Europe has spent years living inside a permanent state of adjustment. It absorbed the financial crisis. It navigated migration. It weathered Brexit, a pandemic, and the return of war to the continent.

This is no small feat.

Yet a continent cannot survive indefinitely without knowing where it is going. It cannot flourish, and it cannot decide its own future, by adjustment alone.

Today some of Europe’s deepest assumptions no longer hold. The unquestioned transatlantic bond, the long opening of the world, the sense that history bent gently in our favor: these certainties are trembling and some have already given way.

The real difficulty is not so much that the world is changing. It is that we no longer know who we want to become in response.

Europe has grown skilled at survival.

In the last quarter of a century Europe has focused in adapting to what was happening. What it still lacks today is a way of thinking about what comes after the mass societal transformation taking place as we speak. Technology, demography and security are mutating the life of Europeans in a way that people have not seen in decades, and as a continent we are not prepared to address this complexity: we lack the tools and the vision to do it.

This is because we have gradually lost the ability of thinking about the future. Once seen optimistically as the solution to all problems, now Europe perceives the future as a scarier version of the present and tries to avoid thinking of it. But a continent cannot survive if it cannot think of itself in a different dimension as is the one we are entering in the next decades.

This is the reason Europe’s Futures Initiative was founded. We are a non-profit, pan-European startup in the world of ideas. Our task is to help Europe think forward and turn that thinking into decisions.

Our work sits where Europe struggles most: in the space between analysis and action, between elite debate and public language.

Our ambition is to build that missing layer by taking Europe’s future seriously. We want to look toward the next decades and ask, with the urgency the question deserves, who we are becoming as a continent: what we must keep and what we must build.

This is a wager.

That Europe’s best days lie ahead, if it dares to act with confidence.
That democracy can remain legitimate and effective, if it delivers under pressure.
That Europe can hold its sovereignty in an age of technologies built to erode it, if it treats sovereignty, once more, as a question of power.
That Europe can defend its model against its rivals, if it relearns how power works.
That a continent of many priorities can still build one that is shared.

Membership is constitutional.

Most of the founding members of the Europe’s Future Initiative were already asking these questions long before they found one another. In EFI they found something their individual work could not give them: a community of equals who care about Europe as they do, and the chance to think further, and count for more, together than apart. 

EFI was founded by the alumni of the Europe’s Futures Fellowship, a community that has worked on the future of the continent since 2018. More than 40 members from over 20 countries have chosen to build this living network of individuals united in common commitment and purpose. Theirs and ours is a  commitment to democracy and to the belief that Europe’s days are still ahead. 

Membership forms the constitutional core of EFI: it shapes its governance and contributes to its growth.

The Europe’s Futures Initiative finds its home in Vienna, a place at the heart of wider Europe whose history has shaped and engaged the entire continent and where Europe’s past and future continue to engage in dialogue.