In a century defined by what some now call a “polycrisis”—climate shocks, war on the continent’s borders, digital disruption—Europe is not short on challenges. It is short on strategy. Political leadership across the Union has become reactive, short-termist, and painfully electoral in its outlook. Meanwhile, the quiet engine rooms of policy thinking—Europe’s think tanks—remain underpowered and underutilized.
This is not a lament for a lack of ideas. Europe has no shortage of excellent institutions producing rigorous analysis: CEPS and Bruegel in Brussels, SWP and ECFR in Berlin, EUISS in Paris, Ifri in France. What it lacks is something else—translation capacity. The ability to turn insight into institutional action.
Compare that with the United States. Once upon a time, things looked different. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt surrounded himself with a Brain Trust—economists, legal scholars, and policy thinkers from Columbia University. They didn’t write white papers. They wrote policy. Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle weren’t content to interpret the Great Depression; they engineered the New Deal. The result was not just a recovery, but a redesign of the American state.
Even today, as Politico recently detailed, the American right has spent the past decade building an extensive, ideologically coherent infrastructure of influence: the Heritage Foundation, the America First Policy Institute, and the 900-page Project 2025 blueprint. These organizations are not spectators. They are political actors. Their papers become executive orders. Their personnel staff future administrations. Their mission is to steer—not just study—policy.
Now, Europe does not need a clone of this American model, nor would its institutional architecture support one. But there is a critical lesson to be learned: in the 21st century, ideas without power are decoration.
Could Europe foster its own 21st-century Brain Trust? The answer is yes—but not without change on three fronts.
First, proximity to power. Many European think tanks still operate as policy salons—clever, well-funded, but too detached. What’s needed are institutional pathways: secondments into ministries, rotating fellowships inside EU bodies, co-designed policy labs with national governments. Some of this already happens—EUISS, for example, has shaped the EU’s Strategic Compass—but it remains the exception, not the rule.
Second, structural funding reform. Most think tanks survive on project-based grants tied to narrow deliverables and political timetables. This discourages long-term, systemic thinking. It also exposes them to pressure: tweak this paragraph, delay that publication. If Europe wants institutions that can help navigate transitions—climate, technological, demographic—it must fund them to think beyond quarterly cycles. Endowments, public-private partnerships, and less prescriptive funding are part of the answer.
Third, and most crucially, democratic legitimacy. In a time of suspicion toward elites, think tanks must earn public trust. That means transparency—about who funds them, how they work, and what boundaries exist between research and lobbying. Otherwise, even their best work will be viewed as suspect, or worse, irrelevant.
None of this requires politicizing these institutions. Quite the opposite. It means taking them seriously as strategic assets—equipping democratic governments with the intellectual infrastructure to govern complex societies. Independent doesn’t mean apolitical; it means capable of offering inconvenient truths.
Are success stories to build on?
Yes—and the best example came in the 1990s.
When Jacques Delors convened a group of senior economists and central bankers to lay the groundwork for Economic and Monetary Union, they weren’t drafting white papers for debate. They were building the future. The result wasn’t a policy brief—it was the euro.
We’ve seen smaller echoes since. Bruegel’s work on digital markets informed the EU’s Digital Services Act. ECFR’s sanctions analysis helped shape European responses to Russia. Ifri has influenced French defence debates. But these are scattered triumphs. What Europe needs now is a system—a pipeline from research to policy, not a library of unread PDFs.
The next five years may prove decisive. A new EU legislative cycle is underway. Green transition deadlines are approaching. AI and digital markets are slipping into regulatory grey zones. In short: the moment to act is now.
Roosevelt understood that in times of crisis, ideas alone are not enough. They need structure. They need courage. And they need to be inside the building—not waiting in the lobby.
The 1930s gave us the New Deal. The 2030s will demand something equally bold. The question is whether Europe’s thinkers are content to host conferences or ready to help shape history.
*Grigoris Patsakis is a project manager at ELIAMEP’s Turkey program
This opinion piece has been selected as part of To Vima International Edition’s NextGen Corner, an opinion platform spotlighting original voices from the emerging generation on the issues shaping our time.
