Going electro requires at the very least three things: a sound system that doesn't blow a fuse, a hell of a playlist, and a guest list that will put the house on fire. So far, Brussels has … a save-the-date.

Electrification in Europe is vital for climate, energy and economic security, and essential as an infrastructural ingredient to the future of innovation. Without it, Europe shows up dressed out of fashion, in the wrong kind of car to a house on actual fire. That's the electro case made.

So it's not the ambition that's the issue. The roadmap is. And look, the next few paragraphs are the designated driver of this essay. Not glamorous. But the only parties you don't cringe about on Monday are the ones somebody stayed sober enough to plan.

So let's look at the way our good old Union needs to shape up in time for 2040. First, a quick and dirty historical background to get the lay of the land. The EU was built on the back of coal and steel. Fossil fuels and heavy industry are the source code of the European project, the material substrate upon which the political superstructure was erected. That may feel like a distant memory in post-industrial Europe, but it still shapes our energy infrastructure, our security posture, and our trade rules.

The EU also emerged within a larger international environment in which liberal markets, democracy and peace were the ingredients of a larger formula to try and solve international anarchy, protectionism and nationalism. Open markets would generate prosperity; prosperity would generate democratic stability; democratic stability would generate peace. Each was supposed to pull the others along.

After 1945, and emphatically after 1989, the working theory was that deepening economic interdependence between states would raise the cost of war high enough to make it irrational, while creating shared incentives for growth. Peace and democracy were treated as the dividends of an economically engineered system, not as standalone political achievements requiring their own defence. Political engineers of that era knew something that we have forgotten since: peace is not something one declares; it is something one builds economically, politically, legally and via deterrence. It is an architecture - not a sentiment. Polities need to have the means to build peace and security architectures, and also to maintain them in a world that never stays still.

"Energy transition, coupled with a digital transition, is in fact a power transition."

After WWII, the US provided those means to Europe through the build up of Pax Americana. The United States was the hegemon whose military reach, financial centrality, technological dominance, and cultural pull made the whole arrangement viable: the underwriter of last resort, with both carrots and sticks. For Europe specifically, the US was two things at once: the security provider that made disarmament affordable, and the economic guarantor that built the foundations of the single market that we eventually came to think of as our own geopolitical asset in the EU. The single market, the euro, enlargement, and the entire post-1989 European project were built on the assumption that this underwriting would continue indefinitely. We forgot the lessons of our own history: alliances shift when the economic formulas sustaining a given Pax change metabolism, forcing strategic reorientation. A Pax does not announce its expiration.  But if you pay attention, you can often read it in the modern equivalent of tea leaves: the direction and concentration of energy, material and resource supply chains. We’ll come back to that. 

What underpinned the whole liberal peace “order” (better called: ever-recalibrating equilibration exercise)? 

Energy concentration and dispatchable distribution: coal, oil and then gas. Materials too. They were the obvious, oft-forgot backbone of a system that grew steadily more complex, more international, and faster, eventually culminating in just-in-time globalization. A system in which finance moved just as fast as energy, re-allocating productivity where labour was comparatively cheaper, safeguards weaker, and economies of scale bigger and therefore more profitable. A system that quietly turned states into transactional negotiators with markets, and arbiters of budgets rather than full sovereigns in their own right. 

What we called globalisation was, viewed from one angle, the slow conversion of political sovereignty into debt and fiscal management - the substitution of what we collectively decide to be for what the markets will allow us to afford and borrow. Seen from another angle, it became a highly mechanised entity in which interdependencies grew so dense they became opaque, making post-industrial societies blind to their vulnerabilities. Societies whose political, carbon-free, climate- and inflation-fate sat outside of their border, and often outside of their influence. What these societies failed to see is that capitalist globalisation, once presented as the economic force that would lead almost organically to peace, had instead concentrated wealth in hands that escaped democratic representation, and overwritten the very notion of power distributed through economic interdependence. What emerged was the opposite: concentration, chokepoint control, and the eventual weaponisation of what had been sold to us as mutual reliance. 

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Our Europe sits squarely in that camp. It grew from a region where power had been architecturally neutralized into an economic hegemon whose footprint deflated the moment globalization turned into a multi-dimensional chessboard worthy of the Hunger Games. Europe's plan had been to ride globalisation toward decarbonisation, and to rise again on the back of it. Decarbonization, in President Von der Leyen’s own words, was going to be our “man on the moon” moment.  It was not a bad plan - for a continent that defined itself as the world's largest single market, and that still believed Brussels called the regulatory shots, using the gravitational pull of its demand to drive change across global markets.The problem is that the EU failed to understand two things in time. The first is that climate policy is industrial policy - industrial policy embedded into regeneration at scale, and couched in geo-strategic navigation systems adapted for our age. Industrial policy does not just need a market. It needs deliberate intervention and patient investments into sectors that underpin everything in the economy but run at a loss - like mining, refining, repairing, recycling, grid hardware, nuclear. The unglamorous base of the pyramid. Changing the energy system is not about shifting commodity gears; it is about changing the base layer of an entire metabolic order that underpins an economy. And the catch - the real catch - is that industrial policy of this kind runs directly against some of the founding principles of the single market. It tugs at the path dependencies the EU’s source code created.

"Weaponization, war, conflict, dual use, economic hollowing out – these aren't interferences in the energy transition. They are the energy transition in motion."

The second thing Europe missed is that an energy transition, coupled with a digital transition, is in fact a power transition. 

