The European
Power Index

Europe is routinely described as a declining power, fragmented into twenty-seven competing national interests, dependent on the United States for security and on Asia for growth. That description is accurate in the language of geopolitics and false in the language of infrastructure.

One Dutch company is the only source on Earth of the machines that print advanced semiconductors. One Danish company and one privately held Swiss-Italian carrier move a combined third of the world's shipping containers. Two European drug makers supply most of the world's insulin.

None of this shows up on a market capitalisation table, because irreplaceability and size are different things.

Beneath Europe's political fragmentation sits a set of companies that the rest of the world, including the United States and China, cannot presently route around. No country can build an advanced chip without ASML and, one level further down, without Zeiss.

This is not a story about European strength in the way the term is normally used. It is a story about leverage that has gone largely unweaponised, held by companies rather than governments, and rarely coordinated with the political institutions nominally responsible for European strategic autonomy.

The gap this index reveals is not between Europe's power and its weakness. It is between the power Europe already has, sitting inside fifty boardrooms, and the political attention that power has so far received.