Rebecca Christie

Senior Fellow, Bruegel

Growth will help Europe advance and prosper, and therefore needs to be a higher priority than reducing interconnections with the wider world.

Inside the single market, the EU needs more cooperation, more crossborder finance, and more common public goods. It does not make sense to reinvent every wheel and subsidize European industries solely based on geography. Rather, the EU needs to invest in its own innovations and take sensible advantage of global suppliers. For example, Europe does not need solar panel factories, it needs to deploy renewable energy and connect its power grids. Successful electrification attracts investors, and the green transition is more important than reducing dependence on outside suppliers.

Already, the EU has some of the best universities in the world, generating top-tier ideas. The challenge now is to keep those ideas in Europe as they grow and compete worldwide. This means offering investors from inside and outside the EU a better climate, with more common supervision and clearer rules on what happens when investments fail. It means taking risks on projects with high societal benefit. And it means maintaining the democratic values and quality of life that make the world’s best and brightest want to stay.

Nicola Bilotta

Coordinator of the EU-Supervisory Digital Finance Academy

No. Framing the issue as the so-called "made in Europe" strategy versus openness risks missing the real constraint: Europe's problem is not too much foreign capital, but too little strategic selectivity in how it is embedded.

There is no inherent contradiction between attracting foreign investment and developing strategic technologies. The real issue is whether Europe provides sufficient internal demand, deep markets, industrial policy, and regulatory frameworks that allow firms to develop, scale, and sell these technologies within the continent. The United States offers the clearest benchmark: It has long combined technological leadership with being the world's largest recipient of foreign capital. The contradiction only emerges if the made in Europe strategy means that it is funded exclusively by Europeans—in which case, financing would depend on European private capital or public budgets, and neither is abundant enough to sustain global competition at scale.

This is not to dismiss the legitimate concern that foreign investment in strategic sectors can create dependency and leverage. But the answer is not exclusion; it is conditionality—frameworks that distinguish between investment that builds local capacity and investment that extracts it.

Without coordinated industrial policy, common financing instruments, and clearer rules on strategic assets, "made in Europe" risks remaining a slogan rather than a strategy.

Elvire Fabry

Director of the Trade and Economic Security program, Jacques Delors Institute

The binary opposition between economic nationalism and open trade is now obsolete. What matters is finding an efficient balance between protection and openness, through targeted, sector‑specific—or even technology‑specific—approaches. The pace of innovation is so fast that agility is essential to decide what to protect, support, expose to competition, and when to adjust those choices.

Reducing dependencies requires a long‑term strategy that addresses existing vulnerabilities and prevents future ones. This can only be achieved through a European innovation strategy.

To attract foreign investment, Europe today benefits from a comparative advantage: the stability of a regulatory framework rooted in democracy and the rule of law. Yet without greater pooling of resources to fully leverage the economies of scale offered by the single market—Europe’s greatest asset—upcoming elections risk pushing the EU toward fragmentation and jeopardizing any further increase in innovation capacity.

Conditioning access to the European market has become necessary in certain sectors to support the scale‑up of European companies. But rather than choosing between buy European, made in Europe, or made with Europe, the real challenge is to determine, sector by sector, which approach best serves the objective—whether to prevent the loss of know‑how or to gain it through technology transfer.

Erik Jones

Nonresident Scholar, Carnegie Europe

The real question is whether the EU can repatriate European investment abroad in a way that reduces unwanted interdependencies. Right now, the EU runs huge current account surpluses alongside equally huge exports of capital. This combination is a direct result of the EU’s post–financial crisis export-led growth model. That model makes European exports and European investors dependent on the United States.

If the EU could make it more attractive for European investors to put their savings to work in Europe by strengthening and streamlining the regulation of equity markets, facilitating the growth of pan-European investment funds, changing the regulation of national pension schemes, and encouraging financial innovation, that would reduce much of that unwanted dependence on the United States. That is what the European Commission proposed last December.

If that proposal is adopted, increased European investment in Europe would strengthen the European economy, finance the expansion of the European defense industrial sector, and accelerate the digital and green transition. Along the way, it should also make Europe more attractive for foreign investors. 

So, the answer to your question is yes. But that yes comes at the end of a more fundamental macroeconomic rebalancing in Europe that needs to take place first. 

