A practical agenda for European sovereignty, investment and strategic capacity

September 21, 2026

Paolo Gentiloni’s Diventare una potenza, published by Rizzoli, is a short political book with a practical ambition: to ask what the European Union would need to change if it wants to remain capable of shaping its own future.

Written from the perspective of someone who has occupied both sides of the European political system, as Italian prime minister and European commissioner, the book is less a manifesto than a set of instructions for institutional change. Gentiloni starts from a simple observation: Europe has accumulated considerable economic, regulatory and social power, but has not built the political and strategic capacity to use it collectively.

His answer is not to abandon the European project in favour of national sovereignty, nor to imagine a United States of Europe detached from the realities of European history. Instead, he proposes what he calls a “federation of nation-states”, an institutional hybrid designed around the particularities of the continent.

The proposals are unusually concrete. Gentiloni calls for a major common defence programme, potentially involving Ukraine and the United Kingdom and financed through €300 billion of eurobonds. He proposes European energy sovereignty by 2040, a European tax on large multinational and digital companies whose revenues would feed the common budget, and a European unemployment insurance mechanism modelled on SURE. He also advocates an “autostrada umanitaria”, or humanitarian highway, to facilitate the legal arrival of five million migrants.

The institutional agenda is equally direct: a single person serving as both president of the European Council and president of the Commission, the abolition of the national veto, a European army and Treasury, and a European digital platform capable of providing an alternative to the dominant American and Chinese ecosystems.

What makes the book interesting is not that every proposal is immediately achievable. It is that Gentiloni treats European sovereignty as an engineering problem. The question is not simply whether Europe should become more autonomous, but which common instruments, financing mechanisms and institutional changes would make that autonomy possible.

This is particularly relevant in energy and defence. Europe cannot separate its social model from the infrastructure that sustains it, nor its economic competitiveness from its capacity to secure energy, technology and supply chains. Gentiloni's argument is therefore ultimately about investment and scale. The choice is not between a generous social Europe and a stronger strategic Europe. The more difficult question is how to generate the growth and common financial capacity that can support both.

The same logic runs through his discussion of defence. Increasing military expenditure is politically uncomfortable in societies built around the post-war welfare state. But, as Gentiloni argues, presenting social spending and defence spending as mutually exclusive choices misses the underlying fiscal challenge. The real task is to create the conditions for growth while deciding collectively which capabilities Europe needs.

The book's most useful contribution is perhaps this insistence on moving from European aspiration to European capacity. Europe already has many of the ingredients: a large single market, substantial industrial and technological capabilities, common regulation, financial resources and a population large enough to operate at global scale. What it lacks is sufficient coordination between these assets.

Gentiloni is also deliberately impatient with the political culture that treats deeper European integration as either inevitable or impossible. His target is not only the sovereigntist right. He also challenges the centre-left, whose commitment to European integration has, in his view, become increasingly cautious precisely when the strategic environment demands greater ambition.

That is the central message of Diventare una potenza: Europe does not necessarily need another declaration of principles. It needs institutions capable of converting existing European assets into collective power.

For readers interested in sustainability, energy, industrial policy, investment and the future of European competitiveness, this makes the book worth reading beyond its immediate political context. Its most interesting question is not whether Europe should become a power. It is what kind of power it can become, and what economic and institutional architecture would be required to get there.

CPM