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At the ILA Berlin Air Show on June 11, eight German aerospace and defence companies signed a strategic positioning paper committing to build a sixth-generation fighter jet without France, under the banner “Team Gen 6”. Airbus called it “an existing step for European sovereignty”. Spanish industry is already lining up behind the initiative.
Three days earlier, France and Germany had officially abandoned the joint fighter jet program at the heart of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the €100-billion initiative that was supposed to embody that very sovereignty. Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, called the outcome a policy failure for Europe: “Industrial interests have been prioritised over Europe’s security and defence interests.”
The question raised by the collapse of the program is the following one: can better management of coopetition by European institutions prevent sovereignty-driven projects from collapsing?
The FCAS collapse is a call to better understand the success factors of a strategic concept that sits at the heart of Europe’s strategic autonomy: “coopetition”, the idea that European competitors can and must cooperate to build sovereign capabilities that none of them can build alone. FCAS was not facing difficulties because the idea was fundamentally flawed. Rather, it struggled because coopetition, when it involves competing firms, competing states, and contested interests over critical technologies, is structurally prone to collapse without the governance architecture needed to sustain it.
When Aerospace competitors become necessary partners
The logic is straightforward, even if the practice is not. National champions, the historical model for European industrial sovereignty, are increasingly unable to sustain alone the scale of investment that frontier technologies demand. No single firm, and no single state, can credibly mobilise sufficient skills and resources to produce and operate a next-generation combat aircraft, a a competitive semiconductor ecosystem, or European AI infrastructure.
The response, across defence, space, energy, and critical technologies, has been to combine forces, including with direct competitors. This is what researchers call coopetition: strategies that are simultaneously cooperative and competitive. Partners pool costs and share knowledge to create value together, while each tries to capture as much of that value as possible individually.
The European satellite navigation system Galileo is an early instructive case. Launched in 2001 with a budget of €13 billion, it brought together firms, including Airbus Defence and Space, Thales Alenia Space, and OHB, that compete in the same markets. Pooling their R&D capacities allowed Europe to build a system capable of rivalling GPS. No single actor could have done it alone. The coopetition, carefully orchestrated by the European Space Agency as a neutral third party, worked (Rouyre et al., 2024).
FCAS has proved far harder to manage. The contrast is worth dwelling on.
The sovereignty twist
Coopetition always generates tensions (Tidström, 2014). Companies that cooperate to create value also compete to appropriate it. This produces a structural paradox: each partner must share knowledge to advance the joint project, while simultaneously protecting the knowledge it does not want to transfer. The line between the two is rarely obvious, and incentives to cross it are constant.
When the stakes are commercial, managing this is hard. When national sovereignty is involved, it becomes acute.
In the FCAS case, Dassault and Airbus Defence and Space are not merely industrial competitors, they are the industrial embodiments of French and German defence interests respectively.
Dassault’s Rafale and Airbus’ Eurofighter compete directly on the global arms market. Their collaboration in FCAS thus runs directly against their competitive interests, and neither partner can afford to be the one that transfers more than it receives.
This is not irrationality. It reflects what research literature calls asymmetric learning: the risk that, in any cooperative arrangement, one partner learns more from the other than it contributes in return. In standard industrial coopetition, this is a governance problem. In coopetition involving rivals from different states, however, it takes on a harder edge: strengthening your partner’s knowledge base may, in certain scenarios, amount to strengthening the capabilities of your competitor’s country.
The Galileo project itself offers a cautionary tale here. In 2003, China joined the program, investing €230 million and taking a substantial share of the work. “China will help Galileo to become the major world infrastructure for the growing market for location services”, commented Loyola de Palacio, the late Spanish former energy and transport commissioner.
Over time, Chinese actors absorbed enough of the technology to develop BeiDou, their own independent gps-equivalent positioning system, which they have since used to interfere with Galileo signals. The coopetitive project had, inadvertently, helped subsidise a rival. The lesson is not that cooperation is naive; it is that knowledge flows must be governed.
Spain, or the third partner’s dilemma
Spain joined FCAS in 2019 as its third partner. For Madrid, the program was never only about an aircraft: it was a vehicle for upgrading an entire defence-industrial ecosystem. When the Franco-German relationship turned into a learning race and then hit deadlock, Spain faced the classic dilemma of the junior coopetition partner: stay loyal to a stalling project, or hedge.
