Will Europe Become the New Third World?

This working paper examines whether Europe’s growing technological, industrial and strategic dependencies could eventually translate into material impoverishment. It argues that the European Union does not primarily suffer from a lack of knowledge, scientific capacity or even public resources, but from a persistent difficulty in converting them into industrial scale, strategic ownership and market power at the speed required by contemporary technological competition. The paper analyses the post-Draghi competitiveness agenda, NextGenerationEU and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, energy costs, artificial intelligence, venture capital, research commercialisation, cumulative advantage in research funding, CERN’s technology-transfer ecosystem, the space economy, semiconductor dependence and the coordination between state and market. It also includes counter-evidence highlighting areas in which Europe remains globally competitive, including pharmaceuticals, industrial automation, patents and selected research fields. The expressions “new Third World” and “technological Middle Ages” are used as deliberately provocative analytical frames rather than formal economic classifications. The paper’s central hypothesis is that, if current structural trends persist, technological dependence may progressively erode productivity, fiscal capacity, strategic autonomy and ultimately living standards.