The twin shocks of Trump's economic coercion and Putin's military aggression have delivered Europeans an uncomfortable revelation: they are significantly less free than they believed. The platforms Europeans use, the energy they consume, the podcasts they listen to, the weapons their armies carry, and the infrastructure that organises everyday life, too often, depend on someone else's goodwill or strategic interest. A people that cannot meaningfully shape the systems it relies on is not fully free.

This reckoning has done what decades of EU institution-building never managed: it has made European integration feel not just important, but existential, a matter of democratic survival, to ordinary citizens. More than that, it has given Europeans something rarer: the courage to imagine and claim their Europe as a political space that defines their own chances in life. A historic opportunity. And yet European leaders remain politically paralysed, unable or unwilling to translate this public urgency into concrete action to reduce Europe's dependence on US military, energy and economic shelter.

This lecture argues that the gap between public demand for pan-European action and the failure of national political responses is the defining political opportunity for at least two generations of Europeans whose lives have been defined as much by the EU as by their national capitals. This moment may offer a blueprint for what seizing it would require.

About Alberto Alemanno

Alberto Alemanno is the Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law at HEC Paris and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe. One of Europe's leading voices on the democratisation of the EU, his scholarship centres on how law and policy can shift power, countering social, economic, and political inequalities within European societies and beyond. Alemanno has authored more than fifty scientific articles and several books, including Nudge and the Law: A European Perspective and the widely translated Lobbying for Change: Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society, a theoretical and practical guide empowering ordinary citizens to engage with policymaking at every level. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Risk Regulation, published by Cambridge University Press.

Beyond academia, he has built durable civic infrastructure, including legal clinics, policy and advocacy labs, and pro bono services, to match his research convictions. As founder of The Good Lobby, he works to equalise access to political power for civil society. He has translated scholarship directly into policy, advising on the EU Tobacco Products Directive introducing of plain packaging across EU member states, drafting the EU Whistleblower Directive, designing the first independent EU Ethics Body, and proposing a dedicated EU Commissioner for Future Generations. His advocacy spans dozens of transnational campaigns, from the European Citizens' Initiatives One Single Tariff, Stop Glyphosate, Voters without Borders to Save Your Right, Save Your Flight, alongside strategic litigation including the pending MEDEL case and End the Cage Age v Commission aimed at improving access to EU Courts. In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, his Ukraine Corporate Index - credited by the Financial Times and Forbes - applied sustained pressure on multinationals to reassess their presence in the Russian market.