A dream called Europe

The world order is being shaken by a new Cold War, which could also be seen as a new round of the never-ending old one, and there’s a great absentee: the European Union. The Middle East is on fire, with Israel and Iran never so close to open war, Ukraine and Russia are fighting an existential battle that is going to shape the century, and the United States and China entered a harsh strategic competition with worldwide implications. The EU is the great absentee.

It’s true that the EU has been sending weapons to Ukraine since the beginning of Russian invasion, but it hasn’t done nothing else: it left the attempts to reach a ceasefire or a lasting peace and even the talks on hostages and prisoners of war to Turkey, the Holy See, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, China, India, and Brazil.

The same situation occurred throughout the Middle Eastern crisis, where talks on hostages and ceasefires have been protagonized by regional players, from Egypt to Qatar, and where even China has found a way to take advantage of the escalation by calling the Palestinian representatives to Beijing and coordinating the Arab League. The EU, which for geographic reasons should have been interested in playing a peace-building role in the Israel-Palestinian war, limited its actions to verbally denouncing Israel’s alleged crimes of war. 

Winds of crisis are rising and increasing numerically within and outside Europe, and the EU is alternating indifference and diffidence to all of them: the Serbia-Kosovo tensions, the Serbia-Bosnia tensions, Moldova’s growing instability, Poland’s Russian-manufactured refugee crisis, the never-ending civil war in Libya, the increasing risk of open war in Western Sahara, the birth of the so-called coup belt in the Sahel. The EU has been sometimes unable and other times unwilling to act and to make its voice heard. As a result, the EU’s decline on world stage hardened and fastened from 2022 onwards.

What Belgium’s top diplomat Mark Eyskens once said of Europe, describing it as “an economic giant, a political dwarf, and a military worm”, keeps being true. The EU and its individual members, even when operating independently, are no longer respected and considered politically relevant by other players. It’s quite the contrary: even non-state actors like the Houthis feel free to attack European ships in the Red Sea. The Houthis managed to virtually close the Red Sea to Westerners, primarily from the EU, and the EU hasn’t been both unable and unwilling to take the lead and defend its economic, trade and energy interests. It left the task to the US, which preferred bombs over diplomacy and eventually understood that it was the wrong strategy.

The EU is doomed to remain a dysfunctional contradiction unless it reforms itself. It has a common currency, but no common army. It has a common market, but no common bank. It has a Parliament, but no President. It has a diplomatic body, the EEAS, which has no actual diplomatic powers. It has a Common Security and Defence Policy, but only on paper. It speaks about building a common army, but its members are simultaneously tied to NATO.

The EU has a great potential which is likely going to remain untapped. Most of the success of the European project relies on Germany and France being able to coexist and to make other members accept their shared hegemony, but such a shared hegemony, which granted the European community a leadership over decades, is being challenged by ever-growing internal divisions and dissent, from Poland to Italy, and by the lack of courage and farsightedness of its leaders. Emmanuel Macron’s strategic autonomy made no real progress since it was announced. Angela Merkel’s efforts to give the EU cheap energy for its factories have been nullified by the Ukraine War and the subsequent total economic war on Russia. 

The EU is now increasingly encircled by a super-arc of crisis, stretching from the Balkans to the Red Sea. The radicalization of great power competition—particularly the Russo-American and Sino-American rivalries—leaves little space for strategic autonomy. The EU’s current trajectory suggests a fate of growing political and economic irrelevance on the global stage unless its leaders can unite to reform its institutions and forces.

The World Order Kickstarter campaign has closed—but don’t worry! The late pledges are now open, giving you another chance to join the journey and explore these shifting dynamics of international relations through an engaging board game experience. Don’t miss out!

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