Under a European Union grant, Blanca Garcés, senior research fellow at the Barcelona Center for International Affairs (CIDOB), has prepared an extensive report about the living and working conditions of agricultural migrant workers in four European countries (Italy, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands) and one African country (Morocco).

Europe is talking war, but preparing peace. This report strips away the speeches and summit slogans to reveal a defence posture that looks busy yet delivers almost nothing at speed. While threats multiply on Europe’s borders, the EU’s military readiness remains slow, fragmented and painfully unfit for a real crisis.

Europe keeps talking about standing on its own feet, but this analysis shows how shaky the ground really is. Military autonomy sounds bold, yet the hard decisions keep being postponed. With war back on the continent and US politics unpredictable, Europe faces a brutal question it still refuses to answer: what actually comes first when independence costs real money and power?

Europe’s far right is watching Washington, and it likes what it sees. This study argues that a second Trump era would not just shake the US system but turbocharge radical right movements across Europe. The shock is not ideological inspiration alone. It is the signal that disruption works and that liberal guardrails can be bent or ignored.

Germany has embarked on a large-scale rearmament program. Under the program, the country’s military expenses may already exceed EUR 108 billion in 2026 and reach a record EUR 150 billion by 2029. As Valeria Campari writes in the online journal of the Italian Institute of International Affairs (Istituto Affari Internazionali), the German parliament has approved partial resumption of conscription.

France still talks like a global player, but this analysis shows how domestic chaos is hollowing out its international role. Political fragmentation, protest politics and permanent campaigning are dragging foreign policy down to size. Paris wants influence abroad while barely holding authority at home.

A report entitled The ECB’s bid to strengthen the euro’s global role by Spyros Andreopoulos and Sander Tordoir, former European Central Bank employees, was published on the website of the Centre for European Reform on 20 February 2026.

An analytical brief entitled Beijing’s next bet: Why Europeans should care about biosolutions by Janka Oertel, director of the Asia Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), records that Europe is losing ground in the strategic biosolutions sector. With China seeking a global leadership in this field, urgent steps and protectionism are indispensable if Europe is to retain its own leadership.

The analysis takes stock of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s first hundred days and finds a government eager to signal strength but constrained by the same limits that trapped its predecessors. Rhetoric has sharpened, priorities look clearer, and ambition is back in Berlin. The problem is delivery.

Europe risks losing its long-term influence in the Sahel. That will happen if the Old World countries fail to understand the driving forces of rising anticolonialism and to adapt their approaches in Africa to the new realities.