Towards a more resilient, competitive and sustainable Europe

The EESC:

• wishes with this opinion to put forward its views on the European Commission communication adopted in connection with the Granada summit, so that its position can be taken into account during preparations for the next European legislative mandate;
• is extremely concerned by how much ground has been lost to the US and China in strategic sectors. This further undermines the EU's independence, its sovereignty and our model of society;
• considers that securing Europe’s energy transition means strengthening Europe’s control of the value chains of the all the decarbonisation technologies, ensuring a real decarbonisation by electrification, ensuring coherency between national energy and climate plans and European targets and developing valued job for European workers;
• argues that Europe’s digital independence will be based on a number of elements: its ability to develop supercomputers, to store data within the EU, to encourage the development of real industrial players and to develop digital skills;
• is of the opinion that Europe's space industry will need to overcome numerous challenges in terms of sustainability and sovereignty. Fragmentation, duplication and the small size of our core institutional markets are weakening the EU at a time when the funding gap with the US and China is widening and when the EU is facing giant private actors who are optimising their internal supply chains, and
• estimates that in the coming years, Europe's defence industry will not only need to provide Member States and their armed forces with high-quality defence equipment and capabilities that are adapted to the new strategic environment, but also continued military assistance to Ukraine and other partners.