One of Europe’s greatest achievements is increasingly being treated as a security problem. Across the Schengen area, governments are reintroducing temporary border controls in response to migration pressures, security concerns and political demands. The Stratfor analysis warns that these measures may look temporary, but their economic consequences could become much harder to reverse.

France likes to present itself as Europe’s most sovereign major power – a nuclear state with global military reach, an independent foreign policy tradition and ambitions to lead Europe in an increasingly unstable world. The RUSI analysis argues that this image masks a more uncomfortable reality: France’s power rests on a web of dependencies that could become serious vulnerabilities during a major crisis.

A growing political rebellion is spreading across Europe, and mainstream parties are struggling to stop it. In this ECFR podcast discussion, Mark Leonard and British MP Liam Byrne argue that the rise of populist movements is not a temporary protest wave but the result of deeper failures that have been building for years.

Europe’s migration debate is dominated by border fences, asylum numbers and political battles. The DIIS study argues that one of the worst aspects of the migration system remains largely ignored: the industrial-scale sexual violence suffered by migrants travelling along African-European routes.

Europe’s biggest economies are no longer moving in the same direction. As energy costs rise again, heavy industry weakens and defence spending explodes, Germany, France and Italy are increasingly pursuing their own survival strategies while Brussels struggles to hold together a coherent economic plan.

Europe is staring at the return of a nightmare it thought it had escaped. Fresh economic data and analyst warnings suggest the Iran conflict is dragging the continent towards stagflation – the toxic mix of rising prices, weak growth and collapsing confidence that haunted Western economies in the 1970s.

After Covid, the Ukraine war and now the Iran conflict, a grim conclusion is taking hold inside Europe’s strategic circles: the continent keeps discovering its vulnerabilities only after the crisis begins. The HCSS column argues that Europe must urgently build strategic stockpiles – from fertiliser and energy to semiconductors – because global supply chains are becoming weapons in geopolitical conflicts.