I hold an unfashionable view: I do not think the United States is running a vendetta against the European continent. It pushes its interests, in a dull, repetitive way, mixing finance, technology, standards, and infrastructure. In Europe we sometimes turn economics into morality. Then we mix up loud politics (headlines, fights) with the slow machinery of capital.
That slip has a cost we underestimate because it does not show up on the evening chart: opportunity cost. While we argue as if the topic were good versus evil, a portfolio elsewhere decides whether to put millions into a site, a production line, a subsea cable, a lab. “Resistance” can make sense if you build capacity behind it: a supply chain, a school pipeline, a power grid, a debt market that actually funds industry. When it is mostly a slogan without deliverables, you do not resist other people’s calendars for long.
I deliberately separate three things we constantly mix. Trade (who pays what at the border). Foreign direct investment (who plants a factory or buys a company). And the technology layer (who hosts sensitive workloads, who sets a de facto standard). You can fight on one and stay dependent on another. You can “win” a political debate on AI and keep importing the same software stack because nobody arbitrated power and permits in time. That is the detail that worries me more than the catchphrase of the week.
Where it hurts us is not only the culture clash over AI or data centers. It is more banal: we rerun the same national file, stack friction, and meanwhile other regions chain permits, plants, and timelines. I am not saying they are smarter. I am saying they move while we talk.
Washington is not a cartoon villain
When people say America wants a weak Europe, it feels like a comic strip. A slowly poorer Europe is not a strategic trophy for anyone across the Atlantic; it is mostly a smaller market, a weaker partner, and a harder neighborhood to stabilize from outside. Big American firms win when they can sell, invest, and lay cable in a rich, stable place. That is cash flow, not affection.
That does not erase real friction. Standards, cloud concentration, extraterritorial rules, who captures the tech premium: those are power fights, not a morality play with a good guy. My point is more pedestrian: if you treat everything as a vendetta, you miss the engineering. You spend your time explaining emotion instead of locking a schedule.
Interdependence runs the other way too. A Europe that drifts or keeps underperforming eventually shows up in risk premia, insurance, siting decisions, and the mood of funds that finance energy and infrastructure. The United States does not need to love Brussels to prefer a predictable neighborhood. It needs a solvent customer and a place where its own chains can lean.
The trap for us is to think that blocking everything in the name of sovereignty, without an industrial counterpart, equals wisdom. Often we protect slowness. Slowness does not protect you when value chains shift.
Numbers, without a slogan t-shirt
I will not invent an AI-sounding percentage about who owns France. The picture depends on whether you look at listed equity, debt, private equity, funds booked elsewhere. What still holds is that flows are cosmopolitan and North American counterparties matter a lot, including where the headquarters is French.
When you read AMF supervision work, you do not get a ready-made “73 percent” t-shirt. You mostly get a method: residence, how ownership chains split with free float, how a large block can sit inside vehicles domiciled elsewhere. That is what makes Twitter punchlines stupid: they mix controlling shareholders, financial shareholders, creditors, and sometimes a European fund whose LPs are everywhere. The ECB’s financial-integration framing is not a romance; it is plumbing for how the system connects and where it sticks.
For a growing SME or mid-cap, the link to the ground is liquidity and depth: can you raise fast, exit cleanly, find industrial buyers rather than flighty money that leaves at the first political wobble? If Europe becomes the continent where every industrial project becomes a national legal case study, you do not only punish American giants. You scare patient capital, the kind that finances what you claim you want to protect.
If Europe turns into permanent veto mode on growth without a concrete industrial answer, it does not only punish American giants. It shoots itself in the foot: capital hesitates, projects leave, plants do not get built here.
What I mean by lining up the interfaces
I am not asking to erase cultures or merge Rome into one spreadsheet. I mean what hurts a CEO: rules that contradict, timelines that slip, tax logic that changes at every border, power that is not there when you need it for a plant or a data center. Scaling in Europe still means rebuilding your administrative brain at each frontier. A competitor with a large homogeneous home market gets a lead without being more brilliant. That is mechanics.
The single market, on paper, is a beautiful promise. On the ground there are still blind spots: services, public procurement, non-tariff barriers, judicial delays, local interpretations that do not match. When you try to replicate a model in three countries, you fight not only competitors but three administrations with different risk tolerance, three political clocks, three compensation logics if a project fails. Saying so is not “anti-European”; it is what you learn when you sign the guarantees.
