LONDON, 2 August 2004 — 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.
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 toward 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 European Union is that the nation state is in decline, hence the need for a larger institution that 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 Southeast 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 toward unilateralism, thereby weakening the trend toward 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.
