On February 12th, United Europe in partnership with the European Forum Alpbach and Sovereign Europe Forum organised an official side event at this year’s Munich Security Conference at Hotel Bayerischer Hof.
The panel discussion convened an outstanding group of experts from industry, policy, and innovation: Anne-Laure De Chammard, Member of the Executive Board at Siemens Energy, Arancha González Laya, Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po), former Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, André Loesekrug-Pietri, Chairman and Scientific Director of the JEDI Foundation, and Ricardo Mendes, Founder and CEO of Tekever. Hosted by Dr. Julia Reuss, Board Member at United Europe and Public Policy Director at META, The conversation brought together perspectives from energy, geopolitics, innovation, and security—creating a multidimensional lens through which to understand today’s challenges and opportunities in Europe’s technological sovereignty.
What follows is not a transcript. It is an account of themes, tensions, and insights — drawn from a conversation under Chatham House Rules:
European Tech Sovereignty: Strategic Reality or Regulatory Illusion?
Europe prides itself on being a regulatory superpower—but can regulation alone secure technological sovereignty?
Europe writes the rules for data privacy. It sets global standards for competition. It speaks confidently about digital rights and ethical artificial intelligence. But beneath this normative strength lies a harder question – one that policymakers too often prefer to avoid.
Which technologies define power in the 21st century?
Technological sovereignty is not declared in speeches or policy. It is measured in fabrication plants, data centres, satellite launches, secure networks and industrial scale. It is visible in the ability to design advanced chips, deploy independent cloud infrastructure and scale platforms globally.
By those metrics, Europe remains deeply dependent.
For decades, this dependency seemed manageable. The United States guaranteed security. Global supply chains optimized efficiency. Strategic vulnerabilities were masked by geopolitical stability. That era is over. Technology has become the primary arena of geopolitical competition. Dependencies that once appeared benign now carry strategic consequences.
A continent that import its most advanced semiconductors, relies heavily on foreign cloud providers and trails in critical defense tech cannot credibly claim strategic autonomy. Europe can regulate markets – but it cannot command them.
The United States and China understand the centrality of technology to power. They invest accordingly, at extraordinary scale, in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing and space systems. These sectors are not simply economic categories. They are infrastructure of sovereignty.
Europe’s shortfall is not intellectual. Its universities and research institutes are among the world’s best. Its engineers and scientists are highly competitive. The problem is structural: fragmentation of capital markets, underinvestment in scale, and political hesitation when integration becomes uncomfortable.
Too many European innovations stall at the prototype stage. Too few become global. Venture capital remains thinner than in the United States. Capital markets remain nationally segmented. Strategic industries are often treated as domestic political concerns rather than shared European priorities.
The result is a dangerous contradiction: Europe speaks the language of sovereignty while operating within systems largely designed, financed and scaled elsewhere.
Technological sovereignty does not require autarky. It does not imply severing global partnerships. It requires something more pragmatic and more demanding: the capacity to choose dependencies, to mitigate risk and to maintain credible domestic capability in critical domains.
That means building industrial scale semiconductors, investing seriously in secure cloud and data infrastructure, strengthening cyber defense, advancing space capabilities and aligning industrial and defense policy. It means using public procurement strategically. It means completing capital markets integration. It means acting at European scale rather than national scale.
No individual member state can match continental powers alone. Scale is structural. The single market once redefined Europe’s economic position. Today, technological integration must follow.
Sovereignty in the 21st century is exercised less at physical borders and more in code, chips and computing power. Regulation without industrial depth creates leverage for others, not for Europe.
Until ambition is matched by scale, investment and integration, sovereignty will remain rhetorical.
By Dyria Sigrid Alloussi, Program Director at United Europe e.V.