One future, four starting points - what citizens’ stories reveal about Europe in 2040

A fairer society. Healthier communities. Clean energy. Technology that serves people. Peace, cooperation and a sense that no one is left behind.

This is the future described by thousands of people across Europe through Our Futures, an open platform inviting citizens to write short stories about the Europe they would like to live in. Across 3,927 stories from Northern, Western, Eastern and Southern Europe, a striking pattern emerges: citizens are not divided over where Europe should go. They are divided by how far away that future feels. 

Same destination, different starting points 

The regional comparison does not reveal four competing visions of Europe. Instead, it reveals four different relationships with the same vision. 

• Northern Europe often reads as if elements of the desired future are already within reach. Stories tend to focus on maintaining and improving systems that people see as broadly functional: trusted institutions, accessible public services and strong social foundations. 

• In Western Europe, the future is more often framed as a process of redesign. Contributors imagine reformed institutions, more participatory democracy and new ways of organising social and economic life. 

• Eastern European stories place particular emphasis on the foundations of trust: tackling corruption, strengthening the rule of law and ensuring that institutions work fairly and transparently. These are not presented as isolated governance concerns, but as conditions for progress in every other area. 

• In Southern Europe, contributors often write from a stronger sense of present-day vulnerability. Their stories foreground resilience: against economic insecurity, environmental disruption, crises and a perceived erosion of trust in public institutions. 

The distinction is therefore not one of ambition. It is one of capacity. Across Europe, people are walking towards a similar future — but they are starting from different places. 

What all four regions agree on 

Strip away the regional framing and the same seven aspirations recur everywhere: climate action and sustainability, fair and inclusive economies, health and lifelong learning, quality of life over pure growth, human-centred technology, peace and European cooperation, and strong communities. Innovation and technology are consistently framed as tools to reach these goals, not goals in themselves. A preference for human-centred application shows up in every region's stories. 

“People are valued for who they are, not for what they own. Social policies guarantee that no one is left behind, ensuring equal opportunities for all regardless of background or income.” Fair society for all, Southern Europe

Governance is what divides the regions 

Of everything compared, institutional trust is the single clearest dividing line. In Northern Europe, trust in government is assumed, and stories focus on preserving what already works. In Western Europe, governance reform (decentralisation, citizen participation) is a central pillar of getting to 2040. In Eastern Europe, tackling corruption and building judicial independence are treated as prerequisites for everything else. In Southern Europe, the priority is rebuilding institutional trust after a string of crises. 

“Decisions are made openly, with citizens regularly participating in forums where laws and priorities are debated and agreed. The government is seen as a partner, not a distant authority.” 
Shared leadership, Northern Europe

“In the future, corruption has been eliminated through strict oversight and citizen-led monitoring. Courts are independent and trusted, and political decisions are made in the open.” 
Justice restored, Eastern Europe

Who feels hopeful, who feels uneasy 

The emotional landscape of the stories is equally revealing. 

Eastern Europe's stories skew most positive overall (77%, against 67–70% elsewhere) and notably happier (39% versus a 25% average in the other three regions). Southern European stories lean most on global-level events (61%, versus 45–50% elsewhere), while Eastern and Western storytellers weigh national and local realities more heavily (30%, versus 20–24%).  

There is also an important tension between hope and agency. Northern and Western Europeans are comparatively less confident in their own ability to bring about the changes they describe. Southern and Eastern Europeans express greater concern about the future, yet Eastern European contributors are especially likely to see citizens themselves as active agents of change. 

These differences are not contradictions as much as they show that people can feel hopeful while recognising deep challenges, or feel uneasy while still believing in their collective capacity to act.  

Which policy process this report could feed 

The EU's next Cohesion Policy framework is being prepared by the Commission for the 2028–2034 period, following the current 2021–2027 one. One proposal stands out: the new framework is set to have fewer thematic constraints, giving regions more room to tailor interventions to local circumstances rather than applying one template everywhere. This report's central finding (that regions share the same destination but stand at different distances from it) offers a clear citizen-level case for exactly that flexibility. 

A similar case can be made to the European Committee of the Regions, the EU's advisory body of elected local and regional politicians. Its 2025–2030 priorities are built around Cohesion, Resilience and Proximity, and its Proximity pillar states plainly that trust in Europe grows at the community level, echoing this report's own finding that institutional trust is what most consistently separates a hopeful regional future from an anxious one.  

Why collect stories at all? The logic of collective visioning 

Standard surveys ask citizens to react to pre-set options; OurFutures instead asks them to imagine: to write a short story about life in 2040, then interpret their own story: what themes it touches, how it makes them feel, whether they believe they have any power to shape it. This narrative inquiry approach lets researchers analyse thousands of self-authored stories at scale while preserving the texture and emotional honesty a multiple-choice survey would flatten out. 

The logic behind this is what the report's authors call collective visioning: a union of nearly 450 million people cannot design its future by expert modelling alone, nor by asking citizens to simply approve or reject predetermined scenarios. Citizens need space to articulate, in their own words and across all 24 official languages, what a desirable (or feared) future looks like from where they stand. Aggregated across thousands of contributions, these visions reveal shared patterns: recurring fears, hopes and disagreements that conventional surveys could not capture. 

The takeaway for policymakers 

This report's real message isn't that Europeans disagree about the future, rather it's that they don't. The regional split that matters is not linked to values, but distance from the destination: how much institutional trust a region already has, and how far its governance still has to travel to earn more. 

That has a direct implication for how EU-wide initiatives get designed: a single policy, aimed at a single shared goal, will still land differently in each region. Not because people there want something else, but because they're standing at a different distance from it. Governance turned out to be the one factor that consistently separates a hopeful future from an anxious one, which suggests that building institutional trust where it's weakest may do more for a shared European future than any new target aimed at the future itself. 

Regional inspiration 

Would you want to know how exactly the citizens in your regions envision to make this collective EU future come true? Our Futures can also collect stories at regional level, for example as in Flanders.