The EuroStack

Europe is losing its grip on the future — or more precisely, on the means of the future. Caught between competing scenarios of global transformation driven by the United States and China, it has so far failed to develop a bold, radical strategy for its own technological and digital development.

In this essay, Francesca Bria calls for an ambitious, integrated strategy to build Europe's digital infrastructure: the industrial, communications, and resource backbone without which sovereignty remains an empty word. From securing critical materials to retaining top scientists, from chip fabrication to energy supply, Europe will have no say in the future unless it reclaims sovereignty over what has become our dominant ecology of thought and action: the Stack.

Francesca Bria is an innovation economist working at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and political economy. She co-founded the EuroStack Initiative and is lead author of the EuroStack Report, the blueprint for European digital sovereignty now backed by a coalition of over 250 companies, the European Parliament, and EU member states. Her recent work on the Authoritarian Stack maps how concentrated tech power and ideological capital are privatizing sovereignty and reshaping democratic institutions.

She is honorary professor at UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and a fellow at Stiftung Mercator in Berlin. She sits on the board of the European Innovation Council, chairs the New European Bauhaus Facility at the European Commission, and serves as president of ART-ER, the Innovation Agency of Emilia-Romagna, where she leads the Apply AI strategy. She is a member of the International AI Council convened by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.