[crop_rotation]

It would be an achievement as the EU is not an isolated planet. For the prosperity of EU it needs to compete in external markets. If EU has no big companies but US/China do EU will be less and less competitive in global markets. Certain things require big companies to be possible with efficiency (e.g you can't have Airbus as a collection of small companies and certainly would not have been competitive with Boeing).

[tossandthrow]

Funny you mention airbus and Boeing.

Anyhow, you are right, and that is the infamous downwards spiral and lack of sovereignty to the market.

Either we see increased protectionism, increased inequality, or we pull our selves together and make a plain global playing field (eg. Through minimum taxation schemes).

[crop_rotation]

Sadly Europe is not at a point where it can utilize increased protectionism to save itself. Europe has far too few natural resources and needs a far higher standard of living, necessitating importing a lot of stuff. Unless it can maintain technological edge in some products, Europe is doomed to lose it's current standard of living.

[soco]

Maybe you know this already but I reckon rather not: Europe is not "one" state to apply all that things you mention. Europe is a loosely connected network of wildly diverging national and partisan interests, with resources very unevenly distributed, so I definitely cannot see an "European" solution - heck I cannot even expect one. So, nice chat, but not gonna happen - or at least not in this way.

[Gravityloss]

It's not so direct though. There is a huge technological factor in it. France didn't have coal. It developed tremendous nuclear capacity. From trade perspective Finland was basically an island separated by impassable ice for some part of the year. Finland developed ice breakers. Europe developed communication satellites but USA wouldn't launch them as they competed with US satellites. So Europe developed Ariane launchers.

Europe has a huge technological base and has the capability to affect its own destiny.

[holoduke]

Europe is too expensive. Your rocket example is a prime example.

[Gravityloss]

Ariane is expensive now. But that wasn't the case for decades. Everything wasn't static in the eighties or nineties and won't be from here to eternity either. American rockets were very expensive as well.

As we speak, companies like Rocket Factory Augsburg are developing cheap access to orbit.