Europe enters 2026 facing a rare convergence of pressures: a stagnant Germany, war in Ukraine that has reached a perilous new stage, rising populism, demographic decline, against a background of intensifying US–China superpower rivalry. David Marsh argues that the next three years may determine whether Europe muddles through, or begins to fracture.
In Episode 75 of The Hale Report® host Lyric Hughes Hale speaks with Marsh about his latest book, Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World which was just published by Yale University Press on Nov 11.
David Marsh, CBE, has spent five decades watching Europe from every possible vantage point — as a journalist, an analyst, an adviser to governments, and since 2010 as co-founder and chairman of OMFIF, the global forum for central banks and sovereign investors.
He began his career at Reuters, moved on to the Financial Times in France and Germany, and has been chronicling Europe’s political and monetary evolution ever since. Few people have seen more — or understand more deeply — how Europe’s institutions, markets, and leaders think.
His new book arrives at a moment of extraordinary events not many predicted on the continent or the UK. I am sure that you will learn as much from this very enjoyable conversation as I did.
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January 1, 2012
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❝ The book is fundamentally about power — and about the uncomfortable truth that Europe has much less of it than it thinks.
❝ Germany can no longer be the banker of Europe. The model is fragile, and repairing it will take years and a lot of pain.
❝ Europe can’t have a feather-bedded social system, preserve national sovereignty, keep generous pensions, and also lead in technology. The trade-offs can’t be avoided.
❝ If Europe has too many years of stagnation, it doesn’t just get an economic crisis — it gets a political one.
In this fast-paced 43-minute conversation, Lyric Hughes Hale and David Marsh discuss:
Marsh argues that today’s EU increasingly resembles the loose, overlapping structures of the Holy Roman Empire, full of jurisdictions, compromises, and variable geometry.
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