. The European Central Bank was publicly supportive, privately anxious about the fiscal implications. The European Commission accepted the diagnosis and produced the Competitiveness Compass in January 2025 and the Clean Industrial Deal in early 2025 as the operational responses.

The action that has actually resulted, two years on, is thinner than the rhetoric. The Clean Industrial Deal and the Competitiveness Compass exist as documents. Most of the binding legislation Draghi called for has not been passed. The two big moves with some real content are the carbon border adjustment mechanism, which entered its definitive phase in 2026, and a modest expansion of the European Innovation Council. On common debt for energy and defence, there has been no breakthrough. The September 2025 high-level conference Draghi and von der Leyen held to review progress was, by all accounts, candid about the gap between the report and the implementation.

That gap is the political fact the Rhine Group is built on.

How the Rhine Group came together

The Rhine Group is not a European institution. It is a private forum, run by a small executive team, and the funding model has not been disclosed on the public site. According to the leadership page, it was co-founded by Mario Draghi and Patrick Collison, with Luis Garicano as Executive Director. The team is anchored by Teresa Raigada as Chief of Staff and Marta Garayoa as Chief Operating Officer.

The two co-chairs are an unusual pairing. Draghi is the most senior European central banker of his generation. Collison is a 37-year-old Irish-American technologist who co-founded Stripe in 2010 with his brother John. Stripe processes a significant share of online payments globally and was last privately valued in the tens of billions. Collison is also the co-founder of the Arc Institute, a long-term biomedical research initiative. He has been writing and speaking about European growth, science funding, and innovation policy for several years. Bringing him in is a deliberate signal that the Rhine Group does not want to be a banker-and-bureaucrat talking shop.

Garicano is a Spanish economist, full professor at the London School of Economics, former full professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a former Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2022. He was involved in drafting the EU recovery fund legislation, which is one of the few large joint-fiscal instruments the EU has actually run. He is, in other words, the only person in the leadership with recent direct experience of getting an EU-level financial instrument through the legislative process.

The Eurometal coverage notes that the group has roughly 55 members at launch, with French and German members each at twelve, followed by seven Italians, six Britons, and five Spaniards. The inaugural working session is scheduled for 20 to 23 September 2026. The group will operate under Chatham House Rule and will be organised around research papers distributed as pre-reads, with the discussion aimed at producing recommendations that can be fed into the Brussels policy process.

Who is in the room

A short note on the editorial method here. The full membership list is on the Rhine Group website. I have grouped the 55 members into four clusters, named a few representative figures from each, and called out the absences I think matter.

Macroeconomic heavyweights and Nobel laureates. Philippe Aghion (Collège de France, Nobel 2025) and Bengt Holmström (MIT, Nobel 2016) are the two Nobel laureates in economics. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former chief economist of the IMF. Lucrezia Reichlin, the LBS economist and CEPR trustee, and Beatrice Weder di Mauro, the current CEPR president, anchor the European policy research presence. Moritz Schularick is the president of the Kiel Institute, one of Germany’s most influential macroeconomic research houses. Ulrike Malmendier (Berkeley), Per Strömberg (Stockholm School of Economics), John Van Reenen (LSE), Sir Tim Besley (LSE), and Xavier Jaravel (LSE) are clustered here. This is a serious room on macro.

European policy and political figures. Bruno Le Maire as Special Advisor to ASML, Toomas Hendrik Ilves as the former President of Estonia, Robbert Dijkgraaf as the former Dutch education minister and a working physicist, Benoît Cœuré as the President of the French Autorité de la concurrence, Daniela Schwarzer as the incoming head of the Hertie School, Lars-Hendrik Röller as the founder of the Berlin Global Dialogue, Nicolas Petit at the European University Institute, and João Costa at the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education. The political layer is real but mostly composed of people who have left office. There are very few sitting ministers.