China is a rising hegemon. The first rung of the ladder it successfully built to get there was verticalizing mineral supply chains from extraction to processing to assembly, innovation and export. This verticalization – across rare earths, graphite, copper, manganese, all ingredients for decarbonization and digital technologies – produced highly efficient techno-industrial systems geared for overcapacity, price point competitiveness and self-reinforcing innovation at industrial scale, with the world as a demand stage. The best way to picture this system is an octopus. Each arm is a semi-autonomous and intelligent branch of a larger whole steadily turning into the powerhouse for the 4th industrial revolution. One increasingly able to compete with the US, and potentially out-pace it in terms of technological innovation and economic performance before long. One able, when it chooses, to weaponize mineral supply chains vital to any post-industrial and industrial society worldwide. One whose energy, technological, market and innovation power causes such imbalance in a system originally designed for interdependencies that we are now back into an existential security dilemma at a global level. To cut a long story short: the energy transition is the vessel through which the old peace and security architectures of the post war order and its fossil foundations are being dismantled at their base. The transition may be a necessary component for a climate-safer, more peaceful world, but getting there means walking the valley of death. Weaponization, war, conflict, dual use technologies, economic hollowing out – these aren't interferences in the energy transition. They are the energy transition in motion.

In this valley, Europe is stuck downstream between a rising electro-state (China) and its old hegemonic ally (the US) which is now pursuing fossil dominance as a way to retain its power model, and bankroll its technological dominance. Since the war in Ukraine – a war that historians will, I’m sure, look back upon as ground zero for transition warfare – Europe has grown more dependent on the US for fossil-based energy, particularly LNG. It is militarily and technologically dependent on its old ally too. An ally that is increasingly becoming unpredictable and willing to weaponise interdependencies even against friends because of its existential contest against China. Europe, in other words, is dependent on a friend turning foe.

On the other side, it is dependent on China for export-led growth stimulation and for the imported clean tech without which decarbonisation cannot be delivered at speed or at price. But there is a cost to importing clean tech from China. Chinese overcapacity and price competitiveness mean that Europe is now at real risk of comprehensive industrial hollowing-out. Tens of thousands of jobs are on the line: exactly the kind of dislocation the alt-right and far-left have proven adept at converting into electoral momentum. 

"Becoming the Electro Union is not just about electrifying Europe. It is about birthing a new Union project on the back of a different energy-economic metabolic system."

Clean tech can also be dual use: it is critical infrastructure with a kill switch embedded inside it. If Europe runs its energy system on hardware governed by Chinese software, it exposes itself to energy neutralisation the moment political tensions escalate. The mechanism cuts two ways. Beijing might activate the switch. Or Europe, fearing it might, may pre-emptively appease - neutering itself geopolitically without a single command line being executed.

In this dual asymmetric dependency, and with a Russian neighbour taking active part in destabilization and systems shifts, Europe is among the regions most exposed to inflationary pressures, energy price shocks, supply chain disruptions. These shocks will keep coming, because they are part of the security dilemma engulfing the buffers that once contained them. Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Greenland are not separate stories. They are the faultlines of a shifting geo-strategic terrain. And the repercussions land directly on Europe's industrial and technological competitiveness. Energy prices are too high. Debt-to-GDP ratios are climbing. The fiscal and industrial bases on which any response must be built are eroding precisely as the demands on them intensify.

The bind for Europe is existential, and cruel. Electrification is vital on climate on geopolitical and socio-economic grounds. But electrifying through Chinese imports risks industrial atrophy, which could in turn trigger the collapse of the EU's economic – and therefore political – coherence. It would accelerate ostracization by Washington, and deepen military or security exposure to Moscow. Meanwhile, sourcing energy in the interim pushes the EU further into precisely the dependencies the US is ready to monetize and instrumentalize, locking the continent into long-term fossil reliance, compound shocks over time, and the slow drip of dependency manipulation from across the Atlantic.

The picture is sobering enough. And yet, national politics inside member states remain polarized and divided over questions disconnected from these macro-factors, which are rarely discussed domestically. Constituencies understandably discuss issues that feel closer to them: welfare, pension, inflation, unemployment, cost of living. What they seldom see is that European states are tributaries of a global and regional system whose underlying logic is collapsing. Our fate depends on our willingness to look at the European plight with extreme clarity: identifying strengths and possibilities inside the trade-offs, and forging the right partnerships for an age in which planetary conditions will themselves become a source of disruption at scales never experienced before, interfering with economic systems in ways our institutions were never designed to absorb. Europe will have to shed old skins in order to face what's next. We can no longer preserve and maintain a system that belongs to an age gone by. We are therefore on a path to transform. Becoming the Electro Union is not just about electrifying Europe. It is about birthing a new Union project on the back of a different energy-economic metabolism, and, beneath that, a different conception of what sovereignty, security, and solidarity now mean. Peace requires a different architecture, and we have yet to invent it. 

Does this sound daunting? Good. What this prospect requires is not optimism, that emotional currency too many have been spending without understanding optimism is the result of energy spent in the right places, not the starting condition for spending it. What it requires is discernment, inventiveness, risk appetite, courage and mobilisation. 

The generations of Europeans active on the front lines of innovation, industry, science, research, diplomacy and war will write a European chapter as consequential as the one written when the coal and steel community first became an idea with a material metabolism.

Where to start? That's the work of the next piece.

Part 2 of this essay, published on the 26th of May, sets out the architecture.
Three layers, twelve concrete moves, and the people who need to make each one happen.

Olivia Lazard is Founder of Transition Intelligence, Fellow at the Berggruen Institute, and Director of Peace in Design Consulting.