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Since 2020, Europe has been affected repeatedly: first by a pandemic that closed borders overnight, then by disrupted supply chains, then by an energy crisis that highlighted the cost of strategic dependence, and finally by the return of war on the continent.
These vulnerabilities are now manifest in an international context that is openly hostile. The new international relations are characterized by the assertion of oligarchic, authoritarian, and illiberal powers formed around the American, Chinese, and Russian orbit, and that converge in the attack on what the Union embodies. Besides the Russian threat, it is subjected to an American strategy that today alternates between challenging NATO and using it as leverage in a form of security coercion. Recently, the United States has thus made the “ideological loyalty” of NATO members to Trump policies a criterion, in the framework of the ongoing reassessment of the deployment of American troops stationed in Europe. In reality, this is not merely a “loyalty test,” but what should be called a “sovereignty test.” The critical situation of vulnerability and isolation in which the Union finds itself nevertheless clarifies objectives, observable in the language, with a convergence of elite discourse: the term “independence” has recently been used by figures as different as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde. It is in the field of defense that this shift is most concretely occurring.
Thus, since 2022, European states have increased their military spending by more than 45%, the defense industry has greatly expanded its production capacity, and the Union has been given a role as a “strategic facilitator.” The European Commission has created several budgetary instruments — ASAP, EDIRPA, SAFE, EDIP, AGILE — to support acquisitions and the defense industry. The heads of state and government have managed, despite political differences, to maintain unity within the Council through their support for Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on Russia.
But the national bureaucratic-industrial lock slows and weakens this agenda. A political decision can be taken at the European level, but it must then be translated into national budgets, administrative procedures, arms contracts, and industrial choices, and it is at this moment that national reflexes resurface. This situation rests on a paradox: the political agenda of European rearmament and the means mobilized to address current geoeconomic questions unfold in a time of war, but their implementation at the national level has not been adapted and continues to operate according to practices largely inherited from peacetime. Yet, it is precisely the implementation of this agenda that the continent’s strategic future depends on. If political actors cannot break this national administrative lock, it is unlikely that European states will be able to be “ready” by 2030, that is, to possess militaro-industrial capacities sufficient to deter Russia from acting.
The political and industrial “archipelagization” of European rearmament
The war in Ukraine has transformed the strategic priorities of European states: it has Europeanized the Russian threat and shifted budgetary investment — thus political investment — toward defense. But the scale of changes in agenda, decisions, and instruments has not been matched by an equivalent change in their implementation at the national level. Three institutionally pre-2022 characteristics continue to structure Europe’s rearmament.
A persistent transatlantic dependence
Despite the aim of strengthening Europe’s strategic role within the Atlantic Alliance, almost one euro out of two spent on defense acquisitions still goes to non-European suppliers, of which about one third are American.
In practice, for many states, the security guarantee provided by NATO continues to translate into access to American capabilities and equipment, whether high-intensity systems or critical support functions. This transatlantic dependence was reinforced by the Priority Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative concluded between NATO and the United States in July 2025.
This situation creates a structural tension: Europe seeks to assert its strategic credibility vis-à-vis the United States, while outsourcing a significant portion of its defense effort to the American defense industry.
The primacy of national logics
Armament — understood here as increases in defense budgets — remains largely driven at the national level, following domestic priorities still weakly coordinated.
Thus, there is a European state rearmament in Europe, but partly at the expense of European cooperation, in short an “armament of the States against Europe”. This is reflected in an intensification of competition between national industries, program duplication, and persistent interoperability gaps. The examples are many, including in recent months after more than four years of large-scale war. The industrial divergences between Dassault Aviation and Airbus over the aircraft segment of the SCAF weapons program are troubling. Moreover, the Eurodrone program has not reached the stage where it could be said to be too big to fail. Additionally, Germany announced in March 2026 its withdrawal from the European Iris² satellite network project.
These dynamics are reinforced by a structural tendency to favor national industrial returns over collective efficiency, which could become even more pronounced in a more fragmented political context, with elections in Spain, France, Italy, and Poland scheduled by the end of 2027.
A structurally limited European cooperation
In this context, the European level remains secondary in practice. Less than 20% of Europe’s defense equipment is procured through intergovernmental cooperation, a share that has not significantly changed since the start of the war in Ukraine. Thus, although cooperation is widely recognized as necessary to achieve objectives such as operational readiness, strategic credibility, or greater autonomy, it remains marginal.
