Global order: Europe’s decline may be a necessary reckoning

Among contemporary European writers, novelist Michel Houellebecq is not known for his optimism. In an oeuvre spanning three decades, a leitmotif has been the inexorability of human decline, from the quality of internet pornography to European civilization itself. “France has given up on progress,” he wrote in 2014. “We are not only tourists in our own country, but also willing participants in tourism.”

Today, Houellebecq’s comments sound darkly prophetic. Economic growth across the continent, long anemic, has dwindled toward nought, with even Germany’s industrial behemoth slumping. Dynamism has disappeared, replaced by painful dependencies: Europe’s technology comes from America, its critical minerals from China. The continent’s transformation into an arid playpen for tourists, with its economies geared to serve visitors, is no longer the stuff of dyspeptic speculation.

It is important not to mischaracterize this development. Complaints about the European Union’s failure to produce its own Silicon Valley or comparisons of gross domestic product with countries of vastly different scale are not fair proofs of decline. Yet it is undeniable that Europe has been “provincialized,” as the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once termed it. The negotiations to end the war in Ukraine have shown that the bloc has been reduced to a second-rate participant in world affairs. In President Trump’s words, it is “decaying” and at risk of “civilizational erasure.”

All of this sounds menacing enough to Europeans. Yet perhaps demotion need not be traumatic. A reckoning with European decline — cultural, political and, above all, economic — could give rise to a healthily modest approach to the present. After a century in which Europe was in charge, with highly ambiguous results, it might even free Europeans of the neurosis of mastery.

At least Brussels no longer suffers from denial. Across the spectrum, there is an awareness that the continent is falling behind. A paradigmatic acknowledgment came last year from Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president. In a blistering report, Draghi enumerated the woes of the European economy, from lagging productivity to a lack of competitiveness.

Yet many remedies now in circulation are likely to aggravate the disease they purport to cure. The far right offers a familiar prescription: a racial cordon around the continent. Europe’s center gestures vaguely toward renewal through remilitarization and technological prowess. The left, for its part, either rails against European overreach or welcomes the continent’s retreat. What is needed instead is a new “politics of decline,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Internally, this would require a break with the austerity fetish that has gripped European policymakers since the 1990s. It is with good reason that the economic historian Adam Tooze has castigated EU technocrats as “the Taliban of neoliberalism” for their intransigent attachment to market principles in an age that has rendered them obsolete. Loosening fiscal rules and pursuing serious public investment would be essential to any meaningful economic catch-up.

Politically, such a shift would mean greater centralization and a pooling of sovereignty. Fragmentation has long stymied the development of genuinely continental policy. Externally, Europe would need to rethink its foreign policy priorities. The hope that the EU could secure meaningful military or financial independence from the US has proved illusory.

Reinvention would require more heterodox thinking. Europe may have to contemplate something long considered beyond the pale in Brussels: critical integration with China. Such engagement is necessary for climate mitigation, an effort now largely led by China. Yet it should also be conditional, avoiding submission to Beijing or blindness toward its record on trade and labor rights. Cooperation and export controls need not be mutually exclusive.

Europe can learn from Britain, an exemplar of 20th-century decline. As its empire crumbled, Britain faced a choice between strategic subordination to the United States or a more autonomous, social-democratic path. It chose the former, sacrificing independence for a “special relationship.”

Europe need not follow Britain’s path. No longer in the driver’s seat of history, it can shed its delusions of grandeur. On geopolitics and climate, it can still meet its goals without being the star player. The aim should be what British soccer fans call midtable stability, rather than league leadership.

This will be a bitter pill, particularly for Europe’s elites. Yet decline need not mean collapse or fortification. Cut down to size, Europe may find that a modest, well-tended place in the new global order is more than enough.