Europe’s Hour

Anyone writing about Europe must begin with an uncomfortable truth. This continent nearly destroyed the world twice. It enslaved peoples, erased cultures, plundered resources – and did so, more often than not, in the name of civilization and progress. Between 1492 and the start of the First World War, Europe, occupying just 8 percent of the world’s land surface, controlled more than 80 percent of the world. The First World War cost over 8 million European lives. The Second cost between 70 and 85 million people their lives – soldiers and civilians, through combat, bombardment, hunger, and the systematic genocide of the Nazi regime, which alone killed six million Jews and millions of others. That is the reckoning this continent carries with it.

And then it built something that had never existed before.

After 1945, Western Europe gave rise to a project that sought to replace the logic of the nation-state and the balance of power with something new: institutions, the rule of law, shared values, economic interdependence as a guarantee of peace. The European Union is not a perfect project. It is an experiment running in real time, one that fails repeatedly, corrects itself, and presses on. But it is the most ambitious political experiment of the modern era. And it stands today at a crossroads unlike any since 1945.

The tension between what Europe was and what it wants to be is not a weakness. It is the precondition for credibility. Those who know their own history and name it plainly have the moral foundation to play a role in the world. Those who suppress it do not.

The End of the American Umbrella

There is a version of history in which the transatlantic partnership represents a natural equilibrium – temporarily shaken by Trump, but fundamentally stable. That version is wrong, and not only since 2025.

The American retreat from its role as guarantor of European security is not an accident, not a slip. It is a program, strategically justified and capable of commanding consensus across party lines. Three factors distinguish the current moment from earlier burden-sharing debates: there is a bipartisan US consensus that China is the primary strategic challenge. There is an unprecedented and explicit questioning of Article 5 guarantees by senior American politicians. And there are concrete restructurings of US forces toward the Indo-Pacific that are not reversible.

Leading security analysts have described the current US posture as aimed at keeping Europe fragmented – unable to negotiate as a single voice on trade, technology, and security. In July 2025, Washington and Brussels agreed on a trade deal that many analysts characterized as a defeat for the EU: 15 percent tariffs on EU exports, no reciprocal tariffs on US goods, and financial commitments running into the hundreds of billions in favor of the American economy.

Former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell put it plainly: Europe had been unprepared for the harshness of the world because the European integration project was built in opposition to the very concept of power politics. February 24, 2022 had awakened Europe as a geopolitical actor. But being awake and acting are two different things. While the EU spent months debating and its members undermined each other, concrete countermeasures were available: prepared tariff packages on politically sensitive American goods, the Anti-Coercion Instrument as an economic lever, targeted measures against US service exports to Europe. Instead, European governments from Warsaw to Westminster chose reflexive submission.

Trump is not the cause of this tectonic shift. He is its symptom. The rules of international politics have changed. Economics, energy, technology, and military power are no longer separate spheres. They are instruments of geopolitical leverage. Those who fail to understand this will be punished by it.

Why Europe Moves So Slowly – and Who Benefits

Before demanding that Europe finally act, one must honestly name why it is structurally so difficult. This is not the failure of individual politicians. It is a systemic flaw with deep roots.

The EU takes security and foreign policy decisions by unanimity. All 27 states must agree. A single veto blocks everything. When Hungary spent months in 2022 obstructing EU sanctions against Russia, that was not a malfunction. The system worked precisely as designed. The lowest common denominator is not a weakness of individual politicians. It is architecturally built in.

Beneath that lies a second problem, less visible but equally consequential. The EU has a common currency – but no common economic policy. In practice, this means weaker countries like Greece or Portugal are locked into a currency optimized for Germany’s export economy, not for them. They can neither devalue nor invest autonomously. The result is a single market that looks like a bloc from the outside but systematically produces imbalances from within. Wage dumping in one country drives down standards in the next. Tax havens inside the EU – Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands – drain billions from the rest that would otherwise fund investment.

This did not emerge by accident. It is the result of decades in which liberalization and capital mobility took precedence over democratic accountability and economic convergence. Subsidiarity – the principle that decisions should be taken as close to the citizen as possible – is legitimate. But it was used too often as a shield to block European agency precisely where it was most needed.

That can be changed. But only if we stop pretending it is merely inertia.

800 Billion Euros and an Open Question

Europe is rearming. That is good news, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

According to data from the European Defence Agency, the 27 EU member states spent around €343 billion on defence in 2024 – an increase of 19 percent on the previous year and the tenth consecutive rise. €106 billion went into investment and research, the highest share since data collection began. The ReArm Europe Plan mobilizes €150 billion in favorable loans, projected to unlock a total of €800 billion in defence investment. Poland is set to spend nearly 5 percent of its GDP on defence by the end of 2026. In March 2025, Germany broke its long-sacred debt brake: a €500 billion special fund for infrastructure and climate investment over twelve years was adopted, while defence spending above one percent of GDP was permanently exempted from fiscal rules – with a target NATO contribution of 3.5 percent by 2029.

This is real. This is no longer paper.

The decisive question is not whether Europe should rearm. The question is: what, exactly, is being defended?

In November 2025, the European Parliament sounded the alarm over the growing use of AI-generated deepfake videos in Hungary, amplified through channels closely tied to the governing party – with an eye to the 2026 elections. This is not an isolated case. According to the broad consensus of independent democracy researchers, Hungary has not been a liberal democracy since 2019 but an electoral autocracy. The European Parliament said so explicitly in 2022, with 433 votes in favor.

And Hungary continues to sit at the EU Council table. Votes. Blocks sanctions against Russia. Receives Putin. Collects EU funds.