Taken together, these elements lead to a clear finding: Europe has a growing defense industrial base, but it is not yet organized to produce collective efficiency at the required scale.
This situation can be analyzed as a form of “archipelagization” of European rearmament: a collection of actors sharing common interests and goals, but evolving largely autonomously, without sufficient coordination to produce collective effects at the needed scale. It is therefore not only a matter of increasing capacities, but of recreating forms of organized interdependence among these different national poles.
Hence, the key question lies in implementation: why does the national level continue to prevail, even as the collective interest commands the opposite?
European political interventionism blocked by the national bureaucratic-industrial lock
At the level of budgetary, market, administrative, and human mechanisms, it is always the wrong level that wins.
The budget remains national
The first mechanism is budgetary and acts as a brake rather than as an incentive for cooperation: without correction, defense spending tends to remain organized at the national level rather than in a collective way, with all the strategic, operational, and economic inefficiencies that implies. As national defense budgets rise, each state becomes more convinced that it can act, acquire, and produce on its own, and that it can improve its position by weakening others rather than strengthening them: a zero-sum logic in which the increase in national spending displaces, rather than encourages, European coordination.
Or, even Germany’s defense budget, which now exceeds 100 billion euros per year, is not enough on its own to sustain production and acquisitions across the full spectrum of armaments, a finding that the literature explicitly states. This can be summarized as: spending more is necessary but not sufficient; spending better and together is the determinant condition.
La logique économique sous-jacente est claire : le coût de l’autarcie stratégique ne se limite pas au développement et à la production, mais se répète à chaque étape ultérieure — l’acquisition, le déploiement opérationnel (où les pertes d’interopérabilité sont les plus élevées, une leçon apprise par l’Europe à ses dépens dès le Conseil supérieur de guerre interallié de 1917), et le maintien en condition sur toute la durée de vie des équipements —, ce qui signifie que les pertes d’efficacité liées à la fragmentation nationale des acquisitions s’accumulent au lieu de se résorber avec le temps. Cette même fragmentation entraîne un coût macroéconomique qu’une comptabilité purement militaire ignore : des dépenses dispersées entre de petits programmes nationaux non coordonnés génèrent un multiplicateur budgétaire plus faible, et un effet correspondant plus faible sur la productivité et la croissance potentielle, que le même euro dépensé au travers de programmes européens intégrés. Cette fragmentation restreint en outre la marge de manœuvre budgétaire disponible pour soutenir l’effort de réarmement dans la durée.
The market remains fragmented
The second mechanism is a market failure that European policy has diagnosed but not corrected. Europe’s defense market increasingly functions, in fact, as a “war market” whose self-reinforcing logics push toward the national scale rather than the European one, even as production networks become more transnational in terms of components and supply chains. The Union’s stated ambition of a “European preference” in defense acquisitions is structurally incompatible with the persistence of fragmented national markets: without de-fragmentation there is no critical mass; without critical mass, companies remain dependent on foreign markets and under-invest in their own market — a trajectory that the broader geopolitical shift in European industrial policy has not yet managed to reverse.
Large industrial players have only a limited incentive to consolidate voluntarily, as national fragmentation currently protects the rents of incumbents. The relevant historical parallel is not European but American: the consolidation of the defense industrial base in the 1990s (the “Last Supper”) was imposed by the federal government, not initiated by the industry. A credible European defense industrial policy therefore presupposes a public capacity to enforce consolidation — a role that European states have already successfully exercised in civilian aerospace, through Airbus.
Administrations remain disconnected
The third mechanism is a deficit of mutual trust among states that administrative practice actively reproduces. President Macron was right to diagnose the need for Europe’s “strategic intimacy” as the foundation of a common strategic culture — but the instruments to build it have been lacking. The mistake to avoid is assuming that implementation will mechanically follow political agreement: national administrations retain a broad margin of appreciation and can appropriate the decision-making process, so negotiations are experienced as a zero-sum game — “we always feel we are losers,” say often the representatives of member states — precisely because the benchmarks and administrative practices remain national.
