Draghi and Stripe’s Collison launch Rhine Group to tackle Europe’s decline

Former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison have launched the Rhine Group, a new body that convenes leaders from European government, business, and academia to address what its founders describe as an existential decline in the continent's economic competitiveness.rhinegroup+1

The group, announced on Monday, is co-chaired and co-founded by Draghi and Collison, and operates under Chatham House Rule with discussions grounded in commissioned research papers. Its membership includes a Nobel laureate in economics, senior executives from ASML ↘ 2.24%, Société Générale, and Celonis, along with researchers from MIT, Stanford, and INSEAD.rhinegroup+1

'Europe Is Weak'

The Rhine Group's website opens with a blunt assessment: "Of the fifty largest technology companies in the world, only four are European. In every emerging technology that will shape the coming decades, Europe is weak." The group frames the challenge as no longer cushioned by a favorable global order, citing the highest U.S. tariffs since the Smoot-Hawley era, fiercer Chinese competition, and a fading European growth model.rhinegroup

"Decline is not inevitable, but it is the direction we are heading unless we take urgent action," the group's founding statement reads.rhinegroup

Building on Draghi's Diagnosis

The Rhine Group draws directly from Draghi's September 2024 competitiveness report, commissioned by the European Commission, which laid out more than 380 recommendations and called for roughly €800 billion in annual investment to close Europe's gap with the United States and China. Draghi himself has acknowledged that implementation has been slow. By January 2026, only about 15 percent of his recommendations had been fully implemented, according to an Institut Montaigne study, with partial implementation bringing the figure to roughly 39 percent.encompass-europe+3

At a Stanford summit in March 2026, Draghi said Europe's "immense complacency" was over but expressed only cautious optimism about the bloc's trajectory.siepr.stanford

Convening, Not Legislating

The Rhine Group is an advocacy and convening organization — not a fund, a legislative body, or a company. Its stated purpose is to generate discussion around "possible answers" to Europe's challenges. Whether a body of this kind can translate elite consensus into enacted policy or deployed capital remains the central question. As the group's own framing acknowledges, Europe is "increasingly at the mercy of external events" it does not control, and its citizens are asking leaders "to grasp the scale of the challenge".rhinegroup