Europe loses because rules are downstream of economic gravity. When your share of global output slides for decades (and the chart is basically a ski slope into the projection zone), you stop being the default market everyone optimizes for, and your “Brussels effect” turns from leverage into paperwork.
Reversing that trend is not a seminar on “competitiveness”. It’s a decision to be a builder civilization again:
1/ ship abundant energy (nuclear + grids + storage + faster permitting),
2/ ship compute (data centers, chips, sovereign cloud that actually scales),
3/ ship AI (less fear-as-policy, more deployment-as-policy),
4/ ship housing (yes, housing is industrial policy and YES, no houses, no babies 👶), and
5/ ship infrastructure (ports, rail, digital, defense production)
….ALL THE ABOVE at wartime speed.
Then: make it stupid-easy to start and scale companies across the EU. For this you need one market, one set of rules, real Capital Markets Union, stock-based compensation, bankruptcy that doesn’t brand founders for life, procurement that buys from European startups instead of subsidized Chinese stuff, and a migration system that recruits the world’s top engineers like it’s the Champions League.
Europe has world-class research, and now it just needs world-class commercialization velocity.
Of course, that means confronting the core mismatch: Europe is trying to regulate its way back to relevance while other regions are engineering, financing, and manufacturing their way forward.
Build an innovation flywheel around three engines:
(1) productivity software everywhere (AI copilots in SMEs, public sector digitization, mandatory interoperability),
(2) reindustrialization, where Europe can dominate (advanced manufacturing, robotics, energy tech, biotech, space, defense), and
(3) scale capital (pensions + insurers as long-term risk capital, deeper public markets, fewer national silos).
If Europe wants to bend the curve, it must choose: be the continent that primarily consumes technology and arbitrates its risks or the continent that creates technology, compounds productivity, and therefore earns the power to set the rules.
The chart below is the bill for decades of under-building. Pay for it with construction, and things will reverse. Let’s build!