This is not an abstract claim. France’s diplomatic record since 2019 provides concrete illustrations: NATO described as “brain dead”; warnings about “the humiliation of Russia”; a call for a “united Europe” issued in November 2024, in French only, without mentioning Poland, Italy, the Union, or NATO. The same national reflex is found in elite training: French industry leaders are trained largely at Polytechnique, Sciences Po, and INSP, their British counterparts at Oxford and Cambridge; only 5% of a European age cohort undertakes an Erasmus stay.
Interests remain divergent
The fourth mechanism is not institutional but human: it is a matter of interests. It explains why the three preceding ones persist despite discourses that converge. Three types of actors contend . The “guardians of sovereignty” — political leaders, military elites, incumbents — have every interest in protecting national industrial bases, whatever the economic logic. The “h egemony clients” bet that loyalty exhibited to Washington remains, for their security, the safest choice. Only the “promoters of Europe,” scattered across administrations, diplomacy, and industry, have an interest in the change this text recommends.
The stakes go beyond economics: a Union whose founding ambition was to render war between its members “materially impossible” cannot remain indifferent to a rearmament that stays national and not integrated — and thus reversible if nationalist coalitions gain ground in one or more member states.
Five levers to break the lock
Five levers, usable starting today, allow targeted action at the points where the four preceding mechanisms produce their effects — the budget, the market, the administrations, the coalitions of interests.
The following five recommendations are organized around a single principle. Because this lock operates primarily at the level of national administrations and national budget cycles, rather than at the level of the Union’s institutional architecture, the most effective interventions are those that make the European level worthwhile for states and companies that today retreat by default to the national level — rather than those that primarily create new European bodies. Two are budgetary, one is political, one is administrative, and one is industrial. Each is feasible within the current cycle of negotiations for the multiannual financial framework (MFF, 2028-2034), which we view as the most decisive short-term test of political credibility. Together, they combine the “carrot and stick” logic that increasingly structures the Union’s geoeconomic posture: measures that make cooperation more attractive, and measures that make persistent fragmentation more visible and costly.
R1 — More European money: make the MFF the test of budget credibility
The Commission’s July 2025 proposal allocates 131 billion euros to the defense and space portfolio, of which about 60 to 70 billion euros are specifically earmarked for defense — a fivefold increase compared to the 2021-2027 MFF. This ambition is already under pressure: Chancellor Merz reacted critically in the weeks following its publication, and France and Italy, among others, are expected to press for reductions, concerned about the strain on national public finances and funds that could escape their own defense industries. The problem is not that the Union lacks instruments for defense — EDIP, FED, and AGILE are reasonably well designed — but that each remains underfunded relative to its mandate: Germany’s FED budget was cut from 13 to 8 billion euros in the last MFF negotiation, a precedent that should not be repeated.
This level of ambition should be defended, at a minimum, throughout the MFF negotiations. It is not simply about spending more, but about spending European: shared, pooled, multiannual funding on which companies can base their production planning.
R2 — Buy European: earmark national budgets toward European cooperation
Money remains overwhelmingly national. The EU lines dedicated to defense amount to around 2 billion euros per year; France and Germany alone spend more than 150 billion euros, nearly 40% of the Union’s total military expenditure. France’s and Germany’s budget for program 146 “Forces Equipment” alone exceeds 20 billion euros per year, ten times the Commission’s total annual budget for this sector. An objective of cooperative acquisitions of 35%, raised to 40% within the European Defense Industry Strategy, has existed since 2014; the actual level rose only from 18% to 24% between 2024 and 2025. The one recommended measure is to earmark a clearly larger share of national defense acquisition budgets for equipment produced through European cooperation or cross-buying among member states. This is not a theoretical hypothesis — France’s December 2025 purchase of Saab’s GlobalEye, and Sweden’s May 2026 purchase of Naval Group’s FDI frigates show what this means at scale. This lever was proposed in early 2025 and has since been taken up, in a related form, by the Haut-Commissariat au Plan. The “1% European” thus moves in the right direction, but remains too slow to reach the cooperative acquisitions target of 2030 and the NATO 5% target by 2035.
R3 — “Arsenal Europe” meetings: institutionalize high-level political steering of flagship programs
Major weapons programs continue to stall, not for technical feasibility reasons but due to a lack of sustained political attention. It is member states, not the Union, who invest, who acquire, and who remain ultimately responsible to their citizens; it is their political leadership, not the Commission’s, that must keep these programs moving. The number of unforeseen crises competing for this attention keeps growing, and it cannot be left to good will alone.
