Our wishes for 2026: Europe unbound
From botched trade “deals” to geopolitical bullying, from threatened friends to hybrid wars, from industrial impotency to self-inflicted political pains, 2025 will have been a long and painful wake-up call for all of us Europeans. Not just in Brussels, but in Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague or Copenhagen, it is time we all shed off the comfort of past certainties: apart for some complacent fools who still believe that things will go back to usual, the truth is that the world is no longer the one we used to live. Even more than in the Cold War times, this world has become a dangerous place to be European.
Scared, delusional or plainly treacherous, some failed leaders pretend that jumping ships and declaring ourselves a province of the new American or Eurasian empires is the only path to safety, echoing those who once had called to join the emerging dark order briefly ruling our continent. Us, we do believe that Europe has a future, a purpose and place in this world’s history.
“Europe”, that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We cannot be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We shall be united in our common interest. Does Europe need the permission to pursue its own goals, its own way of life, its own chosen values?
Today, more than ever, Europe needs the courage to become what it claims to be.
For seventy years, we have repeated ourselves the same reassuring story: peace through integration, prosperity through trade, relevance through alliances. That story once protected a fragile continent, yet today it confines it. In the name of interdependence, we tied our hands and dismissed the various threats growing in the shadow. The time has come for a European declaration of independence—not against others, but for ourselves. Independence from great powers that treat our societies as markets, battlefields, or mere variables in their strategic games. Independence from the comfort of tutelage, whether military, technological, or political. Independence from the new empires in the making.
The US and China now pretend to structure the world as rival empires, exporting their worldviews and values, as much as their products. Aligning with one or the other is not a destiny, it is a capitulation, a dereliction of duty. Europe shall no longer be the junior partner of American security and the passive client of Chinese overproductions. More than a lazy slogan for institutions’ communiqués, “strategic autonomy” is the patient albeit urgent construction of our own defence, digital capacities, industrial policy, and diplomatic voice. To choose independence is to accept responsibility. We need to learn again the cost of saying no—no to extraterritorial laws, no to vassalised supply chains, no to the dollar dominance, no to imported culture wars.
Because our dependencies are also very concretely material. As long as our economies burn fossil fuels, Europe remains hostage to petro‑autocracies abroad and climate chaos at home. It is not a coincidence that our environmental and climate ambitions have triggered so much hostility from the fossil powers – to the point of trying to bully us into buying more of their production. Europe’s green transition is not a moral luxury, but the condition to its freedom. Decarbonising our energy, transport, and agriculture is the only way to emancipate Europe from the blackmail of pipelines and tankers. Climate denial, in its crude or sophisticated forms, is a politics of surrender to disasters that will fracture societies, radicalise anger, and erode democracy.
In addition, our economies remain hostages of the 20th centuries conglomerates and their vested interests. The old economic model—endless extraction, cheap labour, energy profligacy, deregulated finance—no longer produces security or dignity. It produces resentment, precarity, and a fertile ground for those who promise protection in exchange for obedience. Independence today means inventing a new prosperity: anchored in public services, ecological reconstruction, social rights, technological mastery and shared knowledge. It also means redefining our collective needs, and defending democracy not as a tired procedure, but as a daily practice of conflict, compromise, and collective meaning.
Europe’s independence will not be granted by a treaty or a presidential speech. It will be declared in the minds of its citizens, in parliaments that dare to legislate differently, in territories that experiment with new ways of living well within planetary limits. To become independent is to stop asking who will save us—and start deciding who we want to be.
We will not go quietly into the night.
For 2026 it is time to act on it!
