We live in a complex world, rich with data and insights, where finding our way is becoming increasingly challenging. As Herbert Simon wrote back in the 1950s, ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’. And when there’s a dearth of attention, knowing where to look becomes an uphill battle.

Nowhere is this truer than in the burgeoning world of AI. New policies and standards are emerging every day. Large corporations update their models, while startups secure funding to drive innovation. Scientific collaboration spans across continents, researchers tap into software and data swaths to achieve new breakthroughs, all while business leaders form alliances and politicians ponder their next moves. All this in a frantic effort to ride the wave of the most powerful general-purpose technology of the past few decades.

For businesses, policymakers and investors, understanding the AI revolution requires improved skills in locating, processing and analysing data to detect patterns and forecast trends.

And even if they do find the data, understanding what it means often requires guidance, analysis and easy access to technical and non-technical explanations. After all, knowing where we are is a key prerequisite for understanding where we’re going.

To bridge this knowledge gap, CEPS has created a large-scale data platform called AI World. It’s a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all things AI, from insights on market developments, and leading companies and locations, to emerging applications and techniques.

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COP29 left many disappointed, seen by many as a choice between failure and disaster. Fair criticism but the Paris Agreement is still delivering as it was designed to do – namely a bottom-up, consensus-driven framework.

While COP29 was mainly seen as a stepping stone to COP30, when updated national climate plans are expected to be presented, the bar was set high this year for hammering out a landmark climate finance deal. However, COP outcomes often reflect the lowest common denominator; some proposals are inevitably too modest for some and too ambitious for others.

This means success or failure is rarely a clear-cut binary. While these two weeks of COPs always capture the global spotlight, they’re merely steps in an incremental, consensus-driven process. As the European Commissioner for Climate aptly put it: ‘It is less than what we would have liked, but better than we feared’.

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The European Parliament (EP) hearings for the new Commissioners are now over. After some last-minute drama and a little delay, the EP has greenlit all candidates – for the first time in 20 years.

In theory, the confirmation hearings are a great instrument for scrutinising the incoming Commissioners. Such a process can be healthy, especially for a complex polity like the EU (i.e. often accused of being untransparent and unaccountable). In practice, however, it’s compromised by party-political tit-for-tat and structural issues around how it’s organised. Below are my five main takeaways from the last three weeks.

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The Free World that we knew has been transformed overnight and now we in the EU must deal with the world as it is. That the United States has decisively chosen to be led by a man who is a convicted felon, who lies far more often than he tells the truth and who tried to steal the 2020 election by violent means – these might be issues for America and for Americans to now deal with.

That the US has chosen to be led by a man who is enamoured with authoritarian rulers, who sees no merit in promoting liberal democratic values worldwide, who places no great value on America’s allies and who is prone to protectionist tariffs and trade wars – these are issues for us in the EU to now deal with.

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Sustaining the current progress towards a Capital Markets Union (CMU) requires both strong political commitment and high prioritisation. While integration is often cited as a key objective, the more fundamental issue for EU capital markets is their limited depth rather than integration alone. Unlike more market-based financial systems, the EU’s financial system relies heavily on banks, where deposits are liquid and nominal in value. This creates a mismatch when it comes to financing long-term, illiquid investments typical of capital markets.

Within the EU, there is a significant and positive correlation between institutional savings and the robustness of capital markets in individual countries. For example, in the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, where institutional savings are high – especially in pension funds and life insurance companies – capital markets tend to be more advanced. This is partly due to the prevalence of pre-funded pension systems in contrast to the pay-as-you-go pension systems dominant in other EU nations. Importantly, pre-funded pensions not only bolster capital markets but also improve fiscal sustainability by reducing dependency on current revenues to fund retirement benefits.

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While in some EU Member States, there is still a firewall against the far right, at the European level, cooperation between conservatives and the far right is taking place without much fuss. This is already apparent in the way the hearings of the designated Commissioners are being organised in the European Parliament, starting on 4 November. The process of critical questioning is becoming increasingly party-politicised. The largest political faction, the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), has advantages in the process. What’s more, it seems ready to work with the far right.

This is dangerous because it increases the risk that party-political considerations will overshadow what this procedure is actually about, which is to check whether candidates are suitable for influential Commissioner posts. That could compromise Parliament’s role in oversight.

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On 26 October, Georgians went to the polls in a critical parliamentary election that President Salome Zourabichvili described as a referendum on the country’s European future. It is a future that Georgians have fervently supported through countless rallies and protests in recent years against the pro-Kremlin drift of the current ruling party, Georgian Dream (GD).

This election, the first conducted under a fully proportional system, raised hopes of a multi-party government. Yet, instead of marking a turning point, GD claimed a sweeping 54 % of the vote, securing 89 out of 150 seats in parliament, thus clinging onto majority control for the fourth consecutive term since 2012.

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Tackling Europe’s economic decline, preparing and adapting for a new wave of enlargement and defending Europe’s geopolitical position… the new European Commission will definitely need to deliver. The past five years have shown that it can prepare and react when it needs to, responding on the spot to multiple crises. But the path ahead will be steep.

The economic challenges are undoubtedly enormous. Mario Draghi’s recent report outlined them clearly. There’s doubt over Europe’s ability to create wealth. It doesn’t invest or innovate enough, it doesn’t spend enough on R&D and it lacks high-skilled labour. Europe also needs to prepare for a rapidly ageing population and invest much more in defence.

Europe’s productivity gap with the US is somewhere between 12 %-30 %, depending on the measure used. And as the Letta Report also laid out well, the EU is just not enough of a single market – it’s too fragmented in finance and digital services, and energy is far too expensive.

There have undoubtedly been many challenging moments for the EU. Jean-Claude Juncker spoke about the ‘last chance’ Commission more than a decade ago. Competitiveness was already a major concern at the turn of the millennium – think back to the 2000 Lisbon Declaration and Germany’s then-sorry state in 2000-03 as the ‘sick man’ of Europe.

Yet the EU has demonstrated that it can react to unexpected events. Apart from the green and digital transition, the Commission spearheaded the EU response to Covid-19, to the energy crisis and to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The EU adopted the Sure programme and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) to prevent an economic meltdown. It unanimously adopted 14 packages of sanctions against Russia and agreed in June 2022 to grant candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova, with accession negotiations starting exactly two years later.

What’s problematic now is the extreme right’s increased size in the European Parliament (EP) and many Member States. Compared to 15 years ago, the ‘centrist’ parties’ (EPP, S&D, Renew and the Greens) share of EP seats have declined from about 85 to 65 %. The extreme right parties have all adopted populist policies to win voters’ favour, be it with anti-immigration (or just purely racist) posturing, protectionist policies and/or irresponsible fiscal measures.

Such policies will certainly not improve Europe’s competitiveness – especially when there’s still, even after Letta and Draghi, no real consensus on what competitiveness actually is. And thus, this is why the new Commission’s use of ‘competitiveness’ as a possible guiding mantra for the next five years is fraught with difficulties.

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