Bridging the Imagination Gap: What Europe Needs After von der Leyen’s State of the Union
At this year’s State of the Union, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered a familiar but urgent proposition: Europe must become stronger, more independent, and better equipped to navigate an increasingly turbulent world.
But beneath the big geopolitical ambition sits a more fundamental question — one that cannot be answered through policy alone: Do Europeans still feel that Europe is theirs?
“We have to win back the hearts of Europeans. Create this feeling of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Belonging to a common home.” The political ambition is clear. The challenge is making it tangible.
Our European Sentiment Compass 2026 Future Nostalgia: Europe’s unfinished song points to a growing “imagination gap”: many Europeans express a desire for a stronger, more united Europe, while struggling to picture what that Europe would actually look like — or how to get there.
That gap matters. A political project cannot thrive on ambition alone. It needs citizens who can see themselves in its future. And that means looking beyond the machinery of Brussels.
“In Europe, we form our own opinions based on access to reliable, independent information. This is how we debate, compromise and find solutions. This openness is our biggest strength.” If openness is one of Europe’s defining strengths, the next question is where Europeans actually experience it.
Libraries offer one answer.
They are more than repositories of books and information. They are public spaces where people can meet, learn, disagree and participate — often across the political, social and generational divides that increasingly shape European societies.
That is central to the European Cultural Foundation’s work with libraries, which starts from a simple premise: democracy is sustained not only by institutions, but by people in places where they encounter one another, freely exchange views and debate perspectives.
Europe’s democratic resilience is built locally before it is defended geopolitically. “A battle of narratives is seeking to weaken the confidence in Europe, to paralyse our democracies.”
The battle is also taking place somewhere else: in the digital spaces where Europeans increasingly fight each other’s views rather than nourish thinking and learning and build a an engaging and open public space. Technology has transformed how people participate in public life — but it has also made misinformation, polarisation and manipulation easier to spread. The response cannot simply be to regulate the digital sphere from above. Europeans also need the skills and confidence to navigate it themselves.
Through our work on digital citizenship, we support digital literacy, critical thinking and democratic participation, with a particular focus on helping young people become active shapers of digital spaces rather than passive consumers of them.
Because if Europe wants citizens to believe in its democratic future, it needs to give them a role in building it.
“This is a Europe that stands up for each other”. Solidarity is easy to invoke in a speech. Its harder test is whether people can witness it in practice.
The war in Ukraine has made that distinction painfully concrete. The EU continues to show solidarity with Ukraine – fully aware that the fight in Ukraine is a European fight – but national elections ahead will test Europe’s capacity to deliver on this front as well. At ECF, our support for cultural actors in Ukraine and of cross-border networks of cooperation show how solidarity can move from political principle to lived reality — through sustained relationships, cultural exchange and practical cooperation across borders.
That kind of solidarity may not make the front pages every day. But it is part of what makes the European project real to the people who live in it.
Which brings us back to the imagination gap.
“We need our most brilliant minds (…). Together, they will produce a vision that can inspire the new generation of Europeans and recapture the European imagination.”
This may be the most consequential challenge of all. Europe does not only need to defend what it has built. It needs to create a compelling picture of what comes next and give confidence that the European Dream is possible.
Culture has a role to play here — not as an afterthought, or a decorative element of a bureaucratic infrastructure, but as the fundament of the greatest political project of our times. And a pivotal space where societies work out what they value, what they fear and what they want to become.
Through the Cultural Deal for Europe and the What Can Culture Do? conversations across Europe, cultural organisations and citizens have already been exploring what that contribution could look like, and what is needed to make our shared Europe happen.
The question now is whether the just announced Congress of Europe (in reference to The Hague Congress of 1948 which provided the means to heighten public opinion for European unity) will build on these conversations — and whether cultural actors will have more than a symbolic place at the table.
If Europe is serious about recapturing its imagination, it will need more than another institutional initiative. It will need spaces — online and offline — where Europeans can imagine their future together, test ideas, encounter disagreement and turn possibility into action.
The imagination gap will not be closed in Brussels alone.
It will be closed when Europeans will strongly feel that European sentiment, and the EU be able to evidence that it stands by its values and interests, and make Europe feel less like an abstract political project and more like a common home.
Here at the European Cultural Foundation and our partners in the philanthropic sector stand ready to help make those spaces possible.