This past week saw not only the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty, forcing a crisis summit this week to chart an alternative path to EU continuity, but also the annual EU-US summit in Slovenia, aiming to forge a common trans-Atlantic agenda on Middle East peace, climate change and trade.
The Irish vote is likely to fuel rumors of the EU’s demise, yet it is the latter summit that will prove more revealing about its future. While mending trans-Atlantic divides is commendable, the summit presents an opportunity to rectify misperceptions about the US leading and Europe following on global issues. No matter who occupies the White House, the actual trend is the reverse.
UNASUR
On May 23 in Brasilia, a treaty was signed to establish the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). It was the most recent example of the real geopolitical revolution that has been under way since the end of World War II: the regionalization of international relations on the precedent set by the six nations who established the Treaty of Rome, which became the European Economic Community in 1957.
It was this breakthrough in thinking that offers the greatest potential to prevent the return of what conservative thinkers take for granted: superpower conflict between the US and China, or an East-West conflict between democracies and autocracies.
From ASEAN to UNASUR and the African Union (AU), it is globalization within regions that has become the driving narrative of political and economic life. The issue is not whether rival trade blocks will emerge, but rather that each regional grouping promises to eliminate conflict among its members, as Europeans have done. The US is no longer providing the security blanket or umbrella; rather, each region is building its own.
For elite observers in Western capitals, it has always been easier to conceive of globalization as global first and local second. Globalization is thought to be synonymous with Westernization.
But in many places today, globalization starts with bringing down barriers between neighbors, building common diplomatic institutions and eventually even common armies, peacekeeping forces and criminal courts — all of which the AU has now established.
A world of regions still needs leadership, but not necessarily a single leader. While many have fretted that Europe follows the US without providing an alternative course, in fact the EU has been providing this model for decades, and it is bearing fruit around the developing world, despite the US’ post-Sept. 11 actions, which have served only to discredit the West.
Today the EU provides more than itself as an institutional model. Its emissions trading system is the world’s leading carbon market and a model that progressive US voices yearn to replicate. It is the largest aid donor and market for goods from developing countries. And next year it will launch an external action service through which eventually the embassies of the EU will be larger abroad than those of individual members.
The EU is not finished. Even if its expansion stops at 30 or 35 members, its global presence will be increasingly felt on matters of global concern.
PAVED THE WAY
Even as multilateral institutions such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank strive for reform to remain relevant, the EU has paved the way for a world of unions to focus on resolving their own problems and managing globalization as collectives.
One sees this in East Asia’s selective integration of WTO standards, and even in the push for an EU-style North American Union to boost competitiveness. Europe has become the gold standard for creating such institutions, and is far better poised than the US to be the arbiter of disputes among them.
A future concert of powers among the US, China and the EU — capable of setting basic global standards and leveraging the adherence of other major powers such as Russia and India — is a vision with which Americans should be familiar. It resembles Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen.”
A half century later, it is clear who the three most influential global actors are and who must assume responsibility for preserving peace. But among these three, the EU has the most credibility today, and must ensure that the other two do not return the 21st century to the 19th.
Parag Khanna directs the global governance initiative at the New America Foundation. Alpo Rusi is ambassador in the office of the president of the UN General Assembly.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past