The EU is often eulogized as history’s greatest peace project. That sounds beautifully idealistic and enlightened, and I am all for it. Now, though, the continent is at war again — not within the EU, admittedly, but right at its edge. What future, if any, does the greatest-ever peace project have in this harsh new era?
This is a question I am asking myself as I move back to the US after 11 years of living in Berlin, and covering Germany and the EU. Europeans, a German foreign minister once said, are vegetarians in a world of carnivores. How long can herbivores survive when the predators start feasting?
Germany was a good vantage point to observe the messianic naivete with which some (mainly Western) Europeans used to insist — before Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine — that “we’re surrounded by friends nowadays.” Europe, in their telling, had transcended its old militarist mentalities and was on its way to becoming a different kind of superpower — of commerce and regulations, values and civilization.
Illustration: Mountain People
Not all Europeans indulged in such phantasms. The relatively new members in central and eastern Europe that used to be under Moscow’s heel — such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland — have long been agape at their western neighbors’ willful blindness toward the Kremlin’s aggressive potential. They were irate as Germany spent two decades hugging Putin and making itself dependent on his hydrocarbons.
This fault line between east and west, long before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year, cleaved the EU one way, while a different rift, exposed by the euro crisis, was pulling apart its north and south. The north (which included the UK until it exited the bloc) tends to be more market-oriented, economically strong, fiscally conservative and culturally Protestant. The south leans more corporatist, spendthrift and culturally Catholic or Orthodox. In some ways, the ancient Roman Limes still divides the continent.
Europeans, it turns out, built their common abode atop creaking and grinding tectonic plates. The deepest of these faults today runs between members who equate the EU with liberal democracy and others — notably Hungary and Poland — that increasingly undermine the rule of law to build mini-Kremlins of autocracy.
Ultimately, the problem is that no master narrative about Europe — not even the one about irenic transcendence — has ever captured the imagination of Europeans as much as their national storylines. And those frequently clash.
Such frictions were there from the beginning. The post-war West Germans, for example, viewed European integration as a way of re-entering Western civilization after their Nazi crimes. As part of their post-nationalist atonement, they were not only willing, but eager to cede sovereignty to “Europe.” (Whether they still are is another matter.)
The French, by contrast, saw “Europe” as a way of continuing to project Gallic national power via Brussels to the world, at a time when they were losing their empire and global status, and economically falling behind Germany. This is still the subtext today whenever French President Emmanuel Macron talks about European “autonomy,” but really means French-led independence from the US.
Ah, the US. It is an often overlooked irony that the US has done more for European integration than any other country. During the Cold War, its military and nuclear aegis — in the form of NATO — scared away the Kremlin, so that the western Europeans could reconcile and build something new. And that is still true today. Uncle Sam has been the father figure in whose benevolent presence the squabbling European kids learned to play nicely.
That is why the presidency of Donald Trump came as such a shock to Europeans. It frightened them more than the Brexit referendum in 2016; more than the refugee crisis happening around the same time; more than the euro crisis which had not yet quite ended; more, even, than Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea two years earlier and the hybrid warfare he was already waging in eastern Ukraine. Each of these crises exposed a different vulnerability of the EU, but having Trump or somebody like him in the White House — back then or again in 2025 — could wreck the bloc.
Trump refused to play that old paternal role. It was understandable that he was fed up with paying to defend Europe when the Europeans, and notably the Germans, were often freeriding. However, Trump’s reaction was so transactional it undermined the alliance. With his trade policy and rhetoric, he treated Europeans, such as then-German chancellor Angela Merkel, as foe more than friend. Simultaneously, he approached Putin more as friend than foe.
Trump made clear that he saw no intrinsic value in NATO — and, by extension, “the West.” He cast doubt on his commitment to the alliance’s mutual-defense clause and was even thinking of pulling the US out of NATO altogether. For the first time since World War II, Europeans had to contemplate a continent without a US presence. Suddenly, the European herbivores remembered that they had molars, but lacked fangs.
The next big shock came when Putin launched his genocidal war of conquest against Ukraine. At a stroke, he took Europe back to an earlier and darker age. Gone was the consensus to honor rules, norms and borders. In its place was once again ruthless and anarchic imperialist aggression.
To some extent, Putin’s assault made both Europe and the West pull together. Finland is now part of not only the EU, but also NATO, and Sweden will, I hope, follow. Germany has — at least rhetorically — abandoned its long demilitarization and promises to rearm. Countries like Italy that used to be cozy with the Kremlin have lined up against Russia.
However, the EU is far from united. Putin still has sympathizers there who regurgitate the Kremlin’s disinformation. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a Putin epigone, blocks or slows EU sanctions on Russia whenever he can. If the war in Ukraine is protracted, Europe would start wobbling.
Putin’s invasion has also exposed Europe’s vegetarianism. Despite recurring talk since the 1950s of a “European Army,” it would never come to anything — unless you count various technocratic schemes to pool military procurement. However, that is a far cry from war-waging.
