GoKawiil“Europe will always choose science,” Ursula von der Leyen announced in May 2025 in a landmark speech that kicked off a European Union-wide campaign to attract scientists fleeing the chaotic US research environment. The president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch in Brussels, didn’t explicitly mention US President Donald Trump, but she didn’t have to. Trump’s administration had in the preceding months frozen grant funding, pulled the United States from global scientific organizations and begun firing federal research staff.
Europe’s leaders hope to fill the vacuum left by chaos in the United States — and position the region as an alternative research superpower. The EU has allocated nearly €900 million (US$1 billion) to its Choose Europe initiative, which aims to make the region a magnet for researchers around the world, and individual European countries have launched some 100 complementary schemes.
Europe must seize the moment to lead on free and open science
A renewed focus on innovation means that the EU’s main pan-national research-funding programme, Horizon Europe, could receive its largest-ever increase for the next seven-year cycle, which will run from 2028 to 2034, taking the fund’s value up to €175 billion. The programme’s reach also looks set to grow. Many science powers elsewhere in the world — including Japan, India and Australia — are joining parts of it, or are considering doing so, raising the prospect of a global research network anchored in Europe.
But as a whole, research and development (R&D) funding in Europe still languishes behind that in China and the United States. The region has found it hard to translate its academic research prowess into innovation and economic benefits. The past decade has been marked by the shocks of the United Kingdom’s 2016 decision to leave the EU and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That ongoing war, combined with weaker US defence support, has prompted increases in funding for military research.
It is early days, but Europe’s efforts to step up in global scientific leadership have so far been “more psychological than a visible positive upswing”, says Helga Nowotny, a social scientist in Zurich, Switzerland, who was previously the president of the European Research Council (ERC) — a part of Horizon Europe that focuses on researcher-led science.
The US retreat is an opportunity for Europe, says Anna Rubartelli, a cell biologist at San Martino Hospital’s scientific institute in Genoa, Italy. “The reality is that we are like a Sleeping Beauty and maybe it’s time to wake up.”
State of the Union
On some measures, it would be a case of both waking up and catching up. US science policymakers have described the country as being in “a two-nation race” with China. Both countries each spend more than US$1 trillion a year on public and private research funding, whereas Europe invests just $750 billion (see ‘Science spending’).
Source: OECD/UNESCO
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