Crisis and union: Mario Draghi, Itihad, and Europe’s last opportunity

Illusions shattered

This article runs a parallel between Mario Draghi’s speech at the Meeting 2025 and The Finding – Itihad, the novel I published in May 2020 at the height of the COVID crisis. At first sight the two texts could not be more different: one is the sober voice of a statesman, the other a fast-paced narrative of finance, manipulation, and looming conflict. Yet they converge on the same message. Both suggest that Europe is living through an existential moment, that the illusions of stability have collapsed, and that what we are facing is not simply a pandemic, an economic slowdown, or a diplomatic dispute, but a geopolitical turning point of historic proportions. When I wrote Itihad, in the early months of 2020, my argument was blunt: the world was already sliding into a new global conflict, and World War III may, in fact, have already begun. COVID-19, I suggested, may not have been just a health crisis. It may have been the largest psychological operation (PSYOP) in history, designed to lock down billions of people and distract them while deeper confrontations unfolded. Or it may have been an act of hybrid warfare, where biology, information, finance, and geopolitics blended into a single, hidden battlefield. In March 2020, I argued, we may have been far closer to systemic confrontation than most realized. The comparison was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 — but this time, without missiles in plain sight, without leaders addressing the public. Instead, the crisis was invisible, disguised by a health emergency that absorbed the attention of governments and citizens alike.

Crisis as revelation

Five years later, Mario Draghi’s speech strikes many of the same chords, albeit in the measured tones of a policymaker. The former president of the European Central Bank and Italian prime minister began with an observation that captures the shift of the past half-decade: only a few years ago, Europeans still believed that sheer economic size — 450 million consumers, a vast single market — was enough to guarantee influence. That illusion, Draghi said, has evaporated. The United States imposed tariffs on Europe despite its market power. Washington forced allies to raise defense spending. China flooded Europe with excess industrial production, indifferent to European protests. And in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, the Union found itself marginalized, absent from the decisive negotiations. In other words, the Europe of the 2010s had been living in a dream. It believed that the post-Cold War neoliberal order, with its free trade, multilateral institutions, and bureaucratic rule-making, was permanent. Draghi now declares what Itihad dramatized in narrative form: that order is gone. The world is defined instead by geoeconomics, control of supply chains, technological sovereignty, and raw security. In early 2020, as COVID tore through Lombardy, I placed Europe at the center of the global crisis. Milan, Bergamo, and the hospitals of northern Italy were not just victims of a virus; they were symbols of a continent at the epicenter of a geopolitical earthquake. The novel depicted Europe as weak, fragmented, and vulnerable to manipulation by hidden powers that used financial markets, energy supply chains, and emerging technologies as weapons. Draghi’s words in 2025 confirm this vulnerability. He catalogues how Europe is failing in semiconductors, splintered in defense procurement, and trapped in national silos when common debt and collective investment are the only path forward.

Europe’s weaknesses exposed

Both perspectives place crisis at the heart of change. Draghi reminded his audience that the Union has always advanced only under pressure: the euro created after the 1990s turmoil, Next Generation EU designed in the depths of the pandemic, the swift vaccine campaign and joint response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Left to normal times, sclerosis and complacency return. Europe functions only when the abyss is staring back. In Itihad, crises are not simply accelerators; they are revelations. Earthquakes, market collapses, and pandemics expose the hidden structures of manipulation behind global events. In both registers — the technocratic and the literary — the message is the same: normality is an illusion. History moves forward through rupture. Draghi’s speech and my novel also share a deep skepticism about Europe’s ability to defend its values. Draghi insists that the skepticism of today is not directed at democracy, freedom, or solidarity per se. Europeans still prize these. The problem is that they no longer believe the Union can protect them. The same anxiety animates Itihad. The book is full of characters who cling to ideals but realize that the institutions around them — whether governments, central banks, or alliances — are powerless against the hidden networks that actually drive outcomes. When the European Union is treated as a spectator in its own backyard, the fiction becomes reality. One of Draghi’s most memorable confessions in his speech was that in the early 1990s he himself thought the euro a nonsense. It was only in the heat of the Maastricht negotiations that he realized the project’s potential. And even then, he said, only a “handful of people” truly believed in it. That remark resonates with me on a personal level. For when I wrote Itihad at the dawn of the pandemic, insisting that we were in the middle of a geopolitical conflict and perhaps already at the start of World War III, I knew I was speaking to a very small audience. Most clung to the idea that this was a health crisis, nothing more. To see it required, as Draghi suggests, belonging to that handful of people willing to think the unthinkable.

Hope and union

The convergence continues in the diagnosis of Europe’s weaknesses. Draghi lists them systematically. Internal barriers still hobble the single market, imposing hidden tariffs on trade between member states. Investment in critical technologies is too fragmented, with European projects measured in billions while American and Asian rivals count in tens of billions. And most of all, Europe clings to national financing when only common debt can fund the scale of projects required. In Itihad, these realities appear not as policy memos but as narrative tension: financial markets destabilized by covert trading, oil supplies disrupted by sabotage, cryptocurrencies used as instruments of manipulation. The form is different, but the substance is identical: Europe is too divided to defend itself in a world where finance and technology are battlegrounds. Civil society and values emerge in both texts as essential. Draghi warns that democracy in Europe cannot survive if society becomes atomized, if intermediate bodies disappear, if citizens feel distant from institutions. In the novel, this fear is dramatized in the form of isolation, manipulation, and eschatological yearning. Characters search for meaning in a world of chaos, wondering whether a new messiah might emerge, whether union — itihad — is possible. Draghi formulates the same point in technocratic terms: without solidarity, financial and industrial reforms will fail. I sought to express it through story, asking what sustains human beings when everything around them fractures. Both Draghi and Itihad use history as a warning. Draghi says bluntly that Europe was created to prevent the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, when nation-states failed to protect peace and democracy. Today, he warns, the risk is to repeat that path if the Union does not adapt. My novel makes the same analogy: the years after the 2008 financial crash resembled the 1930s after 1929, a prelude to wider conflict. The pandemic, in this reading, was not the origin of crisis but its accelerant, the event that revealed how close we already were to systemic confrontation. In both, hope coexists with realism. Draghi calls his own Europeanism pragmatic, born not of ideals but of necessity, and only later expanding into a broader conviction. Itihad too is unsentimental, depicting conspiracies, crises, and manipulations. Yet both end with an appeal to renewal. Draghi speaks to the young, who have grown up naturally European, who cross borders without thinking, and who can carry the project forward. My novel ends with the figure of Isaac, a child who represents the possibility of rebirth amidst collapse. The conclusion, whether in the speech or the novel, is the same: illusions must end. Europe cannot afford to drift. COVID was not just a pandemic but may have been a PSYOP or an act of hybrid warfare — the perfect smokescreen for deeper shifts in power. For some of us, this was clear as early as 2020. We were already in a geopolitical conflict. World War III may not have been declared, but in many ways it had already begun. Draghi now says, in the language of policy, what Itihad dramatized in fiction: this is Europe’s last opportunity. Union, itihad, is not a given. It is a choice.