{"id":28477,"date":"2026-06-02T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T02:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/?p=28477"},"modified":"2026-06-01T11:33:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T09:33:22","slug":"have-western-economies-had-their-kodak-moment-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/have-western-economies-had-their-kodak-moment-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Have Western economies had their Kodak moment (II)?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Le para\u00eetre hat l'\u00eatre ersetzt. Der Schein hat die Substanz verdr\u00e4ngt.<\/span><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Kodak had the technology. So did Nokia. Both chose the dividend of the present over the strategy for the future with terminal consequences. In the second part of this column, Eric Lefebvre transfers these corporate parables to Europe: a continent with excellent science that has systematically left the commercial translation of this science to others. Tuesday’s question is: Is the moment already spread over the last forty years and therefore no longer a moment, but a tendency? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In several Western capitals today, governance is advancing through announcements. The vocabulary of action is grafted onto the absence of action. R\u00e9armement<\/em> applied to the army, the economy, demography, social life, schools. Choose France<\/a><\/em> Summits announcing tens of billions that, on closer inspection, turn out to be re-announcements, partial commitments or investments that would have taken place anyway. Plan, pact, roadmap, strategic framework. The lexicon is rich. The deliverable is the press conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The point of this column is not to criticize Emmanuel Macron or Keir Starmer as individuals. They are intelligent men who got to the top of their respective political systems via routes that required real ability. The point is that they reflect the society that produced them. A political culture that rewards the well-articulated sentence over the cost-calculated plan, the photogenic summit over the multi-year program, the questioned answer over the doctrine, will reliably produce leaders who excel at the former and never really get to the latter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Le para\u00eetre<\/em> has replaced l’\u00eatre<\/em>. Appearance has replaced substance. The social media calendar has replaced the institutional clock. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two case studies deserve a moment because the method of appearances is most evident in the gap between the announcement and what an honest examiner would find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first, from the British side of the Channel: Starmer’s government recently announced with bravado that immigration was falling. The headline figures cooperated. On closer inspection, the figure was a net figure. Entries minus leavers. Exits had risen. Young nationals leaving for higher salaries in Dubai, Singapore and the Gulf. EU citizens slowly returning home after the 2016 break. Gross inflows had barely moved. The promise was not kept. It was presented as kept – through the choice of metric. That is not communication. That is deception with a pivot table. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second, from the French side: in 2017, Macron came to the \u00c9lys\u00e9e with a sentence that captured the spirit of the moment. France, he announced, would become a start-up nation<\/em>. Eight years later, the start-up nation<\/em> resembles a souffl\u00e9. It rose beautifully. It drew applause from the dining room. It has been quietly collapsing ever since. The honest measure of a start-up nation<\/em> is whether it has produced platform companies that the rest of the world relies on. By this measure, the souffl\u00e9 has collapsed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The credibility capital that strategy demands<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

A real strategy requires consideration. Considerations require a stock of credibility that a leader accumulates and then spends. Erhard was able to liberalize prices because he was the only correct diagnostician of the Reichsmark. De Gaulle was able to free Algeria because he embodied free France. Deng was able to say that some would get rich first because he had survived the Cultural Revolution with his moral authority intact. Thatcher was able to stand up to the miners because she had said what she would do before she did it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Credibility capital is the currency in which serious politics is paid for. The method of appearances burns it. After ten years of this regime, the till is empty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this is where the deepest wound is revealed. The next serious leader, if they come, will find a population that has been so systematically deceived that even the truth will sound like manipulation. The channel of trust will be saturated to the breaking point. Accept this pain for that benefit in fifteen years<\/em> will be unspeakable. Not because the offer is false, but because the listeners will not believe the speaker, however right he may be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two parables from the corporate world<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Parabola<\/strong>I – Kodak<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1976, Kodak held ninety percent of the American photographic film market and eighty-five percent of the camera market. The company was not just dominant, it was synonymous with the activity itself. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 in its own laboratories, with its own engineers. The engineer’s name was Steven Sasson<\/a>. He showed management what he had built. Management understood exactly what they were seeing. It also understood that aggressive commercialization would cannibalize the film business, which paid the dividends. It chose the dividend. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lesson is not about technological disruption. Kodak had the technology. The lesson concerns strategic competence under the pressure of the next quarter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parable II – Nokia and Finland<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2007, Nokia held around half of the global smartphone market. In February 2011, the new CEO Stephen Elop circulated the famous burning platform memo<\/em> internally. Nokia would abandon Symbian and bet everything on Microsoft’s Windows Phone – deliberately against Android, which was already gaining momentum elsewhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 2013, Nokia’s smartphone market share had fallen from thirty-three percent to three percent. The macroeconomic damage to Finland shows what a Kodak moment looks like scaled to the size of a small country. At its peak in 2000, Nokia directly accounted for around four percent of Finland’s GDP. Finnish real per capita income then fell from 2008 to 2019, and an entire national growth model evaporated when a single strategic decision was made incorrectly. The Finnish state did not commission the Elop decision. It paid for it nonetheless. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The European question<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