European industry and finance. The corporate layer is where the group is densest. Carlos Torres Vila at BBVA, Andrea Pignataro as the founder and CEO of ION, Gerd Chrzanowski at Schwarz Group, Bastian Nominacher as co-CEO of Celonis, Annette Mosman as CEO of APG, Jörg Kukies at Morgan Stanley, Karien van Gennip on the ASML supervisory board, Michael Miebach as CEO of Mastercard, Niklas Zennström as founder of Atomico, Sebastian Siemiatkowski as co-founder and CEO of Klarna, Tobi Lütke as founder and CEO of Shopify, Alexis Kohler as Executive Vice President and Chairman of Investment Banking at Société Générale, Vittorio Colao as Vice Chairman EMEA at General Atlantic, Cristina Garmendia as President of the Cotec Foundation for Innovation, Ilham Kadri as Chair of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Jeannette zu Fürstenberg as President and Managing Director of General Catalyst, Hélène Huby as founder and CEO of The Exploration Company, Leopold Aschenbrenner as founder and CIO of Situational Awareness, Louis Dreyfus as CEO and publisher of Le Monde, and Luca Ferrari as co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons. The point of listing these is to show that the corporate layer is not a bankers’ club. It includes at least one European space company (The Exploration Company), one AGI-relevant investment firm (Situational Awareness), one European AI-adjacent company (Bending Spoons), and the leading European payments and capital-markets infrastructure.

Media. Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the Financial Times. Louis Dreyfus, publisher of Le Monde. The presence of three of the most influential European media editors is itself part of the group’s design. The Rhine Group wants to set the agenda in the three languages that matter.

There is also a small academic contingent of mid-career economists whose presence signals the kind of policy work the group will produce. Alexandra Roulet (INSEAD), Alice Evans (Stanford), Francesco Decarolis (Bocconi), Francesco Giavazzi (Bocconi emeritus), Andreu Mas-Colell (UPF emeritus, chair of BIST), Jesús Saa-Requejo, and Laurence Boone (formerly at the OECD, now at Santander).

Who is missing

Three absences are worth naming because they reveal what the Rhine Group is not.

The first is the Mistral founders. Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix are the leadership of Europe’s most credible frontier AI lab, headquartered in Paris, valued in the multi-billions, and the only European company widely treated as a credible counterweight to OpenAI and Anthropic. None of them is a member. This is a striking gap, and not because AI capital is absent from the room. Xavier Niel, the Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Iliad and an early investor in Mistral, is a member. Louis Dreyfus, the publisher of Le Monde (co-owned with Niel), is also a member. The absence is therefore of the founders and the lab as an institution, not of the European AI capital network. The Rhine Group’s manifesto names every emerging technology, with AI among them, as a place where Europe is starting from a position of weakness, and the entire 2024 report’s innovation pillar is built around scaling European AI. The lab that is the most plausible answer to that diagnosis is not in the room.

The second is the European automotive industry. There is no CEO of Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, BMW, or Renault in the membership list. The closest automotive figure is Vittorio Colao, who ran Vodafone rather than an OEM. The European auto industry is simultaneously the largest private-sector employer in the EU, the sector most exposed to the China-versus-EU electric vehicle competition, and the sector where the gap between European incumbents and Chinese challengers is most visible. The Rhine Group does not have a serious voice from it.

The third is Eastern Europe. The most senior Eastern European figure is Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former Estonian president, and Robbert Dijkgraaf, a Dutch physicist who was born in the Netherlands and served as a Dutch minister. There are no sitting or recent Central European prime ministers, no Polish or Czech or Hungarian or Romanian senior business voices at the table. The Rhine Group is a Western European project with two notable exceptions.

A fourth, smaller absence. There are no sitting European commissioners, no sitting members of the European Parliament, and no sitting heads of national government. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, the President and Managing Director of General Catalyst, is a venture capitalist rather than a politician. The Rhine Group has been deliberately constructed to be a private forum, not a political vehicle.

