What do fertilisers, artificial intelligence, small cars, microchips, vaccines, nuclear plants, streaming platforms, cloud computing, satellites and green technology all have in common? Trick question, to which the answer is not that the European Union would like to regulate them to oblivion (though there may be that, too). What links them together is that they are all sectors some in Europe think could be transformed by One Neat Trick: to create an “Airbus of”. Merging lots of subscale European companies so they stopped competing against each other and took on Boeing instead worked wonders in the 1970s; from a standing start Airbus went on to outsell its jetmaking American rival. Could the same strategy be used to help Europe in the 2020s take on the likes of Google, Nvidia, SpaceX and Chinese carmakers? Politicians in Brussels and beyond want to believe. As the pilot of a wayward Airbus might exclaim: “Brace for impact!”