It hedged. Before the divorce was final, Madrid had approved funding for a joint Airbus–Indra study on a future national combat air system. Within three days of the official cancellation, Spanish industry had aligned itself with the German-led Team Gen 6, while Robles publicly lamented that industrial interests had trumped European security.
Belgium, an observer to the program, had reached the same conclusion months earlier: its defence minister declared the project “dead” as early as February.
Spain’s behaviour is not opportunism. It is the rational response to a coopetitive project without credible governance: when partners cannot trust the rules of the game, each discounts the project’s future and invests in alternatives. The trouble is that hedging accelerates the very fragmentation it is meant to insure against.
Governance determines if coopetition lives or dies
Neither of the Galileo or FCAS cases argues against coopetition. Rather, they argue for coopetition management to be taken seriously.
Why was Galileo successful, and why are we struggling to bring the FCAS program to completion? What FCAS has lacked is credible governance architecture: mechanisms that allow partners to cooperate intensively while limiting undesired knowledge transfers, distributing costs and gains in ways that each partner considers fair, and resolving disputes before they become public threats to quit.
Research on coopetition identifies several such mechanisms: structural separation between collaborative and competitive activities, formal protocols governing what is shared and what is ring-fenced and, perhaps most importantly, a neutral orchestrator capable of holding the process together when bilateral tensions escalate. The European Space Agency (ESA) played this role in Galileo. In FCAS, the three partner states have struggled to find an equivalent partly because the governance question is also a sovereignty question: who leads, and on whose terms?
The same dynamic is at work, though less visibly, across Europe’s other strategic technology bets.
Semiconductor supply chains require collaboration across firms that compete fiercely in end markets. AI infrastructure demands data-sharing between actors with strong incentives to hoard. Quantum computing development in Europe involves national research ecosystems that are as jealous of their advances as they are dependent on each other. In each case, coopetition is necessary; in each case, European governance needed to sustain it remains underdeveloped.
The uncomfortable conclusion
In sum, in the space industry the European states accepted the coordination role of the ESA. This coordination by ESA explains the success of the Galileo project. (Rouyre et al., 2024). In the defence industry, the European Defense Agency (EDA) does not play this role mainly because the European states do not want to delegate their defence capabilities to an European entity. The other European institutions such as the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR), European Defence Fund (EDF) do not play this role neither. Coopetitive projects are launched by European companies pushed by their governments without a strong coordinating mechanism at European level.
This is a pity for European sovereignty!
Once again, ESA’s strong coordination explains the success of Galileo and the lack of European coordination explains the failure of the FCAS program.
The will of each European state to shape its own defence industry creates tensions. However, no one national state in Europe can support alone the costs and the risks of highly innovative products required by the present and future battlefields and no-one has the innovation capabilities and the market scale to go alone.
Furthermore, the aerospace and the defence industries are becoming increasingly intertwined. As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, the defence capabilities are increasingly based on connection with satellites.
This change in warfare does seem to be taken into account by European states. Paradoxically, the success of European cooperation in the aerospace industry finally provides the tools for assuming European defence by European states. These states build their defence capabilities in space on ESA success whereas they refuse to delegate their traditional defence capabilities to EDA.
The rules of war have changed but the mindset of European leadership seems not to be able to change fast enough to follow! It is now evident that cooperation between competitors requires institutional infrastructure that Europe is yet to build, mechanisms to govern knowledge sharing, equitable distribution of gains, and the ability to absorb the tensions that are inherent to any relationship that is simultaneously collaborative and adversarial.
The risk is not that Europe will refuse to cooperate. Europe will keep launching coopetitive projects while lacking the governance capacity to see them through.
The FCAS totally collapsed and it is not simply a program failure. It signals that European industrial sovereignty remains, for now, more ambition than architecture.
Learning to manage coopetition at scale, across firms, across states, across sectors, may be one of the defining organisational challenges of European strategic autonomy. It deserves more attention than it currently receives.
This article draws on the chapter “Coopétition et souveraineté”, by Chloé Zanardi and Frédéric Le Roy, in Fragmentation, hypermondialisation, souveraineté. Pour une refondation de la stratégie d’entreprise, edited by Stéphanie Dameron, Boris Bernabé and Xavier Desmaison, (Éditions EMS, 2025).
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