A Team Enlargement coalition of EU member states can drive the changes needed to bring Ukraine and others into the bloc.
Europe is converging on a definition of economic security as reduced dependence – de-risking, reshoring, buying European. This column argues that the definition is mistaken. Three decades of evidence on financial and production networks shows that resilience is a property of a node’s position in the network – the depth, diversity, and quality of its…
As the postwar international order fragments and universal agreement becomes increasingly elusive, policymakers face a pressing question: what form of cooperation can replace the postwar hegemon-led, rules-based system? This column examines two complementary answers. Mark Carney argues that coalitions of middle powers can preserve stability, resilience, and strategic autonomy in an era of great-power rivalry.…
The EU Recovery and Resilience Facility was launched to support post-Covid recovery while accelerating structural transformation through investment and reform. This column provides a preliminary descriptive assessment of the macroeconomic impact of the facility in Italy, Greece, and Spain, three countries with large allocations. Using simple counterfactual comparisons, it presents evidence consistent with a positive…
Every wave of large-scale migration into Europe over the past decade has produced the same split-screen: images of families fleeing war or starvation arriving with nothing, alongside the rapid rise of political movements built substantially around opposing their arrival. Both halves of that image are real. The humanitarian case for taking in people fleeing Syria’s […]
Every essay in this series has described a different front in the same broader project — energy, minerals, industry, chips, AI, telecommunications, finance, health, food, education, labor, infrastructure, space, cyber defense, and trade. Each one, examined on its own, has a plausible path forward. But there is a reason so many of these efforts — […]
This final essay is really the connecting thread running through every one before it. Energy diversification, mineral partnerships in Africa and South America, chip fab locations, food import sources — all of them are, at their core, expressions of a single underlying strategic instinct: don’t let any single country hold enough leverage over Europe to […]
Space has quietly become as critical to daily life as electricity or telecommunications — satellite navigation guides everything from farm equipment to financial transaction timestamps, satellite imagery informs military planning and climate monitoring alike, and launch capability determines who gets to put any of it into orbit in the first place. Europe built real strength […]
Every strategy described so far in this series — energy, industry, chips, AI, finance, talent — assumes something that doesn’t yet fully exist: a Europe that functions as one connected market rather than 27 separate national ones stitched together by treaties. Goods, power, data, and people still move across European borders less freely than the […]
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 […]