Maaike Okano-Heijmans

Senior Research Fellow, Clingendael Institute

The Nordics recently argued in a position paper that any made in Europe criteria be guided by three principles: “limited, proportionate, and based on a clear understanding of the consequences.” This caution must not become an excuse for inaction.

Today, the EU is failing to use one of the most powerful instruments in its competitiveness toolkit: public procurement. Europe’s purchasing power overwhelmingly favors established global market leaders, many of them non-European. Short-term economic efficiency is prioritized in critical tech sectors ranging from cloud services and software to solar panels, electric vehicles, and defense equipment. A more strategic approach is overdue.

The “limited” principle should mean focusing on clearly defined strategic technologies. The “proportionate” condition should acknowledge geopolitical reality: The EU would merely be doing what the United States and China already do in practice. And the “based on a clear understanding of consequences” rule should serve as a reminder that the narrative is long-term and pro-European.

EU leaders have a narrow window to shift course. This requires political honesty: Investing in European tech champions entails costs and painful adjustment in the short term. But done credibly, it strengthens Europe’s long-term competitiveness and preserves its attractiveness as an investment destination—ideally under the same three guiding principles.

Cordelia Buchanan Ponczek

Research Fellow, Finnish Institute of International Affairs

The EU should be more bullish. The union can attract foreign investment while reducing dependencies in light of current geoeconomic competition and the weaponization of interdependence. Such policy must be targeted to avoid fragmentation, minimize the risk of alienating external partners, and deepen internal market integration.

But the tools to create the requisite demand conditions must be clear and targeted. A poorly or undefined “European preference” risks increasing fragmentation instead of reducing vulnerability. This could deter the very investment the EU needs. It also sends mixed signals to trading partners at a time when the union is negotiating access to new markets—key to any diversification strategy.

For demand predictability to work, it requires market integration that actually supports scaling. Segmented capital markets, asymmetric state aid regimes, and protracted decisionmaking weaken competitiveness and autonomy. This is why any policy must include deeper market integration. Initiatives like EU Inc. can help firms scale across borders, and the European Innovation Act is meant to harmonize rules which would help EU start-ups grow and stay in Europe.

If demand policy is smart, targeted, and paired with real internal integration, the EU can attract investment while managing vulnerabilities. Without that balance, the two goals will work against each other.

Sander Tordoir

Chief Economist, Center for European Reform

The contradiction between the buy European push and the deregulation drive is misguided. There has been no explosion of red tape and cutting back EU climate-related reporting requirements will not fix the deeper problem: Europe’s old growth model, built on external demand, no longer works in a world where the United States is walling off its market behind tariffs and China is running a $1.2 trillion (€1 trillion) trade surplus increasingly concentrated in Europe’s core engineering sectors.

Industrial policy is not a distraction but one of the few levers available to the EU. This means attaching requirements to demand-side incentives—such as the tens of billions euros EU countries already spend on tax deductions for corporate car purchases—that exclude Chinese supply while remaining open to allies. These programs may add some bureaucracy. But the alternative is to let investment drain from Europe’s core manufacturing industries as they shrink under the weight of Chinese distortions.

In cherry-picking a meaningless simplification agenda from the Draghi report, EU leaders ignore its central insight: Europe needs industrial policy to defend its manufacturing base from China, alongside deregulation in tech to allow digital firms to scale. That dual strategy will do far more to attract investment than trimming reporting rules.

Fabian Zuleeg

Chief Executive, European Policy Center

Yes—but only if Europe understands that competitiveness now requires protection without protectionism.

Europe’s competitiveness is under threat, amplified by a world defined by predatory economic actors, coercion, and a growing shift toward mercantilism without rules. Open markets alone are no longer enough when interdependence is weaponized and state power is used to distort competition. The ability to protect oneself economically has become a precondition for prosperity.

But protection must not slide into protectionism. Closing markets, favoring national champions, or erecting fragmented made in Europe barriers would weaken Europe’s attractiveness and shrink the very economic base it seeks to defend. The goal is not insulation, but optionality: diversifying supply chains, expanding domestic capabilities, and creating new sources of growth through innovation, investment, and skills.

This requires doing more in common, in Europe and beyond, with like-minded countries. An economic security alliance could align trade instruments, industrial policy, and forge common partnerships—reducing dependencies while keeping Europe open to capital and ideas.

