Europe needs to wake up

In an interview with Le Monde's Marc Semo, Nicole Gnesotto, a French historian believes, that, from structural pacifism, Europe must move to solid rearmament. The academic considers, that the European Union must “integrate the constraints of geopolitics within the market itself” and formulates several scenarios on its future directions.

In a world in the grip of chaos, historian Nicole Gnesotto, expert on European issues, particularly in terms of security and vice-president of the Jacques-Delors Institute, analyzes in her book Choosing the Future, Ten answers on the world to come, the challenges posed by this new situation. With a PHD in litterature, member of the editorial committee of the magazine Esprit, professor holding the chair on the European Union at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, she is the author of numerous works, including Europe: change or perish ( Tallandier, 2022), prefaced by the former President of the European Commission Jacques Delors (1925-2023).

Can we “choose the future”, according to the expression you use in the title of your work?

In any case, we can question this inevitability of the worst which seems to impose itself everywhere. We live with this feeling that everything is going worse and worse, that States do not control much and that disasters are ahead of us. Global geopolitics cruelly feeds this anxiety. The economic outlook is more than gloomy in Europe – barely 1% growth expected in 2025 – and even gloomy in our country. Global warming threatens us like the end of the world. And if we add the distant concern about the risks of artificial intelligence for our freedom, the future looks more like a disaster movie than a controlled score.

With one nuance: more than three quarters of humanity do not share our pessimism, quite the contrary. Since globalization unified the world market in the early 1990s, the 7 billion humans who are not part of the West see it first and foremost as a boon, not a catastrophe. In other words, this new world disrupts our comfort as Westerners, but it opens up tremendous hopes of prosperity and freedom to the entire Earth. By forgetting it too much and always believing ourselves to be at the center of the Universe, we prepare ourselves for even more difficult tomorrows.

Never has the destiny of Europe seemed so uncertain. Why is it so ?

The global evolution of the world is working against Europe. The Union, so legal, so wise, so peaceful, so humanist, finds it difficult to understand and even more so to control this context of violence and global chaos. This is one of the major developments in European construction: its dynamic no longer comes from itself, but from outside. In reality, Europe is nothing more than an immense collective effort to react to shocks coming from elsewhere.

Today, the European Union must manage a cycle of vulnerabilities: its security is threatened in the east by the war madness of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and in the west by unpredictable American policy. Its economy requires an intensification of global trade and, at the same time, strategic protectionism that is difficult to implement. Its democracy is shaken from within by the rise of populists and far-right parties, fueled by middle-class fear of immigration and possible social downgrading.

And, to make matters worse, Europe must expand to include around ten new countries, including Ukraine, while its institutions are slow to adapt and opinions are reluctant to such upheavals. That's a lot. Hundreds of billions of euros will be needed, well beyond those contained in the meager European budget. It is not certain that the current governance of the Union, as it results from the June elections, is commensurate with these challenges.

How can it respond to it, when its philosophical fundamentals – peace, wealth through trade – are shaken?

At the start of globalization, Europe triumphed. Until the 2000s, in this decade described as "happy globalization", Europeans had the feeling of being right: everyone's trade with everyone, the interdependence of States, finances, markets, openness as basic principle of prosperity would make the European integration model a recipe for the future enrichment and pacification of the world.

However, the crisis of globalization, from the mid-2000s, called into question these European certainties. It is a totally disoriented Europe that is struggling today in the face of the war in Ukraine, Chinese trade offensives and American uncertainty. It is no longer peace, democracy and liberalism, but war, populism and protectionism which now form the pillars of the European environment. From structural pacifism, Europe must therefore move on to solid rearmament, from atavistic Atlanticism, to the construction of its strategic sovereignty. Far from a liberalism sometimes described as ultra, it must now integrate the constraints of geopolitics within the market itself and consider a dose of protectionism, in opposition to its principles of openness and free competition.

These necessary revolutions will not happen overnight, but the good news is that they have become consensual. The Letta report on the single market, the Draghi report on competitiveness, the impatience of the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, on defense: all these reflections propose major bifurcations – putting back a dose of political control on the markets and building more strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty. The problem is that the speed of geopolitical developments leaves little time for adaptation.

Can Europe become a credible geopolitical actor?

If it does not do so, it has little chance of survival other than as a space open to the covetousness or confrontation of others. Since the Russian aggression against Ukraine, a strategic upsurge has occurred: the Europeans are rearming, sometimes spectacularly as in Germany or Poland; certain countries are breaking with a strategic culture of neutrality (Finland) sometimes more than a century old (Sweden) to join NATO; The European Commission has embarked on several initiatives aimed at strengthening the defense industry in Europe.

This dive by the Union into geopolitics and defense is remarkable. However, it raises a question about the sustainability of the approach: is it a structural conversion to the idea of ​​a “powerful Europe” or an adaptation of circumstance, in other words reversible? We must also wonder about the vision of the world that this geopolitical Europe would decide to promote – and if it even has one. The temptation is indeed great in Europe to adopt the traditional American vision of a global struggle of democracies against authoritarianism of all stripes, starting with China. However, this strategic simplism hardly seems suited to the upheavals that Donald Trump's return to the White House will cause, any more than it does to the complexity of globalization, or to the specificity of European interests.

What are the possible scenarios for the future of Europe?

The scenarios depend on our ability as Westerners to broaden our vision of the world. Two dilemmas will determine the future in my eyes. The first is quite simple: should we act and think in terms of “us first” or “all together”? On the one hand the defense of the West, on the other the search for collective solidarity. On the one hand a strategy of conservation of Western power, on the other a strategy of sharing.

The second dilemma is tougher: is it a question of choosing good versus evil, or should we aim for a more complex assessment of international relations, such as Raymond Aron had thought: "The choice in politics is not not between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable”? On the one hand, emotion, ideology, easy morality. On the other, reason, realism, difficult compromise. These choices will be decisive for the future of peace in Ukraine, Israel and the Middle East, but also for the future of governance in a world in which Westerners do not even make up 10% of the world population.

What does this imply?

The most likely European scenario is that of an Atlantic Europe: a Union without limits, diluted in a large Euro-American entity, at the cost of multiple European concessions with regard to Donald Trump, to maintain the protection of the UNITED STATES. The second scenario is that of geopolitical Europe: it supposes the affirmation of a political and military Europe, certainly allied with the United States against any threat, but aware of its own interests, wishing to assert them within the Atlantic whole, and open to global governance that is fairer and more respectful of the new global diversity.

The third scenario is that of catastrophe: Europe does not know how to build its military power and it no longer knows how to maintain its economic and commercial power. Intra-European solidarity is cracking, prosperity is disappearing, national options are once again becoming priorities, between populist save-who-cans and a bilateral race for improbable American protection.

Last option: that of a complete upheaval of perspectives and affiliations. The Union of Twenty-Seven is being diluted in uncontrollable enlargements, but a hard core of a few countries is trying to save a more integrated and more ambitious Union, including on the military level. Enlargement leads to a sort of narrowing of the European outline, to five, six or seven, and everything has to be rebuilt. Maybe for the better.