Von der Leyen to EU: In a Dangerous World, Follow Draghi
EU commission president Theresa von der Leyen delivered the annual state of the European Union address Wednesday morning. The speech outlined the union’s many security threats and argued for an agenda centered on economic competitiveness to address them.
The speech kicked off the EU’s legislative new year after the August holiday and featured Canadian prime minister Mark Carney as the guest of honor. During the address, Von der Leyen announced that Canada would be the EU’s first ever associate member as Canada seeks to fend off American attempts to subordinate its northern neighbor.
The EU faces an increasingly hostile world environment: the Union’s support for Ukraine is straining defense resources while provoking retaliatory hybrid attacks from Russia. The United States threatened to annex Greenland by force last February and has launched several trade wars with the Union in recent years as well as a very real war on Iran, destabilizing Europe’s already fragile energy market. China has routed its overproduction into Europe, gutting the continent’s industrial base while drought, heatwaves, wildfires, and orchestrated migrant crises like those in Ceuta destabilize the region.
Von der Leyen argued that to address these issues, Europe must scale up its financial, economic, and industrial power through the commission’s competitiveness agenda. The agenda was originally launched in January 2025 after von der Leyen and her European People’s Party secured a second mandate in the 2024 elections. By linking the agenda to the EU’s security woes, von der Leyen is channeling the pressure that these crises generate into political willpower to push through key parts of that agenda.
The Commissioner’s speech was largely a guided tour of the One Europe One Market roadmap built on the Draghi and Letta reports. The roadmap is a very wide platform that includes simplifying regulations, decreasing administrative burdens for business, removing internal trade barriers, developing a capital markets union, supporting domestic industry, signing external trade deals, expanding the electrical grid, as well as various tech buildouts and a new EU-wide corporate ruleset.
The speech framed each proposal as an enhancement to Europe’s security and sovereignty. Von der Leyen pushes for electrification as a response to volatile energy markets. She frames banking deregulation as the way to modernize Europe’s defense industry and proposes Canada’s associate membership as a response to the fracture of the rules-based order.
The commissioner also proposed new structures to handle hybrid attacks and border crises. She proposed a European version of NATO’s Article 4, allowing Europe to respond to hybrid attacks with appropriate responses which NATO is not built to deliver. She also proposed a European Security Strategy and a European Security Council to build a union-wide defense architecture. A new protocol on immigration emergencies would allow the Union to suspend its normal procedures in order to deal with sudden large waves of migrants.
The speech touched on an extensive list of other policies like the upcoming EU Kids Act and Digital Fairness Act to confront addictive design in social media platforms, or the Affordable Housing Act to address housing speculation and short term rentals. The commissioner also briefly touched on certain EU efforts like its humanitarian aid to Gaza or the development of a union-wide plan for handling wildfires.
Media coverage of the speech focused on the Canadian announcement and the social media ban for children, while the most transformative policies, namely the One Europe one Market roadmap and the expansion of Europe’s defense industrial base, were largely ignored. Von der Leyen’s address may not have featured memorable rhetoric — the opening line was “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” — and it didn’t have the booing and heckling that give American state of the union addresses their ratings appeal, but for its intended audience of market liberals, European integrationists, investors, and business interests, it hit all the right notes.