I will say it without a slide deck: either we pool enough to be credible on energy and time-to-commission, or we keep commentating while someone else takes the margin. Pooling, for me, is not an institutional slogan. It is the ability to say “here are the rules, here is the timeline, here is the risk owner” at the level where capital decides. While that message stays fuzzy, capital stays cautious.
Data centers, AI, chips: one equation on the ground
In real life these debates meet. You need electrons, serious industrial sites, trained people, banks that can read industrial risk, and a decision that survives contact with reality. When every project becomes a national exception without a continental frame, you stack systemic delay. Then you import the machine or the service, and sovereignty lives mostly in the press release.
The chain is banal but merciless. Start with the grid: can the network hold if you add tens of MW? Do the municipality, metro, region, and state share the same time horizon? Can your industrial client amortize a tool over ten years while the public debate shifts every six months? Semiconductors and AI are not magic: they follow the same law as wallpaper, meaning space, cash, and calendar.
When you miss that calendar, you miss a layer: compute, storage, the operational tool, maintenance. You keep producing, but you bake in dependence. Then you treat it like a scandal when it is mostly the result of a queue nobody wanted to cut.
Public debt and room for maneuver (without playing oracle)
I will not drop an “exact” debt figure here; it would age badly and it is not the point. The point is the mechanism. When growth is weak and structural charges rise, every industrial arbitrage becomes more expensive politically. You hesitate to subsidize a sector, hesitate to hold an energy price, hesitate to underwrite risk on a large project. That hesitation shows up in files: banks more skittish, insurers pricier, international partners asking for an “Europe premium.”
It is not a cultural fate; it is a balance-sheet constraint. Until you name it, people keep talking about “political will” as if it could replace a TWh or a building permit. Will works when it becomes capacity: decide, compensate cleanly, allow a failure without paralyzing the next one.
What Europe already has and sometimes burns for no good reason
We have serious strengths: engineers, high-end subcontracting, industrial niches, norms that matter globally, brands, medicine and chemistry that hold, SMEs that can do things others cannot. The problem is not a lack of brainpower. The problem is conversion: we leave these forces in silos because scaling demands a common frame we always push to the next cycle.
I keep seeing the same story. An excellent German company does not scale into France with the same fluidity, and vice versa, for boring reasons: tax, perceived labor law, processing time, banking culture. I am not saying we should uniformize people’s lives; I am saying we should stop paying a hidden tax every time we move a pallet, an engineer, or a contract.
If we stopped the theater, what would I do first
No PowerPoint checklist. Say what I would do with my hands on the lever, knowing politics is what it is. First, I would treat energy as a production variable, not an anthology debate. Not “pro or anti nuclear” on Facebook: available GW, predictable industrial prices, connection timelines that do not depend on the local election calendar.
Second, I would put order into the chain for large industrial projects: one counterparty, one procedure, a decision that can be revised but not endlessly. The project sponsor’s nightmare is not regulation itself; it is stacked uncertainty.
Third, I would treat SME and mid-cap finance as infrastructure. Not only grants: market depth, buyers, clear rules when things break. An economy that fears orderly failure and clean redistribution often blocks ex ante anything that looks like risk.
Finally, I would talk less about “digital sovereignty” and more about deployment: where are the halls, who trains, who maintains, who pays the power. The rest is communication.
Closing
Europe has cards: engineers, know-how, brands, networks. That does not turn into external power while it stays fragmented and slow to coordinate. The rest of the world will not wait for us to agree on whether we are modern under the same conditions. Markets mark immobilism without waiting for your press release.
If we stay on the status quo, I see a realistic path: we keep importing critical layers, we keep having heroic national debates, and we keep paying a risk premium on anything that touches concrete and cable. If we push selective integration, not wild, focused on energy, time, and market depth, we can at least make the continent credible for projects that today leave elsewhere without us even noticing.
What I would watch over two or three years is not tweet counts. It is average connection delays, industrial GW actually commissioned, large projects that reach financing without permanent political restructuring, and where Europe sits in value chains (upstream versus subordinated logistics). Boring indicators. They track the real world.
Sources if you want to dig without fantasizing:
- AMF — amf-france.org
- ECB (financial integration framing) — FinLAN network
- European Commission — single market performance: single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
