If von der Leyen’s Davos message is “European independence”, we should name the missing layer: cultural strategic sovereignty. This is the core argument we make in CreativeFED’s White Paper, “Empowering Creative Sectors for Innovation, Sustainability, and Global Influence” (Strategic Dialogue on European Creative Economy and Cultural Autonomy): Europe’s capacity to act geopolitically and compete economically is inseparable from its capacity to create, circulate, and sustain culture at scale. Culture and the creative economy are strategic infrastructure. They determine whether Europe can produce and distribute its own narratives in its own languages, maintain trusted public spaces, and retain value—jobs, IP, data, and revenues—inside a European ecosystem rather than leaking it through a small number of non-European distribution, platform, and compute layers. Cultural strategic sovereignty is not symbolism. It is capability: viable creative careers and fair value capture in the AI era; plural media and cultural participation as democratic resilience; and a creative innovation engine that strengthens competitiveness across sectors through design, audiovisual, games, publishing, heritage-tech, and more. If Europe is serious about a “new security architecture”, culture must sit inside it as a capability to maintain and upgrade—through predictable multiannual investment, AI-fit IP and enforcement, stronger public-interest media, and European infrastructure for cross-border circulation and discovery. Europe talks a lot about chips, grids and defence. We should start talking with the same seriousness about studios, stages, publishing, design labs, cultural data and creative skills—because that is where cohesion, legitimacy and soft power are built.