>the idea has been there for decades

The idea of fully reusable LVs has been around for ages, but no one has managed to come up with a working concept until SpaceX. (And STS and Buran are only partially reusable, and neither delivered on their supposed savings).

I don't disagree that Europe has dragged its feet on the space front for a while, but commercial space has kind of emerged as a happy accident - the Boeing/Lockheed monster was as fat and bloated as European bureacracy until SpaceX suddenly started showing them up.