Europe at Davos 2026: Higher stakes and an outward embrace

“We're under a lot of pressure.”

Sometimes the obvious merits a mention, and the Belgian prime minister delivered. A year ago, the mood hanging over Europe-related discussions at the Annual Meeting in Davos was moribund. This year, these conversations adopted a more urgent but constructive tone – thanks to heightened trans-Atlantic stakes.

Much of the media coverage as the meeting commenced focused on worsened trans-Atlantic tensions over a very big island in the Arctic. In the halls of the Davos Congress Centre and beyond, that was layered over long-simmering anxieties about an ongoing conflict on the region’s eastern flank in Ukraine, and existential questions about its economic prospects.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sought to set the tone. “Europe needs an urgency mindset,” she said during a special address. It must also, she emphasized, open itself up further to the rest of the world.

In particular, to those parts that have not made clear that commerce going forward will involve near-constant uncertainty and threatened tariffs. “Nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” Von der Leyen said. “Hoping for things to revert soon will not fix the structural dependencies we have.”

Addressing those dependencies means branching out. Von der Leyen flagged the EU’s biggest-ever trade deal signed recently with a large bloc of South American countries (since challenged by EU lawmakers), and described an even bigger ambition: the weekend after Davos, she planned to travel to India to make headway on the “mother of all (trade) deals,” potentially creating a single market of 2 billion people that would account for nearly a quarter of global GDP.

Von der Leyen offered up a tag line: “Europe will always choose the world, and the world is ready to choose Europe.”

On the sidelines of Davos, an entrepreneur who chose to build her startup in Europe seconded the sense of urgency.

Hélène Huby, the founder and CEO of The Exploration Company, which is trying to develop Europe’s first reusable spa+ce vehicle, noted that a substantial share of the most valuable companies in the world didn’t exist a few decades ago. Where will Europe’s economy be decades from now?

“This is very simple,” she said. “If we're not able to build these kinds of companies, we’ll be just nowhere in the next 50 years.”

Huby thinks Europe has at least one advantage. Collaborating across borders is ingrained in the region’s collective economy, she said, tying together a variety of wealth levels and cultures. “This is how we work.”

That can be a lure for talent.

“They are not joining because of the work-life balance, or whatever,” Huby said of her employees who join from abroad. Many, she said, are attracted by an opportunity to work with colleagues and governments (necessary for space-exploration efforts) from multiple countries.

That sense of harmony is hard-earned in a place with such a long history of internal conflict. “We're not talking about 1,000, we're talking about 2,000 years we've been fighting,” Huby said, while nodding to more recent decades of (mostly) peace in the region.

Another potential advantage for Europe is its “incredibly strong” industrial-manufacturing base, according to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who made an appearance on-stage at Davos. The US may have led the “era of software,” Huang said, but with a vast fusion of artificial intelligence and machines on the horizon in the form of "physical AI," that base means “robotics is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the European nations.”

A once-in-a-generation risk was also on the Davos agenda for Europe.

As questions about the fate of Greenland and the souring of an alliance with the US that’s held for 76 years intensified, leaders from the region dealt with them in front of the cameras, in real time.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for the continent to make a bolder and more unified effort to defend itself. “We should not degrade ourselves to secondary roles,” he said from the stage at Davos. “We should not accept that Europe is just a salad of small and middle powers seasoned with enemies.”

Asked during a Davos session whether Europe could really defend itself without the aid of the US, Finnish President Alexander Stubb didn’t hesitate: “Unequivocally, yes,” he replied.

Even here, there were signals that the region remained open to seeking cooperation. “We have to do more,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said of European contributions to its own defence, during the same session. “We have to protect the Arctic.”

When an audience member asked whether Europeans should feel safe amid all of the recent talk about a regional defence-spending surge, Rutte offered a version of “yes”: “If you want to prevent war, prepare for war.”

There was no avoiding the region’s pacifist roots, however.

The EU is a superpower, though not in terms of defence, European Investment Bank President Nadia Calviño said from the stage at Davos.

After all, she said, in reference to the post-war origins of the region’s single market, “the European Union project is a project for peace.”