As Europe’s leaders gather this week for the Munich Security Conference, the question hanging over everything is no longer just about defence budgets or troop numbers. It’s about something deeper: what does Europe stand for, and who will tell that story?
A year ago, JD Vance stunned the Munich audience by telling Europe its greatest threat came from within. Since then, the Trump White House has tipped the world order upside down. Tariffs, the Venezuela raid, a push to annex Greenland, a Ukraine peace process tilted towards Moscow. The BBC’s Frank Gardner describes the US National Security Strategy as “a shocking wake-up call for Europe,” one that explicitly promotes “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Trump may turn out to be the great European accelerator. The humiliations and provocations of the past year have done more to crystallise a sense of European identity than decades of institutional messaging ever managed. The vision and direction still need to be determined. But that Europe’s future must be self-determined is now beyond serious doubt. Without deeper unity and integration, individual European countries risk sliding into irrelevance.
Dave Keating‘s The Owned Continent makes the uncomfortable case that Europe’s dependence on America goes far beyond military budgets. It’s cultural, psychological, embedded in daily life. I discussed this and much more in our latest episode of the ZNL podcast.
Alberto Alemanno has been arguing from the other direction: the EU is far stronger than its own leaders seem to believe. What’s missing isn’t capability. It’s a story that connects that capability to how Europeans actually feel right now.
And this is the key to shifting momentum. Policy papers won’t do it. Summit conclusions won’t do it. The story of an independent Europe needs voices that can bridge the gap between a jaded policy elite and a young public that is ready to hear something different.
As Alemanno himself said at EUinfluencer 2025, it’s not the job of institutions to communicate about the European Union. MEPs should be doing it, but most remain, as he put it, “pretty faceless.”
So who can tell this story?
At this year’s EUinfluencer event, Sevim Aktas brought together a new generation of Instagram creators focused on EU politics and helped shape their approach to digital storytelling. People like Chiara Gerngrosz, who said she would “bleed blue and yellow.” Annelies Coessens, who started speaking publicly about gender equality and feminism in the EU policy space without a big following or a communications playbook, proving that influence is measured in connection, not numbers. And Klaudia Woźniak, who pointed to a shift already happening inside institutions themselves: official accounts are increasingly fronted by younger voices, faces and personalities. Not politicians. Not statements. Young people who are allowed to be funny, goofy and experiment. Who delivers the message matters as much as the message itself.
They don’t explain the EU in policy language. They make it emotional. They make it theirs. And they reach audiences that no press release ever will.
What makes this moment interesting is that the worlds are starting to overlap. Sevim herself has since joined the Cabinet of Commissioner Micallef, working on culture, youth and sport. The people who understand how to connect with young audiences are moving into positions where they can help shape the story from the inside too.
We’ve tracked this shift through the EUinfluencer ranking for nearly a decade: influence moving steadily from institutions to individuals. What’s new is the stakes. If Europe is going to tell its own story on its own terms, it will be a new generation of communicators who do it. People who can connect the big geopolitical questions to something that feels real, personal, and worth fighting for.
Europe is debating strategic autonomy in defence, energy, and technology. It’s time to take narrative autonomy just as seriously. Because communication isn’t a nice-to-have in this conversation. It’s the connective tissue that makes everything else possible.
This article was originally posted by Philip Weiss on Linkedin
