The Emperor has No Batteries: Europe’s Uneven Bid for Battery Strategic Autonomy

Why did Sweden’s Northvolt—Europe’s most celebrated green industrial startup—collapse, while France managed to stabilise its local aspiring champions in the same cleantech sector? This paper uses these contrasting trajectories to interrogate the EU’s more assertive industrial policy turn. Drawing on the developmental network state (DNS) framework, we argue that while the EU has shifted from market neutrality to vertical industrial policy activism in a global context marked by geopolitical competition, its capacity to sustain strategic firms through crises remains underdeveloped. However, domestic capabilities and strategies mediated EU resourcing, brokering, facilitation, and protection, the main functions of the DNS. Where Sweden lacked credible financial, fiscal and institutional mechanisms of internal protection for the beleaguered Northvolt, France deployed a more robust economic statecraft toolkit, combining strategic finance, firm-level coordination, and public investment. Northvolt’s collapse illustrates the limits of Europe’s institutional orchestration of ambitious industrial policies: a regime that can incubate innovation but cannot stabilise it commercially. We conclude that without repurposed macro-financial institutions, Europe’s role as a competitive supplier of decarbonisation technologies will remain vulnerable.