Cleaner, Better, more Resilient [antikvár]

Foreword by the editors Europe is facing enormous political, economic and technological challenges. The day of the invasion of Ukraine, 24 February 2022, will go down in European history as a turning point. Europe has not been free of armed conflict since 1945, but this is the first time that one state has invaded another in violation of international law. Geopolitically, however, the tensions between the USA and China will continue to increase. The conflict regarding political, economic, but also technological leadership will continue. Economic and technological dependencies threaten to grow, and this can significantly affect Europe's political weight and sovereignty. Europe's technological sovereignty is already lacking in some sectors. The degree of dependence on foreign countries is enormous. Resilience has thus become the keyword of the hour. The Ukraine crisis has fundamentally and definitively demonstrated the vulnerability of the European economic model (and especially the German export model) and revealed the dependence on individual countries for raw materials as well as for some intermediate products (e.g. computer chips). In recent decades, Europe has placed its full trust in globalisation and rule-based free world trade, where raw materials and intermediate products could be imported cheaply at any time. This phase of globalisation is long gone - at the latest now. At the same time, in the 2020s, Europe's economy is facing probably the most profound, comprehensive and rapid change since the beginning of industrialisation. Digitalisation, decarbonisation, demographics and the strengthening of the resilience of modem societies will be the main drivers. In the next 10 years and beyond, enormous efforts will be needed to manage the political, ecological and economic transformation. Economic-technological sovereignty and strength will become an increasingly important factor - not to mention the significance for growth and competitiveness. But it is precisely in many technological areas of this transformation that Europe's states have considerable weaknesses. In key future fields such as cloud technology, digital infrastructures and services, AI, quantum computing, chip production, software development, battery cell technology, etc