Evidence-based analysis on European strategic autonomy. Filter by sector or search the archive.
Every ambition in this series — more chip fabs, nuclear plants, wind farms, factories, AI labs — ultimately runs into the same wall: someone has to build, operate, and maintain it, and Europe is short on exactly the people it needs most. Aging populations across much of the continent mean the workforce is shrinking even […]
Every other item in this series — chips, AI, energy, industry — ultimately depends on this one. Nuclear plants need engineers, chip fabs need materials scientists, AI labs need machine learning researchers, and none of it happens without a strong pipeline of talent and research feeding into it. Europe still produces excellent science: its universities […]
Food security tends to be invisible until it isn’t. Europe is not, on the whole, at risk of mass shortages the way some import-dependent regions are, but the war in Ukraine still delivered a sharp reminder of how exposed even a wealthy, agriculturally productive continent can be — Russia and Ukraine together are major global […]
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed a dependency few Europeans had thought about before it mattered: a large share of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in common medicines — antibiotics, painkillers, blood pressure drugs — are manufactured in India and China, even when the finished pills are packaged and branded as European. Early in the pandemic, export restrictions […]
Finance may be the least visible of Europe’s dependencies, but it is arguably the most structurally entrenched. The dollar dominates global trade invoicing and reserves; American card networks process the large majority of European card payments; European startups routinely have to cross the Atlantic to find late-stage venture funding; and European capital markets remain fragmented […]
Telecommunications infrastructure is the nervous system of a modern economy — the networks carrying financial transactions, emergency services, military communications, and everyday life all run through cables, towers, and satellites that most people never think about until something goes wrong. Europe’s exposure here is layered: mobile network equipment has historically relied heavily on a small […]
Artificial intelligence has become the layer underneath almost everything else — search, customer service, scientific research, defense planning. Yet the foundation models most of the world builds on come overwhelmingly from a small number of American companies, with Chinese labs close behind and rapidly closing the gap. European companies, hospitals, and governments increasingly run their […]
Europe invented much of the technology that now defines modern manufacturing, from precision engineering to industrial chemistry to semiconductor design. Yet increasingly, the actual production has drifted elsewhere — to the United States, drawn by subsidies and cheap energy, and to Asia, drawn by lower costs and, in many sectors, faster-moving supply chains. A continent […]
If the gas crisis taught Europe the danger of depending on a single hostile supplier, the next vulnerability is quieter but arguably deeper: raw materials and critical minerals. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, and dozens of other inputs used in batteries, wind turbines, electric motors, and semiconductors flow through supply chains overwhelmingly controlled or processed […]
For more than seventy years, Europe’s security has rested on one fundamental assumption: that the United States would remain the continent’s ultimate military guarantor. That assumption is no longer unquestionable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, growing geopolitical competition with China, and shifting American strategic priorities have forced Europe to confront a difficult question: Can it defend […]