Lisbon, May 10, 2026 (Lusa) – Europe remains the only continent capable of saving the democratic order and must build its own technology, innovation economist and European Union (EU) advisor Francesca Bria told Lusa in an interview.

Bria, a UCL (University College London) professor and UN and EU advisor listed by Forbes as one of the 50 most influential women in technology, spoke at this year's APDC Digital Business Congress in Lisbon. In her interview, she addressed the importance of European digital sovereignty and the need to reduce technological dependence to avoid blackmail.

"First of all, I think we have to be very clear that when we talk about digital sovereignty, we also talk about economic sovereignty and political sovereignty," she said.

She stated that the issue involves competitiveness, security, and the defence of democracy. "And it's very important to make this connection because not many people, when we talk about digital, understand that the critical infrastructures of our times are digital, and they are controlled, and they can be used against you, or they can become a very powerful tool to develop," she said.

Europe currently faces a significant "competitiveness gap", as mentioned in Mario Draghi's report, particularly in innovation. According to Bria, this means the continent has stopped investing in technology and scientific innovation and has ceased producing essential technologies.

She highlighted what she calls the "digital stack", describing it as "a new supply chain architecture of modern power and wealth."

"Who controls the choke points of the stack controls the rules of geopolitics today. So we have critical raw materials and energy. We have the chips; the semiconductors are basically in everything we use in our modern economy," she says.

She listed the cloud as the operating system of the digital economy, alongside networks, connectivity, satellites, Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, and the data produced every second.

"Like now that we're talking, everything we do in our lives produces data. And this data gets aggregated by a few US companies that control 70% of our cloud," she said. This situation raises the critical question of who creates value and who extracts it.

Europe currently imports 80% of its digital technologies, creating a dependency that leaves the continent vulnerable to blackmail in the current geopolitical climate, particularly regarding trade wars.

Bria warned that any trade dispute with the US could lead to pressure, as Europe relies on these critical technologies to keep hospitals, schools, power grids, and infrastructure functioning.

She believes Europe can still recognise this as the most important political issue of the era.

"If you do not control the digital infrastructure today, you cannot control your future, you are not free, you are not independent, you cannot decide about your future, and you cannot protect your democracy. So it's Europe's fundamental challenge," she said.

Europe must build its own technology because technology now represents power, Bria said, while highlighting the importance of talent.

She advocated for investing in top students and engineers, enabling young people to create startups, and encouraging more women to pursue science and engineering.

The most important issue for Europe is ensuring that its best talent wants to help build next-generation European technology, she said.

Regarding Europe's delay in this area, she said that internal problems persist, noting that the European project remains incomplete, a point also addressed in Enrico Letta's report.

"We have to complete the digital single market. Europe has some parts which are more European, but then we have national states which are always fighting with each other. And we need more unity to complete this project," she said.

Europe still lacks a capital markets union, yet this type of technology "needs a lot of investment, structural long-term investment", she noted that Europe has "trusted international partners too much."

Data represents the raw material of the digital economy. "It is our gold, our collective power [...] the data that we produce, the information. And now we have been giving all this data to American companies," she said.

Furthermore, AI systems "are going to govern everything we do. And they are using all our data without the real permission of those who produce this data". Consequently, Europe must recover its digital and data sovereignty.

"If we are together, we are still in time because we have the talent, good universities, we have some industrial capacity [...] clean energy, but too high a cost of energy. So we have to do something about that," she said.

She concluded by highlighting that Europe has democracy and currently stands as "the only continent that can save the democratic order."

ALU/RYOL // ADB.

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