That uneasy feeling in Europe when China and Brazil launch a ‘peace’ initiative on Ukraine that goes against Brussels stated aims? The post-failed-coup worry about South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung’s seeming indifference to Russia’s activities? India just one country happily continuing to engage with Moscow? Europeans are getting a quick lesson about a global lack of concern for their fundamental interests.
At the airport, ending his state visit to Russia in 2023, Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that the world is undergoing ‘epochal change unseen in a hundred years’ 百年未有之大变局. His addition that China and Russia were driving this change together may have been somewhat too optimistic. Donald Trump’s victory is only the latest election outcome showing the democratic world is perfectly capable of tearing itself further apart. Trump’s MAGA party, too, is just one of many eager to drive epochal change. Europe, it seems, risks becoming the arena where these forces will clash.
Commentators like to talk about a new cold war, mirroring a stalemate between opposing forces during the old Cold War. The stalemate held true for Europe. For the rest of the world, in contrast, the Cold War was decidedly warmer. A full-scale land war in Europe would have been too hideous to contemplate. This helped prevent the conflict turning hot. Tension that could not find an outlet in fortified Europe, however, erupted in Asia, still wobbly on its feet in the midst of decolonisation and development. The Korean and Vietnamese civil wars were only just some of several conflicts that were transformed as a result — without concern for their fundamental interests.
A similar situation now threatens in reverse. Potential conflicts in East Asia are numerous. But a war between nuclear powers China and the US with Japan around the Philippines, Korea, or Taiwan would be unimaginably extreme. Now it just so happens, that in a divided and militarily weak Europe there is already an ongoing conflict: Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Not coincidentally, more and more countries from Asia are drawn into the geopolitical maelstrom. In this Cold War, Europe risks becoming the new Asia.
The splintering West
Even without belief in the Marxist ‘trend of history’ 历史潮流 on which Xi’s claim to Putin relies, it is clear that world order is changing. Europe increasingly stands alone. There is a non-zero chance that the Americans go the way Orbán’s Hungary. Given the US’ central position and its vast power arsenal, an authoritarian with oligarch friends its helm would have larger consequences for Western unity than European Council summits running late.
The danger to the liberal democratic community is the greatest it has ever been since communism was contained in the West. Backsliding in the US might hollow out the ‘liberal’ part really quickly across the pond, now the Republic Party has a trifecta. There is also no guarantee this side of the Atlantic will keep it together. Europe is facing its own illiberal forces.
The liberal global space that anchored the world’s democracies together was fundamentally a Western compact underpinned by US hegemony. The combination of its military, economic, and cultural dominance provided a foundation. The ideology behind ‘liberal democracy’ or ‘international rules-based order’ can be attacked for its flaws and hypocrisies. It did, however, serve to bind the transatlantic community to common political norms and a shared perception of belonging to a common democratic community.
There has long been talk of the Atlantic growing wider. Ever since the 1980s, talk about the Asia-Pacific has signalled a new direction. The 2003 Iraq War and 2008 financial crises were further moments of divergence. But, perhaps ironically, it was the European Union’s enlargement to include the loyal NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe that had the biggest structural consequences. It moved the continent away from the Cold War period, when Western Europe perched dependently on the edge of a communist-dominated Eurasia. At the same time, the rise of China draws the US in the other direction.
The recent US election outcome brings to the superstructure’s surface the Western rupture long presaged by fundamental shifts in the base. MAGA’s authoritarian promises becoming real would be the final nail in the coffin of shared identity. Demographic trends already increasingly tie the US to Asia and Latin America, while linking Europe more closely to its neighbourhood. Now Trump may turn the presidential US into a challenger of European parliamentary democracies’ values and interests, a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty and global democracy. After many years of people writing about multipolarity, the moment for a European pole is there. But Europe is incredibly weak.
The Indo-Pacific’s globalising interests
The countries in Asia are growing stronger and more assertive. This means their interests are increasingly global too. This is not just limited to Xi Jinping’s China. Much has already been written about the arrival of North Korean troops on the European battlefield. But it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that the Old World is turning into a stage for Asian power plays.
Seoul reacts as it sees a more aggressive North Korea receive aid threatening South Korea in exchange for substantive military support to Russia. Much has been written about Iran. Poland is not the only country looking for South Korean weapons. Japan already had territorial conflict with Russia, which helps explain why it is now working to demine Ukraine together with Lithuania, itself punished by Beijing after successful Taiwanese outreach. Above all, China is increasingly clearly on Russia’s side in the war in Europe, in the form of critical supplies and support in international organisations.
Europe is also subjected to the growing economic contestation in the Indo-Pacific. EU member states’ fight over Chinese electric vehicle factories is just the latest impact of the new reality. Chinese competition is the biggest threat to European industry. However, considering Trump’s transactional and unpredictable approach, The Hague will still think back nostalgically to the days when it only had to deal with Biden’s pressure on Dutch semiconductor industry. Northvolt’s bankruptcy proceedings meanwhile raise the prospect of reliance on Chinese battery manufacturers for what was once the crown of European industry, the automotive sector.
Dancing On Its Own
Countries facing each other around the Pacific Ocean have begun to bring their conflicts to Europe. While this is happening, Europe remains not only economically and militarily dependent on the US, but also politically. What is often referred to as ‘initiative’ or ‘leadership’ in international affairs is in fact the White House taking charge of the narrative and direction of the West. In the face of European hesitation, it was the Biden administration’s commitment that forged the suppliers’ coalition for Ukraine, no matter its limitations. Such actions require a vision on the world, on one’s interests and on one’s role in safeguarding those.
If Europe is to stand on its own, it needs a framework for this ‘leadership’. But where to locate it? The EU’s member states too are submitting to their populist movements while petty commercial and small-p political interests dominate. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s aim for a more ‘geopolitical’ European Commission is admirable. Still, the question offers itself: she and what army? Without defensive initiative, Europe risks becoming a ‘hot’ battleground of the Indo-Pacific’s ‘cold’ war.
To answer the question of our time, Europe can learn from a continent it once colonised, Southeast Asia. Its newly independent countries entered the old Cold War with fledging states but a strong determination never to be taken advantage of again. In the 1960s and 1970s they worked on their answer, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). Their aim was to ensure they could never be played apart again by competing outsiders. Their solutions consisted of an Asean Way of cooperating internally in ways that worked for their political systems while ensuring that no decision about their neighbourhood would be taken without them, referred to as Asean Centrality.
Europe has the advantage of an already existing European Union. It also has the advantage of a capable central executive in the form of the European Commission and democratic oversight through the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. These are potential locations for the political leadership the absence of which in Southeast Asia hinders Asean’s responses to US-China tensions.
The ‘EU Way’ of governing needs to be updated for the political reality and imbued with a renewed vision. ‘EU Centrality’ in decisions affecting the future of the continent requires a political idea of the EU’s place and role in a post-Western world and stronger supranational authority to execute it. This vision should not imply equidistance — the original Asean founders, which include two US treaty allies, relied and continue to rely on close military cooperation with Washington DC.
Both domestic and external politics, however, require a material base of power. For Europe to make up for the breaking apart of the West and the growing pressures from the Indo-Pacific, it needs to have its own economic and military power. That material power needs to be the priority. Only this way the EU can drive its own epochal change and thereby prevent Asia’s past from becoming Europe’s future.