Welcome to the Tour
Image: NASA/GSFC
Europe Can Build Anything — If We Want To
We enter into 2025 in the midst of a changing world order. The past years have been an overdue wakeup call for Europeans to shake off our reliance on other world powers and determine our own path. If we succeed, we and our allies will benefit from a stronger Europe.
Instead of being energised by the opportunity ahead of us, it has become popular to complain about Europe and its supposed decline — which is creating at best a boring and at worst a destructive narrative about our future.
I disagree with that view. Obviously things aren’t perfect here (or anywhere else), but we have everything we need to build the best version of Europe: we have world-class scientific and technical talent, industrial strengths and research institutions. We have a centuries-long track record of world changing ideas and technologies. Technologically, Europe can build anything.
And yet, economic growth is indeed stagnating. Economists will point to more complex reasons but I suspect that part of the solution is simple: we need to want an amazing future.
But right now, Europeans do not have a compelling narrative about the future. Your tweets about over-regulation will continue to do nothing to unlock growth. Instead, we need to spend more time talking about what we do want life in Europe to be like twenty or fifty years from now.
It’s no secret that storytelling about the future and the role of technology in building it isn’t our greatest strength. But ambitious and inspiring ideas can act as magnets aligning talent, capital and energy — and we’re not going to accelerate growth without being able to point towards a future worth wanting.
That’s not a bad problem to have — culture and narratives are incredibly malleable. Imagine we didn’t already have free education and public healthcare, industrial powerhouses and a skilled workforce, beautiful and safe cities or intact democratic institutions, social safety nets and capital markets. None of them are perfect, but all of them are more difficult to create than to get people excited about the future during a time of rapid technological progress.
There Is No Place Like This
The contrast between Europe’s technological capabilities and the lack of inspiring common visions for the future doesn’t surprise me. There are a few reasons:
Europe isn’t one country
It’s easy to talk about Europe as if it was one place — but it includes over 40 countries speaking as many languages, governed by even more political parties. Our best talent is distributed across the continent.
We can lament this fragmentation, but we should remind ourselves that it is just over 30 years ago that many European countries were liberated from Communism, connected through the European Union and that talent could begin to move freely across countries. After centuries of being at war with each other, 30 years is nothing. We are still taking the very first steps on the path towards a more united Europe.
Europeans build quietly
In most European cultures, the social rewards of being unreasonably ambitious in public are limited. Even our most ambitious founders tend to build quietly and hope their work speaks for them.
It will never be our style to brag about industry domination when all we have is a PDF — but storytelling and projecting ambition are powerful tools to attract talent and capital. The perception of who's winning can be just as important as who's actually winning.
If we want to succeed in areas that require vision and risk taking, we need to develop a culture of celebrating those who aim unreasonably high, try, fail and try again in public.
Europe over-corrected after WWII
After being a dominant force in the world for centuries, Europeans today seem uncomfortable with embracing economic and geopolitical power. It’s not for nothing: Europe’s peaks of ambition and influence — the Portuguese in the 15th century, the Spanish in the 16th, the Dutch and French in the 17th, the British in the 18th and 19th and the Germans and Soviets in the 20th century — all came not only with great innovation and progress but also with horrific abuses of power. No country embodies this unease today as much as Germany, to the detriment of Europe and our allies.
If we don’t find new interpretations of European ambition and power that align with our modern values, we risk ceding our sovereignty and peace gradually, then suddenly to less squeamish countries.
Modern Europe is a one-of-a-kind experiment in collaboration between sovereign countries — and unsurprisingly, it’s proving to be more challenging to align interests than in large nation states. There are some things we can learn from countries like the U.S. or China, but for the most part, we will need custom-made solutions.
That is particularly true for trying to change culture across a web of countries. It requires a different kind of connective tissue than in one country where people share the same language, history and social norms. For all the obvious reasons, it won’t be the EU bureaucrats who will drive this cultural change and shape a more inspiring narrative of our future. It will be Europe’s builders and entrepreneurs.
