What citizens’ stories reveal about Europe’s resilience

What might Europe look like in 2040? For some citizens, Europe in 2040 is greener, more united and democratic: able to harness technology while protecting people and the planet. For others, it is a continent facing climate disruption, widening inequalities, institutional distrust and geopolitical instability.

These are not scenarios, but stories written by Europeans themselves.

The new report Resilience: The future of Europe as seen by EU citizens explores what these stories can tell us about resilience: not simply the ability to withstand shocks, but the capacity to adapt, transform and move forward in uncertain times.  

It draws on the Our Futures open platform which invited people across the EU to imagine everyday life in 2040. Over 4,000 short stories were collected. Out of these, 340 stories explicitly reference the role, position, or institutions of the EU, and a further 899 surface specific "shocks" people fear or anticipate. Together, they form a rare thing: a large-scale, citizen-authored dataset about the future, collected not through polling but through narrative. 

The stories offer something that conventional consultation methods often struggle to capture: people’s lived sense of the future, namely their anxieties, aspirations, trade-offs and perceived room for action. Strategic foresight often starts with experts and scenarios. Our Futures starts with citizens, and this is what makes this report a special worthwhile read for policymakers. 

The key insights: eight worries, five tensions, and a surprising amount of hope 

The stories reveal eight recurring areas of concern: 

• Security and defence 

• Democracy, institutions and trust 

• Migration and social cohesion 

• Climate and environmental degradation 

• Economic inequality 

• Technological disruption 

• Ageing societies 

• Shifting global power balances 

What stands out is not the list of issues - most policymakers could have predicted it - but how intertwined citizens perceive them to be. A story about climate disruption may also be about migration, affordability, social division and political polarisation. A reflection on artificial intelligence may lead to questions of work, human connection, democracy and control. Citizens’ narratives show how challenges interact in people’s imaginations of the future and why policy responses need to do the same.  

Democracy and climate stand out as particularly cross-cutting themes. Of the 340 core stories, 41% touch on democracy/governance and 29% on nature/climate — more than any other topic, including security, despite the war in Ukraine looming large in the background.  

The report also maps five structural tensions that citizens themselves articulate as unresolved. They appear across many of the stories, suggesting that any policy choice Europe makes needs to take them into account in a balanced manner: 

• Integration versus autonomy — a more unified Europe versus stronger national sovereignty 
• Protected versus open borders — security and cultural continuity versus openness and humanitarian values 
• Environmental action versus economic growth — urgency versus affordability 
• Technological progress versus human values — efficiency versus privacy, connection, and control 
• Global engagement versus strategic independence — partnerships with the US and China versus self-reliance 

Worry and agency 

Then there's the emotional architecture of the stories: an almost even split between optimistic and pessimistic visions. Optimistic stories describe a federal, transparent EU with a thriving green economy, universal basic income, and automation without unemployment. Pessimistic ones describe EU dissolution, authoritarian drift, and climate-driven collapse in southern Europe. What's notable is that the same underlying anxieties (about AI, migration, or institutional distance) generate radically different endings depending on whether citizens believe Europe has the capacity to act.  

Finally, the report describes the shocks citizens imagine happening in the future: from cyberattacks crippling infrastructure to Putin's sudden death triggering a Russian civil war, from AI systems gaining self-governing power to freshwater shortages forcing internal migration. These are accompanied by strategies proposed by the storytellers themselves: unified European defence, digital sovereignty, universal basic income pilots, citizen assemblies, and pension reform tied to demographic realities, among many others. These aren't naive wishes; several closely mirror ideas already circulating in EU policy debates, which is itself a useful signal. 

Where this report has already made a difference 

The analyses of Our Futures citizen stories are made to inform EU policymaking. The report's citizen-derived findings on resilience were used as an input into the European Commission's 2025 Strategic Foresight Report, the Commission's flagship document for anticipating long-term challenges and shaping medium-term policy priorities. That means the Strategic Foresight Report's framing of resilience as the capacity not just to absorb shocks but to "bounce forward" transformatively was reflected in what citizens themselves thought resilience should look like.  

The report's five closing principles (strategic autonomy with open cooperation, green transformation as a social contract, human-centred tech governance, democracy that delivers, and a culture of care and solidarity) were designed to translate citizen narratives into a language usable by EU institutional planning. 

Why collect stories at all? The logic of collective visioning 

It may be worth explaining a bit more this unusual method, and why its findings carry weight beyond typical public opinion research. 

Standard surveys ask citizens to react to pre-set options. Our Futures instead asks citizens 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 short, self-authored narratives at scale while preserving the texture and emotional honesty that a multiple-choice survey would flatten out. 

The logic behind this is what the report's authors call collective visioning. Citizens need space to articulate, in their own words and across all 24 official languages, what a desirable or feared future actually looks like from where they stand. Aggregated across thousands of contributions, these individual visions start to reveal shared patterns: recurring fears, recurring hopes, and recurring disagreements that conventional surveys could not capture. 

The takeaway for policymakers 

Citizens are not passive observers of Europe's resilience — they are already thinking, in remarkably structured and interconnected ways, about the trade-offs the EU will need to navigate. They are worried, but not fatalistic: the report's own data show that most storytellers, even the pessimistic ones, believe they personally can do something to shape the future they described. 

This combination of concern and a sense of agency is arguably the most policy-relevant finding in the whole report. It suggests that the Commission's resilience agenda will land best not by reassuring citizens that everything is under control, but by giving them a visible, credible role in building it. The stories are already there. The question is how systematically Europe chooses to listen. 

Read the full report: Resilience: The future of Europe as seen by EU citizens (JRC143071)