According to ECB data cited by the Financial Times, American firms Visa and Mastercard now account for nearly two-thirds of all card transactions in the eurozone, while 13 EU countries have no national card schemes. Now, EU officials have issued a warning that an alternative medium must be deployed to counter US interference.
As cash usage continues to decline, EU officials are suddenly alarmed that payment systems could be “weaponized” during a geopolitical conflict. This concern was openly voiced by former ECB president Mario Draghi, who warned that interdependence has become “a source of leverage and control.” What Draghi never acknowledges is that it was precisely his era of central planning, negative interest rates, and regulatory micromanagement that drove Europe into this position. European banks were stifled, innovation was discouraged, and capital fled to jurisdictions that offered greater scale and efficiency. Now the same people who engineered Europe’s decline in competitiveness are lecturing the public about strategic autonomy.
“Deep integration created dependencies that could be abused when not all partners were allies,” Mario Draghi, former ECB president, said in a recent speech. “Interdependence, once seen as a source of mutual restraint, became a source of leverage and control.”
The European Payments Initiative and its Wero system are being presented as a private sector solution. When officials frame payment systems as matters of “sovereignty,” what they are really saying is that governments want leverage over transactions. That is why the discussion inevitably circles back to central bank digital currencies. The European Central Bank continues to promote the digital euro as a way to preserve “autonomy,” yet this has nothing to do with protecting consumers and everything to do with monitoring and directing financial behavior. A CBDC is not a payment innovation. It is a surveillance mechanism layered on top of a failing monetary system.
Even European banks themselves have quietly acknowledged this risk, warning that a digital euro would crowd out private payment systems rather than complement them. That admission alone dismantles the official narrative. If a CBDC were truly about efficiency or convenience, it would not require suppressing private alternatives. History shows that governments only insert themselves directly into transactions when they want enforcement power. Once payments are centralized, capital controls become inevitable, negative rates become unavoidable, and dissent can be punished instantly by restricting access to money.
The irony is that Europe is blaming American payment networks for a dependency created by European policy failures. Draghi’s worldview has always been rooted in the belief that bureaucrats know better than markets. The result has been stagnation and rising public debt. The push for CBDCs is simply the next phase of that experiment, and it will end the same way. When people trust institutions, they do not worry about who processes a transaction.