European policymakers have invested heavily in the doctrine of strategic autonomy, producing regulatory instruments of considerable sophistication. The Union's growing regulatory coherence, however, conceals a deepening productive incoherence: the material infrastructure of the systems it governs remains fragmented, externally owned, and legally exposed to the jurisdiction of non-European actors. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on EU geoeconomics and technological sovereignty by introducing the governance-production gap as a theoretically grounded and empirically operationalizable concept for analyzing this structural asymmetry. It proposes a six-domain scoring framework across four measurable dimensions, namely ownership concentration, jurisdictional exposure, supply chain dependency, and EU production share, that converts the concept from evocative to falsifiable, while acknowledging the framework's categorical limitations explicitly. The paper also develops distributed strategic specialization as a governance approach with explicit decision architecture, and provides a comparative analysis of the US, Chinese, and EU industrial coordination models. Four principal critiques of strategic industrial coordination are engaged directly: liberal institutionalist, innovation-economics, public choice, and subsidiarity objections. A dedicated limitations section and methodological appendix are included. Drawing on peer-reviewed literature on the EU's geoeconomic turn (Bauerle Danzman and Meunier, 2024; Broeders et al., 2023; Farrell and Newman, 2019) and primary institutional sources including the European Court of Auditors Special Report 12/2025, the paper argues that closing the governance-production gap is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for any credible European claim to technological sovereignty.
Polyvios Damianakis (2026) studied this question.