The EU’s principal instrument against democratic backsliding, Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty, was blunted for years because its final step requires unanimity and members shielded each other. Progress came only through fiscal pressure: the EU froze over €170 billion for Poland and Hungary. Poland changed course after its 2023 government change. Hungary did not.

The same logic applies to the NATO question. A European defence pillar – capable of acting independently, no longer contingent on the political mood in Washington – does not weaken the alliance. It is its precondition. Nobody will disband national armies. But a European capacity for collective deterrence, joint procurement, and interoperable equipment is long overdue. The dual-track principle – building European autonomy while remaining inside NATO – is not a contradiction. It is the only realistic model for a continent that does not want to remain permanently dependent on the political whims of a single great power.

Staying Out Is Not Neutrality

There is a tradition in Europe of retreating into the domestic. The idea that non-participation equals neutrality – through abstention, through waiting for others to make the hard decisions. That tradition is an illusion.

In a world where trade relationships are wielded as weapons, where tariffs function as geopolitical leverage, where critical raw materials and semiconductors have become strategic resources, there is no neutral position left. Those who disengage are shaped. Those who do not negotiate have their terms dictated.

This is not abstract. According to data from the European Central Bank, Europe imports around 98 percent of its rare earth magnets from China – the same components found in wind turbines, electric vehicles, and fighter jets. When Beijing introduced export controls on seven rare earth elements in April 2025, Chinese magnet deliveries to Europe collapsed by around 75 percent in May. Several European automakers were forced to temporarily halt production. The ECB has calculated that over 80 percent of large European firms are no more than three supply chain steps away from a Chinese rare earth producer. This is not abstract dependency. This is a built-in vulnerability.

The same pattern applies to climate change – with the difference that the consequences of inaction here are measured not in years but in decades that cannot be reversed. Europe has shown, through the Green Deal and ambitious climate targets, that it can lead the green transition. But that claim to leadership is fragile. Trump has pulled the United States from the Paris Agreement, China dominates supply chains for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries – the same technologies Europe needs for its energy transition. Climate policy is therefore no longer merely environmental policy. It is industrial policy, security policy, and a question of strategic independence simultaneously. Those who treat climate change as a problem for others to solve lose three times over: as a location, as a market, and as an actor.

Then there is the innovation gap. The Draghi Report concluded in 2024, without embellishment, that Europe’s productivity gap relative to the United States is existential. Europe produces excellent basic research – but it regularly loses the companies that emerge from it to American investors, because European venture capital is scarce, slow, or risk-averse. Those with ideas that could benefit the public must be able to develop them in Europe. That is not a sentimental demand. It is industrial policy for the 21st century.

The old world order, which emerged from the Second World War and held for eight decades, has been shaken at its foundations. The international system is less rules-based and increasingly transactional. Those who do not play lose without compensation.

What Is Working – and Why Now Is the Moment

Here is one number worth pausing on: eighty years ago, German and French cities lay in rubble. Germans and French had killed each other by the millions in two world wars. Today, a joint European army is under discussion – not as a threat to each other, but as a shared project. This is not self-evident. It is one of the most remarkable political achievements in human history.

And it continues. The EU single market, with over 440 million consumers, is the largest economic area in the world. No company with global ambitions can afford to ignore European standards – which is why data protection rules from Brussels effectively become world standards that Apple, Google, and Amazon are compelled to follow. This is known as the Brussels Effect, and it is a form of power that Europe systematically underestimates. Europe also has the densest network of welfare states, the highest quality of life, and the most open societies in the world. That is not coincidence. It is the result of decades of deliberate political choices.

And now the decisive point: the shocks of recent years are driving processes that were blocked for decades by inertia and the logic of consensus.

Germany has broken the debt brake – politically unthinkable for decades. The EU has launched joint defence financing, a taboo that could not even be discussed until recently. Poland, after its 2023 change of government, has begun restoring the rule of law domestically and is now a NATO model pupil. France and Germany are openly discussing a European nuclear deterrence component. The European Commission is, for the first time, presenting serious industrial policy through the Draghi Report and the Competitiveness Compass.

Crises force the progress that consensus prevents.

That is the historical opportunity. Not because everything is working, but because the pain is now great enough to move things that no one wanted to touch in times of comfort. The shock of Russia, of Trump, of recognized dependencies – it has forced Europe into a clarity that is painful and simultaneously productive. The question is not whether Europe can become more capable of action. The structures are being built right now. What is missing is political will and consistency in implementation.

Europe Must Decide

In the end it comes down to a question that sounds simpler than it is: what does Europe actually want to be?

What is needed is not a utopia. It is a concrete work program. A stronger single market not hollowed out by internal tax havens and wage dumping. Coordinated European industrial policy that turns basic research into European companies instead of exporting it. European venture capital that keeps good ideas on the continent. Serious action against tax engineering by large corporations within the EU. An independent European defence pillar that functions within NATO and can function outside it too. And the consistent defence of the values Europe has given itself – even when it is uncomfortable, even toward its own members.

This is not a left-wing program and not a right-wing one. It is the minimum program of a continent that wants to remain relevant in the world of the 21st century.

A continent that acknowledges the crimes of its history without being destroyed by them would be credible. A continent that defends the rule of law, democracy, and human dignity internally would deserve to be taken seriously. A continent that builds its defence capacity because it understands that security is a prerequisite for everything else would be a partner on equal terms.

This continent built something after 1945 that had no precedent in world history. It can do so again – if it stops waiting for others to do it on its behalf.

The historical opportunity is now. And it will not wait.