The shift from a largely national approach to a genuinely common strategy requires a strong political impulse. The history of European integration progress suggests that a small number of states — particularly France and Germany — must first be able to agree on the broad lines of a shared ambition, while leaving other states the possibility to discuss and participate. The political impulse for this initiative must come from the very top, i.e., the heads of state and government.
Quarterly “Arsenal Europe” meetings are recommended: a recurring political checkpoint on negotiations for flagship programs, held at the highest level allowed by the format, with a ministerial floor. Political leaders must treat the results as their own responsibility, rather than assuming, as happens too often, that “the administration will follow.” To avoid overloading ministerial agendas, these meetings could be held outside existing Ministers’ Councils, in formats differentiated to fit the programs under negotiation — Franco-German, Weimar Triangle, or others as needed.
Parallel to these ministerial meetings, a Track 1.5-type process is recommended: a small permanent group of respected figures across the member states, acting in a personal but quasi-official capacity, led by a leading figure, endowed with its own decision-making structure, administrative resources and a clear mandate to illuminate ministerial deliberations. A Track 2 process bringing together researchers and think tanks outside any official mandate should be deployed in parallel to build the technical consensus and expertise on which formal negotiators can later rely.
R4 — Implement strategic intimacy: Europeanize the administrations that execute, not just the budgets that fund
This lock is essentially administrative: political will is negotiated in the Council, but it is executed — or diluted — by national civil servants whose careers, training, and professional reflexes remain almost entirely national. Making Europe move from “default” to “by design” involves less creating new institutions than changing the operating mode of the agents who run those that exist. The “strategic intimacy” must be deliberately built, by adapting the national administrations called to carry it over time.
Three measures are recommended. First, clearly create more exchange posts between capitals, concentrated where implementation occurs: defense ministries and their acquisition agencies — the DGA in France, the BAAINBw in Germany — as well as the ministries of Foreign Affairs and European Affairs. Second, Europeanize the continent’s most prestigious training tracks, increasing the number of spots reserved for other Europeans in institutions like the Institute for Higher Studies in National Defense in France. Third, pool functions, then eventually services, following the same path of progressive integration that built the single indisputable European industrial champion: Airbus. Ukraine should be integrated into this circulation as it deepens.
R5 — De-fragment the industry from the bottom up: make it a political priority, not a spontaneous market outcome
A consolidation of the European defense industrial base in the manner of the “Last Supper,” as the United States imposed on its own industry in the 1990s, is unlikely in the short or medium term: Washington possessed a unique federal authority capable of enforcing it; the Union has none. De-fragmentation of supply remains nonetheless essential — it is the most realistic way to lower production costs and accelerate industrial production. Yet, the Commission-led market integration efforts, even with support from the European Parliament, continue to face resistance from member states keen to protect their national industrial bases.
The most realistic lever, in the short term, is to create conditions for bottom-up de-fragmentation: favorable conditions for dual-use goods, for the “new defense” companies, for SMEs and start-ups, so that transnational, innovative, and competitive hubs form around them rather than around large, nationally anchored master builders who have the least incentive to consolidate voluntarily. These incentives should extend to Ukraine: deepening the industrial proximity that is already developing between Ukrainian and European defense companies is, in itself, a form of de-fragmentation, something to encourage rather than treat as a mere secondary effect of war.
From declaration to execution
These five recommendations are deliberately targeted at what they ask of Union institutions as well as member states: none requires a new treaty, a new configuration of the Council, or a level of political consensus beyond what already exists — more than 80% of European citizens already support a stronger European defense according to Eurobarometer. What they require, however, is sustained execution at the level where, as this article has shown throughout, implementation currently fails: national budget lines, national administrations, and the political attention of member states in the intervals between Council summits. This is where the lock lies — and lifting it is the prerequisite for anything the 2050 horizon of this initiative could demand in more ambitious terms.
A credible MFF would give Europe the resources; Europeanized national budgets would put these resources to work; Arsenal Europe meetings would maintain political engagement between summits; Europeanized administrations would turn political will into operational practice; and a “bottom-up” industrial policy, anchored in new defense firms and in Ukraine, would deliver the de-fragmentation that top-down consolidation cannot yet achieve.
Without progress on these five fronts taken together, Europe’s political will risks remaining largely declarative. The key to the lock is therefore in European hands.