The German automotive industry, the backbone of Europe’s largest economy, is being worked over by Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers, who have advanced faster and further than the Wolfsburg, Stuttgart or Munich incumbents had anticipated five years ago. BYD delivered more electric vehicles in 2024 than Volkswagen of any kind across Europe. The German companies understood what was coming. They had the technology. They chose the income stream from combustion engines while the stream lasted. The cumulative line of development is now visible in their share prices, their plant closures and their political aftermath. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The honest exercise in the European information technology sector is to list the major European technology companies that are true global category leaders. SAP is one such entry. ASML in the Netherlands holds an effective monopoly in EUV lithography and is the true European technology jewel. Spotify exists. Beyond that, the list thins out quickly. There is no major European operating system, no major European cloud platform, no major European search engine, no major European social network, no major European semiconductor designer, no major European AI lab on the scale of the leading American companies. The continent that invented the steam engine, assembly line manufacturing and the telephone has lost the platform layer of the modern economy. The loss is structural and has been accumulating for thirty years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pattern across these files is the Kodak pattern. The continent has the science. It had it before most of its competitors did. It has chosen – by means that no single decision-maker would describe as a choice – to let the commercial translation of that science happen elsewhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artificial intelligence is the current frontier where the question is decided. The serious labs are American or Chinese. The European entries, of which Mistral in France is the most frequently mentioned, are by no reasonable measure of training capacity, talent density or commercial deployment on a par with the leading American firms. That may be changing. The development trajectory currently suggests that it is not changing fast enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tuesday question<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Whether a country has had its Kodak moment is a question that can only be answered with certainty retrospectively. What can be observed in real time is whether the strategic deliberation required to avoid the Kodak outcome is taking place. Whether in any of the major Western capitals a government is currently engaged in writing down a doctrine, publicly defending it, deploying capital against it and accepting to be judged on falsifiable outcomes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The honest answer in most cases is that this work does not take place. The work that is done instead is the work of the press conference. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it too late to adapt? The Argentine century suggests that the answer to this question, like the answer to any question in macroeconomics, depends on the time horizon chosen. Argentina in 1930 still appeared recoverable from the perspective of 1930. Each individual decade looked recoverable from the perspective of the decade itself. The compounding ran in the wrong direction long enough for the position to become structural. By the time the structural position was unmistakable, the political conditions necessary to correct it had themselves been damaged by the same processes that had produced the structural position. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deepest fear<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

This is the deepest fear that the European reader should have about the current line of development. Not that a single Kodak moment is imminent. But that the moment has already been spread out over the past forty years and is therefore no longer a moment, but a tendency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bond market is increasingly behaving as if the tilt is real. One hopes that the bond market is wrong. However, one notices that the bond market is not in the habit of being so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kodak is the parable of a dominant company that had the technology and chose the dividend. Nokia is the parable of a dominant company whose strategic error dissolved the growth model of a small country in five years. Argentina is the parable of a top ten economy that took a century to fall to seventieth place, one defensible decision at a time. Switzerland suggests an architecture in which this slow collapse does not happen in the same way. The historical example book suggests a method that has been practiced over two centuries by leaders of every ideological orientation. The contemporary scene suggests that the method has been forgotten. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eric Lefebvre<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also: The narrow pillar<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kodak had the technology. So did Nokia. Both chose the dividend of the present over the strategy for the future with terminal consequences. In the second part of this column, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5100,12135,5134],"tags":[12582,8842,12579,6229,12584,12581,12487,12578,12580,10434,5768,12583],"class_list":["post-28477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current","category-columns","category-general","tag-byd","tag-china-en","tag-choose-france","tag-europe-en","tag-inclination","tag-kodak","tag-kodak-moment","tag-nokia","tag-parabola","tag-science-2","tag-strategy","tag-tuesday-question","ownarticle"],"acf":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":"Le para\u00eetre hat l'\u00eatre ersetzt. Der Schein hat die Substanz verdr\u00e4ngt.","source_text":"","source_url":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28477"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28710,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28477\/revisions\/28710"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebrokernews.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}