The current global turmoil is not just a risk; it is an opportunity. As other regions become less predictable or openly hostile to openness, Europe can become an attractive destination for investment and talent precisely because it combines openness with economic security.

Etienne Höra

Project Manager, Bertelsmann Stiftung

As Europe's dependencies and slow growth persist, it's a good sign that more and bolder policy options are put on the table. However, they risk getting caught up in old dogmatic traps, like the binary between openness and protectionism, which leads to the wrong questions and conclusions.

The EU needs foreign investment both for growth industries and reducing critical dependencies. A mix of tighter market access controls and volatility elsewhere creates incentives to invest in Europe. At the same time, this backfires if the risks that often come with investment, especially from China, aren’t addressed. It's not about paradigms, but careful calibration: choosing the right sectors and remaining open to the right kind of investment.

This should include rightsizing the problem: There is a range of substantial hurdles to investing in Europe's fragmented capital market, from a labyrinth of national regulations to a simple lack of scale and liquidity. In any realistic scenario, the effects of buy European provisions or tighter rules for foreign investment in strategic sectors would pale in comparison. Rather than hitting the brakes on derisking for the fear of complexity, the EU should tackle the persistent hurdles that have consistently slowed investment.

Michele Chang

Director of the Transatlantic Affairs Program, College of Europe

Yes, but not all at once.

More public funding is a necessary but an insufficient step toward achieving strategic autonomy. Multiplying the still-fragmented EU market with more public money would exacerbate its current inefficiencies if not accompanied by an ambitious plan for battling protectionism within the single market.

Reducing dependencies means removing internal trade barriers so that Europe would have the capacity to develop more internationally competitive industries. Decades of geopolitical complacency characterized by dependence on the United States, China, and Russia cannot be reversed overnight by spending more money. EU member states must be willing to open domestic markets to one another and promote more cooperation rather than protect national actors. This includes developing truly European markets in capital, defense, and energy. Buy European debates and more free trade agreements are a distraction that may improve things on the margins but not provide the boost needed.

This is the real work required for a European single market in which the private sector can thrive and provide the economic basis required for achieving broader geopolitical objectives.

Nicolai von Ondarza

Head of EU/Europe Research Division, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP)

Of course the EU has the global economic size and power to attract investment and reduce critical dependencies. The challenge lies in wielding that power credibly. This requires a twin shift of mindset, full of trade-offs.

In the past, the push for a global rules-based order went hand in hand with an EU that was also internally based on rules and liberal principles. As the world returns to a power-based order, where economic coercion is mixed with security threats and weaponization of interdependence, the external and internal logics are now at loggerheads.

The first shift is that the EU will need to, where necessary, move away from prioritizing rules externally: asserting its own interest, setting conditions, and using its full economic-security toolbox. At the same time, it must internally resist the temptations of national economic sovereignties competing, and instead deepen its internal liberal economic rules, including curbing national subsidy races and regulatory fragmentation.

The second shift is accepting that asserting common economic interests requires common political authority: One that can deploy instruments and make trade-offs even when impacts differ across member states. That means empowering the European Commission to negotiate, enforce and, when needed, play hardball, less restrained by the member states.

Eulalia Rubio

Associate Senior Research Fellow in the Economic Policy unity, Center for European Policy Studies

In a world where almost any economic interdependence can be weaponized, reducing excessive dependencies is no longer a choice but a necessity. Europe should not rule out, on principle, the use of made in Europe clauses. Admittedly, this is not an attractive policy tool and sits uneasily with the EU’s self-image as a guardian of the global rules-based order. Yet, if our competitors use this instrument, it should also be part of our toolbox.

That said, local content requirements are very inefficient, difficult to apply in practice, and can generate negative side effects. Their use therefore only makes sense in a narrow set of critical technologies or strategic sectors. In other cases, a wiser approach may be to use softer tools, such as the introduction of resilience criteria into public tenders or establishing specific grant lines to support projects promoting value-chain diversification—following a made with Europe rather than made in Europe approach.

In some areas, we also need deeper market integration to reduce dependencies. The energy sector is a clear example. While targeted support for domestic clean tech industry may help, ultimately achieving Europe’s independence requires decarbonizing our energy system by building up a fully integrated and well-functioning electricity market.