What the group can realistically deliver

Three categories of deliverable are credible. Two are not.

Credible.

A stream of high-quality, narrowly-scoped policy papers. The Draghi report itself was too big to be a usable legislative instrument. The Rhine Group’s Chatham House pre-read model, if it works as described, can produce a steady series of 20- to 40-page papers that take one Draghi recommendation, work it through the political and legal constraints, and produce a draft that a commissioner or a minister can pick up. This is the most plausible short-term value the group can deliver, and it is the model that Bruegel, the Kiel Institute, CEPR, and a handful of others already use. The Rhine Group’s advantage, if it has one, is the unusual cross-section of its membership, which means a paper written in this forum can be validated against the views of the people who will eventually have to implement it.

Agenda-setting in the European press. Zanny Minton Beddoes, Roula Khalaf, and Louis Dreyfus in the same room is itself a mechanism. A leak of a position taken by the group is a story in the FT, the Economist, and Le Monde in the same week. This is a real but constrained form of influence. It works for big questions and it does not work for technical implementation.

A political coalition. The Draghi 2024 report failed to produce a binding legislative agenda not because the analysis was wrong but because there was no organised political constituency for closing the investment gap. The Rhine Group could become the proto-coalition that does for the second Draghi moment what the 2012 OMT moment did for the euro. This is a longer-term and more speculative delivery, but it is the prize the group is built to chase.

Not credible.

Passing legislation. The Rhine Group is not a European institution. It cannot propose directives. It cannot amend the Stability and Growth Pact. It cannot launch a common debt instrument. Anyone who frames the group as “Draghi’s plan to pass legislation” is overstating it. The group can draft, advocate, and convene. It cannot legislate.

Substituting for the European Commission. The September 2025 conference and the January 2025 Competitiveness Compass already exist as the Commission’s response to the 2024 report. The Rhine Group is a complementary private forum, not a parallel public institution. There is no version of events in which the group replaces the Commission. There is a version in which it makes the Commission’s job easier by doing the convening and pre-drafting work that the Commission does not have the bandwidth for.

When the group should be measured

The right window to judge the Rhine Group is not the next six months but the next 18.

The inaugural working session runs from 20 to 23 September 2026. The first batch of pre-reads should be public before the end of the year. By the European Parliament election cycle in 2029 the group will either have produced a body of work that the next Commission and the next Parliament can pick up, or it will have become a polite annual gathering in Brussels with diminishing return on its membership.

The single sharpest test is whether the group can produce a working paper on closing the European AI commercialisation gap that the Mistral founders, or their equivalents, are willing to put their name to. If the Rhine Group can pull Europe’s strongest AI company into its actual workflow, it will have done something no other European forum has done. If it cannot, the absence of Mistral will harden into a structural criticism, and the group will be a very senior talking shop.

A second, smaller test is whether the group can move the common debt question from rhetoric to instrument. Germany and the Netherlands have so far refused to underwrite joint debt for energy and defence. The Rhine Group has the personnel to make the political case. Whether it has the political standing to do so is a different question, and the answer will be visible in the language the group uses on this point over the next 12 months.

The honest reading

The Rhine Group is the most ambitious private European policy forum of the decade, and the people in it are unusually well chosen for the specific work of turning the 2024 Draghi report into implementable recommendations. It is also a private forum, with no legislative power, no public mandate, and a corporate and financial membership that will draw the predictable attacks from the European left and the European sovereignist right.

It is worth taking seriously. It is not worth treating as a substitute for the European institutions that exist, and it is not worth treating as a guarantee that the implementation gap on the 2024 report will close.

The Rhine Group is, in the founders’ own framing, an attempt to do what Europe has done before. The question is whether the room they have built is the right room for that work. The September session will tell us more than the launch did.

Sources

Build Sovereign is published by RightThing Studio Ltd, which also operates Seoptim. Editorial and product operations are kept separate under the same publisher.