在中东持续遭受空袭、霍尔木兹海峡对多数船舶仍关闭的背景下，欧洲能源价格持续上升，领导层分裂，原本脆弱的增长前景正有滑向衰退的风险；这个在两次世界大战后为和平与繁荣而建立的欧盟，在盟友转为竞争对手、供应链难以保障的局面中显得力不从心。 欧洲拥有约4.5亿人口，且欧盟市场仅次于美国居世界第二大，但在高昂能源成本与地缘政治压力下，其工业基础持续受挤压，难以实现真正的地缘政治自主。
欧洲衰落并非神秘现象：其现有工业与技术底盘已接近增长上限，欧洲在软件革命中缺位、在人工智能上仍落后，而高企的能源成本进一步侵蚀其传统制造业优势。 最有前景的方案是由埃尼科·莱塔与马里奥·德拉吉提出的“第28方案”，即在第二大市场内为初创企业提供统一的欧盟法律与监管入口，且目前缺乏强势 incumbent，理论上放大“少输家、多赢家”的扩张空间。
欧盟委员会3月18日推出的“EU Inc.”被认为过于谨慎：企业仍需在成员国注册并受其法域约束，成立和修改章程仍需国家层面的司法与公证程序控制，未能跳过原有“闸门”。 真正可扩张的制度应是单一注册、单一跨境雇佣规则、单一增值税申报、单一破产程序与统一税基，但尽管2009年《里斯本条约》已在许多领域改为多数表决，税收、劳动与破产协调仍受多数否决困局拖累，德国、法国、爱尔兰、卢森堡等国家可反复卡住改革，且该方案仅对不足100人企业给出破产简化和股权激励统一标准，难以支持向大规模“前沿型”公司扩张。
As bombs continue in the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed to most vessels, European energy prices are rising, leaders are divided, and already weak growth risks slipping into recession, showing an EU built after two world wars as too fragile in a world where allies behave as rivals and supply chains cannot be fully secured. With roughly 450 million people and the Union’s market ranking second only to the United States, these pressures threaten the bloc’s ability to secure geopolitical sovereignty while expensive energy keeps eroding industrial strength.
Europe’s decline is not mysterious: its current industrial-technology base has reached limits, it missed the software revolution, trails in AI, and high energy costs are stripping away its prior manufacturing edge. The leading proposed remedy is a “28th regime” from Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi, letting startups opt into a single EU legal and regulatory framework inside the world’s second-largest market where incumbents are currently few and scale-up upside could be significant.
Yet the European Commission’s March 18 proposal, EU Inc., is cautious, because firms remain incorporated under member-state law and still face national judicial-notarial controls on formation and charter changes, preserving the gatekeepers it aimed to bypass. A genuine framework would need one registration, one cross-border hiring regime, one VAT return, one insolvency process, one founders’ exit regime, and a common corporate tax base, but after the 2009 Lisbon changes to qualified-majority voting, unanimity still blocks tax, labor, and insolvency harmonization, with states like Germany, France, Ireland, and Luxembourg frequently obstructing and the proposal’s stock-option and sub-100-employee insolvency carveouts failing to support scaling toward large, dynamic frontier firms.
Source: Europe’s choice: Grow, or become a vassal
Subtitle: It’s time the continent’s more ambitious nations left the rest behind, writes Ulrike Malmendier
Dateline: 3月 26, 2026 04:45 上午