Instead, in supporting Ukraine, Europe has once again ducked under that old US aegis. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz actually made that a condition: He only agreed to send German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine if the US also sent its own M1 Abrams. If the US were ever to waver in backing Kyiv — in a second Trump term, say — Europe would lose heart.
This is the reality as I leave the continent, and as the EU confronts various dilemmas that might seem abstruse, but are germane.
One question is whether Europe should try to return to its professed path of “ever closer union” by ceding more powers from the capitals to the center. A hot-button issue in this category is how countries vote in Brussels. Members, including Germany, want almost all decisions to be made by “qualified majority,” as opposed to unanimity, so that no country — Hungary, for example — can block policies on Russia, China or whatever. Other nations, including Poland, object, fearing that without veto power, they would be dominated by the large countries, above all Germany.
A second and related controversy is about enlargement. The EU has grown from six founding members in the 1950s to 27 today. Another eight are official candidates to join, and two more (Kosovo and Georgia) are considered potential candidates.
The prospect of so many new members puts the EU in a bind. The club is already difficult to manage. Without a drastic rewrite of its treaties (including that change to qualified majority voting), how could it avoid breaking down in dysfunction It appears that the EU can, in Brussels argot, either deepen or widen, but not both.
Moreover, the EU has in the past few years noticed that it has sway over the governance of countries while they are candidates, but not once they are members. Several nations, including Bulgaria, still tolerate far too much corruption. A few, notably Hungary, are moving from democracy to autocracy. The fear now is that countries such as Serbia, Albania, Moldova or indeed Ukraine could also “backslide” after they join, dragging down standards in the whole bloc.
Yet the geopolitics of this new and post-pacific era seems to demand that the EU expands. For the remaining Balkan countries, membership might be their best, or only, way out of ethnic strife and toward prosperity. If they were rejected, they could take up arms again against one another or throw themselves into the geopolitical embrace of autocratic Russia or China.
For Ukraine, the aspiration of integrating with western Europe was what started the enmity between Kyiv and Moscow in the first place. That EU dream is now one reason why Ukrainians are continuing to resist so bravely and fight for their independence. Ukraine’s NATO membership might prove elusive for the time being. EU membership, by contrast, is something that Europe feels it owes the Ukrainians.
Instead of “ending” after the Cold War, history appears merely to have paused and then restarted with Putin’s invasion. However, this was just the opening salvo in our neo-nationalist, neo-imperialist, neo-anarchic era of great-power rivalry. For if Trump and Putin were shocks No. 1 and No. 2, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is lining up to be No. 3.
It has been said that Russia is the storm, China is climate change. For years, Beijing has been throwing its weight around not only in Asia — from the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea and beyond — but also in Europe. It has bullied EU members, such as Lithuania, and spread its financial and diplomatic tentacles into the Balkans and beyond. And now it has formed a “no limits” friendship with Moscow as a way of staring down the West.
Europeans are just beginning to notice that they are at risk of chaining themselves economically to China just as they depended on Russian energy until recently. As they ponder the consequences, though, they are still splitting hairs. Should they “decouple” from China, merely “de-risk” or just “diversify”
Those among Europe’s friends who are watching this most closely and nervously are once again the Americans. They have long been hoping to “pivot” their attention and resources from the Atlantic to the Pacific, on the understanding that the Europeans would take care of their own neighborhood. Instead, the Europeans seem as far away as ever from stepping up on their continent and still iffy in lining up behind the US in Asia.
One fear that runs through capitals from Brussels, Paris and Berlin to Washington, New Delhi, Jakarta and Brasilia is that the new era of power politics will demand wrenching strategic decisions. Faced with a Chinese attack on Taiwan concurrent with Russian aggression in Europe, which would the US do most to stop? Would the Europeans be there for a fight in Asia, too? Would the rest of the world — the so-called Global South — finally choose sides?
The sad reality is that the epoch we have entered is one that Thucydides might recognize more readily than the founding fathers of European integration would. In this world, ideals mean little, might once again makes one right, the strong prey on the weak and only the strongest can set limits.
No member state of the EU would be among those mightiest powers, nor the bloc as a whole. In theory, Europe could be a superpower, by becoming a United States of Europe — but I do not see that happening. The EU would instead remain a confederation masquerading as a federation, and possibly revert to being a mere trade area.
Nor, after so many decades, would Europeans suddenly grow fangs and turn into carnivores that keep away predators. This means their fate, ultimately, might be decided elsewhere — somewhere between Washington, Moscow and Beijing. The world’s greatest peace project, which has inspired me and others for so long, might end as just that — a project, like so many we read about in history books.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. He was a former editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers
Gogoro Inc was once a rising star and a would-be unicorn in the years prior to its debut on the NASDAQ in 2022, as its environmentally friendly technology and stylish design attracted local young people. The electric scooter and battery swapping services provider is bracing for a major personnel shakeup following the abrupt resignation on Friday of founding chairman Horace Luke (陸學森) as chief executive officer. Luke’s departure indicates that Gogoro is sinking into the trough of unicorn disillusionment, with the company grappling with poor financial performance amid a slowdown in demand at home and setbacks in overseas expansions. About 95
RSS