For centuries the world's most outward-going and expansionist continent, Europe has now become inward-looking and self-absorbed.
From being the place to view and understand the dynamics of the world -- remember Paris, London or even Rome in the 1960s -- it no longer provides such a vantage point.
YUSHA
The engines of change have moved elsewhere. Of course, Europeans -- including the British -- do not recognize this. They still think that Europe, the US apart, is the center of the world. But this hubris, which is a product of history, has an increasingly tenuous purchase on the present. Indeed, the fact that Europeans are still largely unaware of this slippage in their global importance is itself powerful confirmation of the growing provincialism of our continent.
The integration project, which has dominated the life of Europe for almost half a century, has served to reinforce and accentuate this sense of introversion, even at times acted as the author of it.
This is not surprising. It has been a huge, difficult and novel undertaking. It has commanded the energy, brains and focus of the continent, directing them towards the nature, boundaries and arrangements of Europe rather than the wider world. The result has been self-absorption: it may have been inevitable, even desirable, but the effect has been no less real for that.
Of course, when Europe was the world's top dog, then these arrangements and preoccupations would have assumed automatic global significance, just as what happens now in Washington or New York is not simply an American, or even Western, matter, but also a global one. For Europe, though, this equation no longer holds: events on our continent are increasingly of regional rather than global concern.
There is a profound failure to grasp this shift in the order of things among many Europeans. There is an assumption that what we are doing still enjoys global resonance and meaning. Take the question of the nation state, for example. Part of the conventional wisdom that lies behind the rationale for the EU is that the nation state is in decline, hence the need for a larger institution which has the potential to be a global player. It has been assumed, moreover, that the decline of the nation state is not simply a European phenomenon but also a global one.
In fact, this is European hubris. In reality, the decline of the European nation state is a regional rather than global phenomenon, a product of the precipitous decline over the past 60 years of the European imperial powers. For the majority of nation states, products of colonial liberation and for whom an independent nation state is an entirely novel experience, the opposite is the case. For them, the building of a strong nation state has been the central objective. The results have inevitably been varied, but if we take the instance of East Asia, home to a third of the world's population, then the project has been hugely successful: the vast majority of nation states have seen a steady accretion of power -- the opposite to the European experience.
There has also been a strong tendency on the part of Europeans to see the EU as a global template for the future. In a Demos (an independent think tank based in London) pamphlet several years ago, Robert Cooper, a former adviser to Tony Blair and an intellectual architect of liberal imperialism, argued that the EU was the model of the future, the laboratory of a new kind of postmodern state. But does Europe prefigure a future for the rest of the world or is it, in fact, more accurately to be seen as the exception rather than the rule? It is not difficult to see echoes of the European integrationist project in regional experiments in other parts of the world, for example NAFTA, Mercosur in Latin America, and perhaps most relevantly of all, ASEAN in south-east Asia, which is a conscious attempt to enhance the power of its member states through the creation of a regional body, even though the latter so far amounts to little more than a free trade organization.
Such tendencies, though, can hardly be described as the dominant ones of our time. On the contrary, the era we have now entered would be more appropriately described as the moment of the nation state.
The emergence of the US as the sole superpower, its turn towards unilateralism, thereby weakening the trend towards multilateralism and global governance, is a quintessential demonstration of the power of the nation state, in some respects in excess of anything seen before. And the most likely challenge to its position of global pre-eminence will come not from the EU but China and India, which both represent a new kind of nation state, not least in terms of the immensity of their populations. From this perspective, the European experiment seems more like a subaltern than dominant trend.
The end of the Cold War, the US' unilateralism, and the consequent erosion of the notion and importance of "the West," have served to accelerate the decline in Europe's significance. With the fault line of the Cold War bisecting the continent, Europe was its global epicenter. The Western alliance sustained Europe's position and power in the world, even though the alliance was always much more a reflection of American strength than its own.
The contrasting importance of the two, indeed, has been manifest for some time: I was struck during the 1990s on my many visits to East Asia how hugely important the US was in a myriad of ways -- not least in the popular imagination -- and how invisible, even, alas, insignificant, Europe appeared to be: the term "west" served to obscure and obfuscate the reality.
Later, upon my return to London after living in East Asia and witnessing an extraordinary historical transformation, I was taken aback by the sheer ignorance of what was happening -- how Europeans had not understood its significance -- not least for themselves -- and by their provincialism (in which the elite is no exception).
European self-absorption will surely continue. Europe will remain preoccupied and troubled by the integration process for a long time to come, not least because the project is bureaucratically driven -- as it must be -- in a continent which is historically the home to democracy and popular sovereignty, a contradiction that lies at the heart of the project and always will.
At the same time Europe, historical home to virulent racism and not only democracy, is finding it enormously difficult to open itself to the world in terms of migration, to become multiracial, to extend to other races and cultures a pluralism that white European societies once imposed on them, to redefine and rethink itself in the context of a world where it is no longer the top dog. The net result will be not only gross introspection and many discordant voices but also, and inevitably, an inability to concert the power of Europe at an international level, be it politically or militarily.
Europe will continue to matter. It remains a great economic power. But the center of gravity is shifting remorselessly, with the result that Europe will no longer be a power in its own right, but rather a check on the power of others, notably the US, as France illustrated in the case of Iraq.
Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Center.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017