What does a stronger Europe actually require? Demos Helsinki’s comments on the State of the Union.

President von der Leyen highlighted in her State of the Union speech on 16 September a Europe that must become more capable of acting on its own terms: stronger in defence, more secure in energy, more competitive in technology, and more resilient in the face of climate and social pressures.

However, strengthening Europe is not only a question of ambition. It raises difficult questions about dependencies, governance and what we actually mean by resilience. Drawing on research from three EU-funded projects, we look at some of the tensions behind the speech: what technological sovereignty requires in practice, how climate resilience depends on institutions that can work across policy silos, and why Europe’s strength cannot be measured solely through current economic indicators. 

Digital sovereignty: autonomy requires more than ambition

“Europe will need its own capabilities”

“We need to stay in the race” 

President von der Leyen made technological capacity a clear part of Europe’s push for greater strategic autonomy. But strengthening technological autonomy is considerably more difficult in practice than the political ambitions might suggest.

The EU Horizon Europe project FORSEE has examined European SMEs’ views on successful AI. The research shows that many SMEs remain highly dependent on US providers such as AWS, Azure and OpenAI, while European alternatives are often seen as more expensive, less capable or harder to access.

This creates a clear tension in EU policy: AI adoption is expected to boost European competitiveness, yet it can also deepen dependence on the very global tech companies Europe is trying to reduce its reliance on.

From our perspective, digital sovereignty should not simply mean replacing foreign technology with European alternatives, nor should it become another label for competitiveness. The more important questions are what different actors are trying to achieve in the name of sovereignty and what the EU is actually prepared to do to pursue those goals.

Climate resilience: integration matters as much as investment

“This is not about mitigation or adaptation. We need both. And they need to strengthen each other. This is the only way to reach climate resilience.”

That makes climate resilience less a question of which comes first, mitigation or adaptation, and more a question of what kind of governance allows the two to work together. Today, sectoral funding streams often reproduce the very split we are trying to overcome. Broad climate targets can be met through spending that is formally green but has limited impact, while genuinely integrated projects can fall between the instruments meant to fund them.

In cities, the institutional divide between the two can become artificial. The same decisions about buildings, public space, infrastructure, and neighbourhoods often shape both emissions and resilience, yet many funding streams still treat them as separate agendas.

That is why the next EU Multiannual Financial Framework should pay close attention to the implementation capacity cities have already built. In a working paper co-authored with Dark Matter Labs, we examined what the EU Cities Mission can teach us about mission-based multilevel governance and how different levels of government can organise around shared outcomes rather than separate policy silos.

For the next MFF, the key question is therefore not simply how much funding is labelled “climate” or “urban”; It is whether the EU can design a funding architecture that makes integration possible and builds on the capacity cities have already developed to deliver it.

European resilience: measuring what actually makes societies strong

Much of von der Leyen’s language of European independence focused on defence, energy, trade and technological capacity. Yet some of the speech’s most tangible examples of European resilience came from elsewhere: housing, care, online safety and the experiences of people living through war and crisis.

“Care is not a privilege. Housing is not a privilege. They are rights,” President von der Leyen said.

This points to a broader question explored by the EU Horizon Europe project MERGE: how do we measure whether Europe is actually becoming stronger and more resilient? Economic and fiscal indicators capture only part of the picture. Health, housing, social inclusion, environmental resilience and people’s ability to trust the institutions around them also shape Europe’s long-term capacity to withstand crises.

The EU’s founding treaty commits it to promoting “the well-being of its peoples”. Yet many of Europe’s core governance frameworks were designed for a more predictable era. Research from MERGE and its partner projects explores what an update could look like, including giving wellbeing goals a stronger role in the European Semester alongside fiscal objectives and tracking progress over time.

Housing makes this concrete. Europe’s housing crisis is not only about the price and availability of homes: it affects health, social inclusion, economic security, intergenerational fairness and environmental sustainability. MERGE sets out actionable EU policy measures for putting these wider wellbeing outcomes at the centre of housing policy.

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Photo Credit: © European Union, 2026 / Photographer: Dati Bendo, Christophe Licoppe (licensed under CC BY 4.0)