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 euros, 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........

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