Predictably the European Council has taken an acrimonious look at the Irish referendum result and decided to do nothing about it until the fall. Unfortunately the harsh questions of purpose and power, now hovering over Europe’s capitals like birds of prey, will not be disposed of so easily.
“When I want to talk to Europe,” Henry Kissinger famously said, “whom do I call?”
At the time, the resounding silence that greeted his question scarcely mattered. Eastern central Europe was imprisoned in the Soviet bloc; the western half of the continent sheltered beneath the capacious skirts of its superpower protector.
Even the end of the cold war and the implosion of the Soviet Union made surprisingly little difference to the fundamentals of Europe’s place in the world or its understanding of itself. Europeans no longer needed the protection of the US against the Soviet threat, but in the unipolar world that took the place of the bipolar world of the cold war, they still lived in the shadow of overwhelming US power. Their inability to speak with one voice in world affairs was humiliating, but not humiliating enough to force them to put their geopolitical house in order. In any case, the triumphant launch of the euro, and the somewhat questionable triumph of helter-skelter enlargement, gave them more than enough to do.
However, unnoticed by many of Europe’s leaders and most of its peoples, times have changed, and the pace of change is speeding up. The unipolar world of the 1990s and early 2000s — the world of overwhelming US predominance, with no other superpower in sight — is not yet dead, but it is certainly dying. A more complex and infinitely more dangerous multipolar world is coming into existence, with China, India and perhaps a revitalized Russia as superpowers alongside the US.
For the foreseeable future, the US will be the strongest of these superpowers, but it will not be the only one. Economically, it has already ceased to be a hegemon. In different ways, China’s authoritarian capitalism and continental Europe’s social market economies have both turned out to be more successful than the hyper- individualistic capitalism of the US. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US’ huge military arsenal and sclerotic military doctrine have turned out to be unfit for purpose. The US is today going through a painful process of relative decline as fleeter, slimmer rivals begin to catch up with it.
We cannot know how this new, multipolar world will evolve, but there is little doubt that it will be an unkind place, riven by quarrels over constrained resources and the divergent impacts of climate change. The great question for Europeans as it takes shape is brutally simple. Do we want our children and grandchildren to live in a world run by the Americans, Chinese, Indians and perhaps Russians, or are we prepared to make the qualitative leap towards the federalism that Kissinger’s question implies, and become at least a quasi-superpower in our own right?
By a tragic irony, the Lisbon treaty that the Republic of Ireland rejected made a tiny, rather half-hearted gesture towards the second alternative. That was the meaning of the full-time president and the foreign policy supremo. In voting against the treaty, the Irish were voting for Europe to remain a fat, rich political pygmy, in a world dominated by potentially predatory giants.
According to the conventional wisdom, the Irish vote shows that Europe’s elites pay too little attention to their peoples. The truth is very nearly the opposite. For the most part, our elites have succumbed to a kind of bastard populism that makes courageous political leadership virtually impossible.
Seemingly, they have forgotten that the statesmen who launched the European project 50 years ago were taking immense political risks, and that if they had submitted their project to a referendum, it might well have been defeated. In France, the Communists and Gaullists were hostile; in Germany, the Social Democrats were at most ambivalent.
Today’s European elites, by contrast, have been frightened of their publics. In their innermost souls most of them probably know that the institutional changes envisaged in the Lisbon treaty were, if anything, far too modest to give the EU even a modicum of the political clout it will need as the 21st century progresses. But they were afraid to say so. Indeed, their treaty was expressly designed not to say so.
The result was that, except to skilled Brussels watchers, the treaty was virtually incomprehensible. Although nobody can be certain, the most probable end to this inglorious chapter in European history will be another helping of fudge, slapped over an even less adequate agreement.
Yet Kissinger’s question will not go away. Sooner or later, Europe will have to find an answer. We cannot know when or how it will do so, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that during the course of the next 20 or 30 years, the core countries of the EU — broadly speaking, the eurozone — will in effect federate. What the rest will do is unknowable at this stage, but I suspect that more of them will join the core than the current conventional wisdom envisages. The moral of the past 60 years of European history is that bold steps by a few eventually win over the timorous many. My only real doubt is whether Europe’s leaders will find the courage to lead. I console myself with the thought that even small men and women can be capable of great deeds in times of crisis.
David Marquand is a former member of the British parliament and a visiting fellow in the department of politics at Oxford University, England.
The US Senate’s passage of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which urges Taiwan’s inclusion in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise and allocates US$1 billion in military aid, marks yet another milestone in Washington’s growing support for Taipei. On paper, it reflects the steadiness of US commitment, but beneath this show of solidarity lies contradiction. While the US Congress builds a stable, bipartisan architecture of deterrence, US President Donald Trump repeatedly undercuts it through erratic decisions and transactional diplomacy. This dissonance not only weakens the US’ credibility abroad — it also fractures public trust within Taiwan. For decades,
In 1976, the Gang of Four was ousted. The Gang of Four was a leftist political group comprising Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members: Jiang Qing (江青), its leading figure and Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) last wife; Zhang Chunqiao (張春橋); Yao Wenyuan (姚文元); and Wang Hongwen (王洪文). The four wielded supreme power during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but when Mao died, they were overthrown and charged with crimes against China in what was in essence a political coup of the right against the left. The same type of thing might be happening again as the CCP has expelled nine top generals. Rather than a
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmaker Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) on Saturday won the party’s chairperson election with 65,122 votes, or 50.15 percent of the votes, becoming the second woman in the seat and the first to have switched allegiance from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to the KMT. Cheng, running for the top KMT position for the first time, had been termed a “dark horse,” while the biggest contender was former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), considered by many to represent the party’s establishment elite. Hau also has substantial experience in government and in the KMT. Cheng joined the Wild Lily Student
Taipei stands as one of the safest capital cities the world. Taiwan has exceptionally low crime rates — lower than many European nations — and is one of Asia’s leading democracies, respected for its rule of law and commitment to human rights. It is among the few Asian countries to have given legal effect to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Social Economic and Cultural Rights. Yet Taiwan continues to uphold the death penalty. This year, the government has taken a number of regressive steps: Executions have resumed, proposals for harsher prison sentences
RSS