Bringing Back the Grand Tour of Europe
One practical step we can take in the coming year to change the mood in Europe is to amplify the stories of Europe’s best entrepreneurs, business leaders and inventors and their ideas about the future — instead of continuing to build quietly.
They are scattered all over the continent, so you can only find out who they are and what they are building as a traveller. It’s time to bring the Grand Tour back:
The Grand Tour was a European cultural institution in the 17th to 19th century – a rite of passage for the young and wealthy from across the continent to complete their education. Many would travel along a common route from Paris to Rome, Florence and Venice, sometimes as far south as the excavations of Pompeii, Sicily and Greece or north towards Vienna, Dresden or Amsterdam to learn about the legacy of European antiquity and the Renaissance.
“I will bring them out of their study, and from amongst the dead, to converse with the living. We must now make them look abroad, raise them to a higher form, and teach them how to know the world; which to live in and not understand, is a shame and a disadvantage when one is come to a competent age … parents will do very well to send them into foreign parts.”
John Gailhard, English tutor and travel chaperone, from his book The Compleat Gentleman (1678)
Depending on their interests and the careers they were embarking on, they would customise their journey and seek out sights and scholars: those destined for the military would seek out battle sites and study fortifications and weaponry; the religious ones would visit clerics in Rome or the Netherlands and the aristocrats would visit courts to socialise and dabble in diplomacy.
Carl Spitzweg — English Tourists in the Campagna (1835). Image: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie
The trip would last for months or years, accompanied by a chaperone who would guide the tour. They returned home with new knowledge, crates full of books, artworks, artefacts and scientific instruments or learned new languages. This ongoing exchange of people and ideas shaped European culture, art and politics for centuries.
It was technology that eventually made this tradition obsolete in its original form: Thomas Cook’s railroad and steamship trips would democratise travel from the 19th century onwards and with it the practice of being carried over the Alps on a chair fortunately fell out of favour. But to this day, taking gap years after school to travel or participating in exchange programs during university is still a common part of European education.
This Time We’re Exploring the Future
History still has a lot to teach us, but to get a sense of where we’re heading, we need to meet the people behind the startups, companies and mega-projects that will change our collective paths into the future.
I can promise you that contrary to the meme, Europe is full of imaginative engineers, ambitious entrepreneurs and places of magical technology — most of which you just haven’t heard of.
When it comes to innovation in the physical world, no amount of video calls will make up for seeing the scale of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, standing 1,500 metres below ground in a mine in Kiruna or seeing robots at ETH Zurich. You have to travel.
So in the coming months, I will turn my otherwise quite erratic travel schedule into my own version of a Grand Tour to learn about the future that is being built across Europe. Each month, I will visit one European country to learn about its history and economy and to meet some of its most ambitious founders, inventors and business leaders.
I want to meet the people behind startups like Helsing or the Exploration Company, industrial leaders like ASML or INEOS and mega-projects like the Fehmarn-Belt tunnel or the Solidarity Transport Hub — and ask them about what they are building today and what they believe will become possible ten, twenty years from now.
Together with locals, I will publish deep dives on each country to provide context on its history and key industries, followed by a series of interviews and articles about the most interesting discoveries I make.
I will start with Norway, Poland and Spain — three countries I don’t know enough about. I chose them because each of them stands out as an outlier in one of the core foundations of Europe’s future prosperity:
🇳🇴 Norway is Europe’s only petrostate and will continue to play a key role in our future energy security, either as a producer of fossil fuels or by leveraging its enormous wealth and industrial experience for low carbon alternatives.
🇵🇱 Poland is leading NATO with its investment in defence — ramping it up further to 5% of GDP in 2025 — and as the Polish presidency of the EU Council has just begun, they will push for more investment in Europe’s security.
🇪🇸 Spain is growing its economy four times faster than the rest of the Eurozone at close to +3% GDP in 2024 and has done the impossible — building large transport infrastructure on time and on budget. We need to know what they are doing right.
I know I’ve only seen a fraction of what is happening across Europe so far, so I greatly appreciate your suggestions — please reach out
I hope some of you will join me either by meeting me wherever you are or by sharing what you’re discovering on your own travels.