Europe has forgotten how to build

In 1969, Switzerland’s Beznau plant went online after roughly four years of construction. France built its nuclear fleet in the 1970s on a similar schedule. Austria completed the Zwentendorf reactor in the same decade, only to mothball it after a 1978 referendum killed the project before it ever produced a kilowatt. Today, the Berlin Brandenburg Airport required fourteen years and a long sequence of postponed opening dates. In Germany, the replacement of a single Autobahn bridge with an identical structure routinely takes six years from closure to reopening. The A45 Talbrücke at Lüdenscheid, closed in 2021 and demolished in 2023, will not be back in service before 2027. In China, comparable infrastructure is constructed in eighteen months.

The Europeans who built the post-war continent were not better trained than today’s graduates. What has changed is the civilisational settlement. The West, and Europe in particular, has organised itself such that building is now almost impossible, while regulating, reviewing, and assessing has become the dominant occupation of the political class.

The American analyst Dan Wang has captured this transformation in his recent book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. The central observation is simple: China is an engineering state, while the United States has become a lawyerly society. By 2002, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo held engineering or technical degrees. Among the first sixteen American presidents, thirteen were lawyers. Of the Democratic presidential nominees since 1984, all but Al Gore have held a law degree. The consequence has been predictable. One country builds high-speed rail networks, ports, and power plants at a pace that defies Western expectations. The other litigates the question of whether a single high-speed rail line in California should ever be completed.

Europe occupies a third position, and it is not a flattering one. The continent is governed neither by engineers nor by lawyers but by bureaucrats. Brussels has perfected a peculiar civilisational form: The production of regulation substitutes for the production of goods, strategy is replaced by communiqués, and compliance is mistaken for competence. The result is an institutional culture that prefers a permit hearing to a construction site.

Beneath the cultural diagnosis lies an industrial one, and it is harder to reverse. In a recent conversation for my podcast, I spoke with Ulrich Gräber, a former technical director at EnBW Kraftwerke AG and former head of Areva Germany. His new book, Kniefall vor der Unvernunft, examines the long shadow of the German nuclear exit. The argument extends well beyond nuclear power. What Gräber documents is the disappearance of an entire industrial ecosystem. The firms that once built Germany’s reactors have closed or pivoted. The supplier networks have dissolved. The institutional memory of how to construct major energy infrastructure has thinned to the point where, even if a government wished to reverse course, the human capital would no longer be available.

This is the binding constraint behind every European debate about competitiveness. The continent does not lack capital. It lacks the capacity to deploy it. A €500 billion infrastructure fund of the kind announced by Berlin will discover that money is the easy part. The civil engineering firms capable of executing megaprojects on schedule are concentrated in Asia, in Turkey, and in a handful of American jurisdictions. The Western European tradition of large-scale construction, the tradition that produced the Channel Tunnel, the original Brenner railway, and the early Autobahn network, has been allowed to atrophy.

Vaclav Smil has reminded readers that the modern world rests on four pillars: Cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. All four are energy-intensive industrial processes. All four require the kind of engineering culture that Europe has systematically dismantled. The Green Deal apparatus believes these pillars can be replaced by software, services, and carbon credits. They cannot. A civilisation that does not produce cement and steel cannot build bridges, and a civilisation that cannot build bridges does not project power.

The Holy Roman Empire continued to exist as a formal entity for three centuries after losing real influence. Its institutions persisted because their administrators depended on them, not because they served any purpose the wider world recognised. The structures of the European Union, the German Energiewende, and the various climate bureaucracies are increasingly similar in character: Elaborate machinery sustained primarily by the careers of those who operate it. They are not vehicles of strategy. They are employment schemes for the political class.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently described Germany’s nuclear exit as a “serious strategic mistake” while declaring the decision “irreversible.” The Christian Democrats held the chancellery for sixteen of the relevant years. They did not reverse the policy when they could have. They now declare reversal impossible. The honest interpretation is straightforward: The political class no longer believes itself capable of executing the reversal. The infrastructure for ambition has been allowed to corrode along with the infrastructure for energy.

The consequences are not difficult to foresee. A continent that cannot replace its own bridges will not deter its adversaries. The same continent has not built a single new reactor in two decades and cannot manufacture artillery shells at scale, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated with embarrassing clarity. Weakness, as older European statesmen used to know, invites provocation. It does not invite peace.

There is no remedy in another strategy paper. What is needed is the willingness to admit that the lawyers and the bureaucrats have failed, and that the engineers, the people who actually understand how things work, must be returned to the rooms where decisions are made. Whether the political capacity for that transition still exists is, at present, an open question.