| Every five years, the EU revamps its institutions. Faced with enormous global challenges, this time, the EU needs to reinvent itself, but instead, we are witnessing a timid Perestroika. Perestroika was a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost policy reform. The word Perestroika is difficult to translate. It means “reconstruction”, but in the sense of building something new by using old material. Nobody explained it, but many of us at that time understood that there were going to be reforms, those were unavoidable anyway, but under the same leadership. Perestroika was a positive development for Russia, but it was messy. In hindsight, we now know that inside this vast country, these reforms were reversed. Arguably, today’s Russia under Vladimir Putin is not better than the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev. On the other hand, the Russian Perestroika led to irreversible changes in the periphery of the Soviet empire—11 Eastern European countries, three of them former Soviet republics, joined the EU and NATO. With a big delay, this enlarged EU realised that it had powerful enemies as a geopolitical entity and that, despite its economic weight, it lacked superpower attributes. Until the last day of Angela Merkel’s reign, the EU naively thought such were not needed. Politicians still believed in the “dividends of peace” until 24 February 2022, when those lost all their value as Putin invaded Ukraine. When EU heads of state and government gathered to reset the leadership of the EU institutions back in 2019, they were not aware that the world would change that much. | 