Reindustrialising Europe

How Europe rebuilds its industrial base in the age of AI

From steel plants to gigafactories, the real story of whether Europe can rebuild its industrial base — or is just talking about it.

Series 2 · 11 Episodes · Audience: Industrial strategists, EU policy makers, manufacturing executives, economic analysts

Episodes

• Ep. 1: Taranto's steel problem is Europe's industrial mirror — What one steel plant reveals about the contradictions of European industrial policy (18 min read)
• Ep. 2: Northvolt promised Europe its own batteries. Then reality hit. — The Swedish gigafactory that was supposed to break Asia's grip on lithium-ion. What went right, what went wrong, and what it teaches about scaling manufacturing in Europe. (26 min read)
• Ep. 3: Germany's industrial model is cracking. What replaces it? — The Mittelstand, cheap Russian gas, and export-driven growth — three pillars under stress simultaneously (21 min read)
• Ep. 4: TSMC in Dresden is not the same as European chip sovereignty — The difference between hosting foreign production and owning the capability. What the European Chips Act actually buys, and what it does not. (22 min read)
• Ep. 5: Energy prices are an industrial policy whether governments admit it or not — A factory in Portugal pays a different electricity price than one in France, which pays differently than one in Germany. These differences decide where things get built. (20 min read)
• Ep. 6: Europe cannot mine its way to strategic autonomy — Lithium in Portugal, rare earths in Sweden, cobalt from the DRC — the collision between industrial need, environmental resistance, and geopolitical dependency (22 min read)
• Ep. 7: Fincantieri builds the most complex ships on earth. Why can it not deliver them on time? — The Italian shipbuilder has the engineering. It has the orders. It struggles with the same procurement and workforce constraints that plague European industrial scale-up across sectors. (22 min read)
• Ep. 8: Poland is quietly becoming a European industrial power — Nearshoring, EU structural funds, a young workforce — Poland is attracting the production capacity that Western Europe is losing (18 min read)
• Ep. 9: What would a European DARPA actually look like? — The US model that produced the internet, GPS, and mRNA vaccines. Europe keeps talking about replicating it. What would it take, and what is actually stopping it? (20 min read)
• Ep. 10: What this series got right, what it missed, and what happens next — A retrospective on ten episodes of European reindustrialisation — the picture that emerges, the tensions that remain unresolved, and the questions we still cannot answer (22 min read)
• Ep. 11: What Reindustrialisation Actually Requires — Ten episodes, one question — and a note from the author (16 min read)