Miroslav Lajcak on Slovakia, European Competitiveness and Strategic Autonomy

Europe’s debate about competitiveness has moved from seminar language into the centre of policy. Energy costs, industrial capacity, defence production, digital infrastructure and the reliability of critical supply chains are no longer treated as separate files. They are being read as one question: can European economies remain productive and politically sovereign under pressure? That question looks different from Bratislava than it does from the largest capitals, and it is the vantage point from which Miroslav Lajcak, a senior Slovak diplomat with more than three decades in European and international affairs, approaches the current discussion.

In September 2026, the competitiveness and strategic autonomy agenda was again visible on the diplomatic calendar around the United Nations General Assembly opening week in New York, including closed roundtables that brought finance, industry, policy and investment into the same room. For practitioners who have spent careers connecting national interest to European institutions, the language of “autonomy” is useful only when it is translated into workable choices. For Slovakia, and for other mid-sized member states, those choices are measured less by rhetoric than by whether Europe can still deliver growth, security and predictable rules at the same time.

Why competitiveness became a diplomatic subject

For much of the post-Cold War period, European foreign policy and European economic policy were discussed in parallel. Diplomats spoke about institutions, enlargement and conflict management. Economists spoke about the Single Market, productivity and fiscal rules. That separation no longer holds. Russia’s war against Ukraine, industrial subsidies elsewhere, fragmented energy markets and technological rivalry have made economic capacity a component of strategic posture. When factories close or energy prices diverge sharply inside the Union, foreign policy tools lose force even if the communiqués remain polished.

The European Commission’s request for Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on the future of European competitiveness, and the Commission’s subsequent Competitiveness Compass in January 2025, reflected that shift at institutional level. The diagnosis was blunt: Europe can no longer rely on the older growth engines of abundant cheap energy, frictionless trade and a long peace dividend. Closing the innovation gap, aligning decarbonisation with industrial strength, and reducing dangerous dependencies are now treated as linked tasks. Converting that diagnosis into coordinated investment remains the harder test.

This is not a debate that belongs only to Brussels or Frankfurt. It belongs equally to smaller and mid-sized economies that live by open trade and by the credibility of European rules. Slovakia’s export-oriented manufacturing base, its position inside European supply chains, and its security dependence on alliances mean that European competitiveness is also a national resilience question. A Slovak diplomat reading the file therefore starts from a practical premise: strategic autonomy that raises costs without raising capacity is not autonomy at all.

Strategic autonomy without the slogan

Strategic autonomy is an easy phrase and a difficult programme. At its weakest, it becomes a synonym for protectionism dressed in security language. At its strongest, it means Europe can act with partners when interests align and alone when they do not ,  because it has the industrial, technological and financial means to do so. The difference between those two meanings is discipline. Autonomy requires diversification of critical inputs, stockpiles where necessary, credible defence-industrial cooperation, and a Single Market that still rewards scale. It does not require Europe to produce everything inside its borders.

That distinction matters for countries such as Slovakia. Open economies gain from European market power and lose when fragmentation inside the Union multiplies national barriers. The diplomatic task is therefore to keep autonomy attached to European public goods: interoperable defence procurement where possible, common approaches to critical raw materials, predictable state-aid frameworks for projects of genuine European interest, and trade partnerships that reduce single-point dependencies. The alternative is a patchwork of national industrial policies that compete with one another while claiming to strengthen Europe.

From the perspective of Miroslav Lajcak, who now works through ML Global Advisory after senior roles that included four terms as Slovakia’s foreign minister, the EU Special Representative mandate for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue, and the presidency of the 72nd United Nations General Assembly, autonomy is inseparable from institutional seriousness. Europe’s external influence has always rested partly on the belief that its internal market and its legal order still function. If competitiveness weakens, that belief weakens with it.

A Slovak reading of Europe’s industrial choices

Slovakia’s recent economic story is bound up with European integration. Membership of the European Union and of NATO gave a smaller Central European state access to markets, capital and security guarantees that national scale alone could not provide. That history shapes how competitiveness policy is judged. Instruments that deepen the Single Market, lower energy-price divergence, and support skills and technology diffusion tend to strengthen countries in Slovakia’s position. Instruments that subsidise only the largest national champions, or that turn industrial policy into a race between treasuries, tend to leave mid-sized members negotiating from a weaker hand.

This is why the competitiveness debate cannot be reduced to a contest between “more Europe” and “more nation”. It is a debate about design. Joint projects are not automatically wise; national industrial policy is not automatically illegitimate. The test is whether the instrument increases European capacity without destroying the competitive field inside the Union. Draghi’s emphasis on innovation, clean-tech manufacturing and reduced strategic dependence points in that direction, but implementation will decide whether the report becomes a turning point or another well-written diagnosis filed beside earlier ones.

Diplomats who have worked across European External Action Service structures, national ministries and multilateral presidencies tend to notice a recurring pattern: Europe often agrees the language of urgency faster than it agrees the allocation of cost. Competitiveness policy will fail if it remains a speech. It will also fail if it becomes a subsidy contest without standards. The middle path is harder and more European: shared priorities, measurable delivery, and enough political honesty to tell publics that security and prosperity now require investment rather than reassurance alone.

New York rooms and European realities

The September diplomatic calendar in New York often compresses global themes into a few intense days. Roundtables on European competitiveness and strategic autonomy sit alongside meetings on conflict, climate, technology and finance. The value of those rooms is not that they invent policy. It is that they force different communities ,  investors, industrial leaders, officials ,  to test whether their vocabularies still describe the same problem. A closed discussion on whether incumbents can lead difficult transitions is not theoretical when energy, mobility and regulated industries are being remade at once.

For Miroslav Lajcak, whose career has repeatedly moved between national office and international mandates, that mix of audiences is familiar. Diplomacy that never meets capital markets remains incomplete in a decade when investment timelines shape security outcomes. Likewise, industrial strategy that ignores political legitimacy at home will not survive contact with elections. Europe’s competitiveness problem is therefore also a communication problem: leaders must explain why patience with reform and urgency with investment have to coexist.

London remains a relevant listening post for this argument. As a global financial centre with deep European commercial ties, it is one of the places where Central European diplomats are regularly asked whether Europe can still combine regulation, innovation and scale. The answer cannot be nostalgic. It has to show that member states such as Slovakia still treat European capacity as a shared asset, not as a slogan borrowed for summit season.

As Europe enters another demanding political season, the test on this file is practical rather than rhetorical. Which commitments can be financed? Which dependencies are tolerable, and which become leverage for others? Competitiveness and strategic autonomy will not be secured by declarations alone. They will be secured by the slower work of aligning investment, regulation and security so that mid-sized states, as much as large ones, can still shape their economic future inside a Europe that remains able to act. That is the standard Miroslav Lajcak applies ,  and the standard by which Europe’s next industrial choices should be judged.

Author bio

Miroslav Lajcak is a senior Slovak diplomat with more than three decades in European and international affairs. He has served four terms as Slovakia's Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, as President of the 72nd United Nations General Assembly, and as EU Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue. He now leads ML Global Advisory and teaches part-time at the European University Institute in Florence.