Hannover Messe, April 2026. Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz is recounting a telephone call with Donald Trump. It was about 6G — the next mobile communications standard, which will shape the digital infrastructure of the coming decades. Merz had proposed a joint Western initiative to Trump. Trump was not interested.
And then Merz says, in effect: if the Americans don't want it — damn it all, why don't we do it ourselves?
The sentence is remarkable. Not because of 6G. Because of everything that lies behind it.
I. What Dahrendorf saw in 2003
In his Acht Anmerkungen zum Populismus [Eight Remarks on Populism], published in 2003 in the Viennese journal Transit, Ralf Dahrendorf formulated a diagnosis that sounds more precise today than it did then:
Parliaments exist in nation states and in their parts, such as regions and municipalities. Yet the spaces in which political decisions are made today have become more diffuse. For good reason, people increasingly speak of governance rather than government. We are governed without anyone being able to point a finger at the governments that bring this about. Moreover, the diffusion of power extends from the global to the local.
— Ralf Dahrendorf, Transit, Vienna 2003
Dahrendorf describes the transition from government to governance — from governing to steering. Government is visible: a parliament decides, a government acts, citizens can vote it out. Governance is diffuse: norms arise in international bodies, standards are set by consortia, decisions are made in negotiations that nobody observes. The power is real. But you cannot point a finger at it.
This is not a technocratic problem of detail. It is the structural foundation on which the Megamachine operates. It needs no government. It needs governance — diffuse, unattributable steering that cannot be voted out and that acts in the name of the common good without being democratically legitimised to do so.
II. What the curse reveals
Merz's "damn it all" is not a slip. It is a moment of clarity — a brief crack in the governance façade through which the real problem becomes visible.
The chancellor of Europe's strongest economy calls the American president and asks for permission to help shape a technological standard. The president says no. And the chancellor is surprised — or pretends to be surprised — and wonders publicly whether Europe might perhaps do it alone.
The question arises three times over. First: why does a sovereign head of government ask the American president whether Europe may develop its own technology standard? Second: why is the answer "we'll do it ourselves" a surprise rather than a matter of course? And third — this is the real question: if Merz recognises this correctly for 6G, why does the same not apply to everything else?
To semiconductors. To AI infrastructure. To payment systems. To defence. To energy supply. To the strategic dependencies that Germany and Europe have built up over thirty years while believing that globalisation was always good and that strategic considerations were anachronistic.
III. The detail and the whole
6G is an important detail. It is not the whole.
The whole is what Dahrendorf described: a world in which political decisions are made in spaces that are not democratically controlled. In which norms are set by consortia in which corporations sit, but no citizens. In which dependencies arise not through resolutions but through a thousand small decisions, each of which seems reasonable on its own, and which together produce a structure that nobody wanted in this form — and that nobody can change any more without bearing massive costs.
That is the Megamachine in its purest form: no plan, no conspiracy, no evil intent. Only feedback loops that generate dependency, path dependencies that block alternatives, governance structures that diffuse power until nobody is responsible for anything any more.
Merz swears about 6G. But the question "damn it all, why don't we do it ourselves?" should have been asked ten years ago — when KUKA was sold to China. When energy dependence on Russia was systematically expanded. When Europe let its semiconductor industry go to ruin. When the digital infrastructure was built on American platforms. When the payment systems were left without a European alternative.
In all of this there was no curse. Only governance.
IV. Why nobody wants to think
Dahrendorf not only described the problem — he also explained why it does not get solved. The governance gaps are places where the bacillus of populism thrives, he writes. Where democratic institutions do not reach, a vacuum arises that simplifiers fill.
But populism is not the cause. It is the symptom. The cause is that nobody can point a finger at power. Whoever cannot point to who decides cannot ask why the decision was made as it was. Whoever cannot ask cannot object. Whoever cannot object cannot change anything.
That is the design — not of a conspiracy, but of the Megamachine itself. Governance is more efficient than government. Consortia decide faster than parliaments. Markets react more quickly than democracies. And each of these efficiencies is reasonable taken on its own. Together they produce a structure in which democratic control is systematically hollowed out — without anyone having decided it.
Nobody wants to think about it, because thinking would mean recognising how deep the dependency goes. How much would have to be given up to overcome it. How many decisions lie not with governments but with markets, consortia, rating agencies, platforms, protocols.
A chancellor who really thinks this through can no longer say "Confidence, that is the spirit". He has to start naming what he does not control. And then explain why he accepts it nonetheless. That is not politically survivable. So one does not think it through to the end.
V. Why nobody wants to change anything
Even if someone did think — change founders on the structure.
The governance spaces Dahrendorf describes cannot be reformed democratically, because they arose outside democratic control. WTO norms are not adopted in the Bundestag. ECB interest-rate policy is not decided in the European Parliament. 5G standards are not set by elected representatives. Data infrastructure is not shaped by citizens.
Anyone who wants to democratise these spaces has to fight against the interests of all those who profit from their opacity — corporations, lobbyists, technocrats, and not least the governments themselves, which enjoy their freedom of action in these spaces without having to fear parliamentary scrutiny. That is the Megamachine as a self-preserving system: it has no interests, but it has structures that systematically suppress every incentive to change.
That is why Merz's curse about 6G is so telling. He recognises a detail. He reacts with the right reflex — why don't we do it ourselves? But the reflex remains a reflex. It does not become the question: why have we not done it ourselves for decades? And it certainly does not become the consequence: what must we change in the structures so that we can do it in future?
For that consequence would mean acknowledging that the governance architecture of the last thirty years was a mistake. That the diffusion of power is not a law of nature but a political decision that can be reversed — but only by building institutions, competences and strategic capacities that do not exist today.
That is the real work. Not a telephone call with Trump. Not a curse at a trade fair. But the laborious, unspectacular, decades-long work on structures that win back democratic control over the spaces in which decisions about our lives are made today.
We are governed without anyone being able to point a finger at the governments that bring this about. This means that institutional gaps have arisen in many places — spaces for which we have no democratic institutions.
— Ralf Dahrendorf, 2003. Twenty-three years later a Federal Chancellor swears about a mobile communications standard. The gaps have grown larger.