The fight for Europe's future

History of the Present (three weeks ending 30 June 2025)

It looks like Vienna or Kraków, but this is a city in a country at war. Lviv, May 2025. (Author’s photo.)

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Europe is in the early years of a new era. The continent is now witnessing a great struggle between two Europes: liberal and anti-liberal, internationalist and nationalist, the Europe of integration and that of disintegration. Who wins will be decided by the strength and skill of domestic political forces, but also by external developments over which Europeans have little or no control.

This still nameless new period of European history began on February 24 2022, with Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Beginnings in history, as in romance, are crucial. In the first seven years after 1945, the US-led west created most of the key international institutions we have to this day, including the UN and Nato. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1952, set the course for what eventually became the European Community. In the first seven years after 1989, Europe and the US effectively decided to extend the existing Euro-Atlantic order, including Nato and a European Community that was deepened to become today’s European Union, to much of the eastern half of the continent.

The two overlapping periods in which this order was created and extended, but then eroded — the postwar (ie after 1945) and the post-Wall (ie after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 1989) — came to a simultaneous crashing end with the start of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022. The institutions still exist, but the context is transformed. Now we’re in this new era’s Year Four — the counterpart, if you will, of 1949 for the postwar and 1993 for the post-Wall.

The word Zeitenwende, catapulted into the English language by the then German chancellor Olaf Scholz in a speech to the Bundestag on February 27 2022, is sometimes translated as “turning point”. But the whole point is that it’s not a point. The change from one era to another may be kick-started by a dramatic event on a single day, but it takes years for the character of the new era to be shaped and recognised — and even longer for it to acquire a lasting name. You want to know what really became of the Zeitenwende? Come back in 2029.

The cliché of “a wake-up call” has earned the witty riposte that one can wake up but still not get out of bed. At the recent Nato summit in The Hague, European leaders were keen to show they have not merely woken up but leapt out of bed, downed a double espresso and are now raring to answer history’s summons. Yet the truth is that it has taken three major external shocks to get them to this point.

One could call these, in shorthand, the Putin shock, Xi shock and Trump shock. Individuals matter in history, and the personal character and views of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump have made a significant difference. But in each case, much larger developments lurk behind the individual name tag.

For the foreseeable future Europe will face a revanchist Russia determined to regain effective control over as much of its former empire as it can. Russia today has a war economy, with declared defence expenditure running at around 7 per cent of GDP, a militarised society and a political master-narrative of civilisational conflict with the west. It’s already waging a hybrid war against Europe, deploying means such as sabotage, arson, cyber attacks and large-scale disinformation on social media.

Putin has a powerful ally in Xi’s China. But it’s not only China that is happy to go on partnering with Russia, despite the fact that it is waging a brutal neocolonial war against Ukraine. So are many other great and middle powers, including India, South Africa and Brazil. For the first time in modern history, these countries have sufficient wealth and power to counterbalance the west. Last year, the combined economies of the BRICS were more than half the size of the combined G7 in nominal dollar terms and some $10tn larger when calculated at purchasing power parity. So the war in Ukraine has brought home to Europeans that they are already living in a post-western world.

Yet the shock that finally got European leaders out of bed and reaching for their espresso machines came not from the east, nor from the south, but from the west. As with the first two, the Trump shock is not just about the individual leader. For most of this century we have seen a long-term trend of the US wanting to give a reduced priority to Europe so as to concentrate more on its own domestic concerns (“nation building here at home” was Barack Obama’s phrase) and a long-heralded “pivot to Asia”. That trend was only slightly obscured by the geriatric Atlanticism of Joe Biden and is likely to continue under any future US president.

Overlaid on this secular trend is the revolutionary agenda of Trump and his Maga movement. His administration no longer treats Ukraine as an ally but, on the most charitable interpretation, aims to be an honest broker between Russia and the victim of its aggression. In most respects, Trump’s US is now behaving like just another of those transactional powers of a post-western world. To the liberal Europe represented by the EU, it poses a three-dimensional challenge: geopolitical, over Ukraine and uncertainty about the US security guarantee; economic, with its tariffs and economic nationalism; and ideological, with its outspoken support for anti-liberal parties in Europe.

In response, the parliaments, chancelleries and lecture halls of Europe are echoing to bold speeches declaring that Europe can, must and will rise to this challenge, becoming a power capable of defending our shared interests and values. At the same time, the forces of anti-liberal Europe feel the wind in their sails. Astonishingly, they are now supported by both Moscow and Washington.

The US has sometimes been ambivalent about the EU, but this is the first time it has been actively opposed to it. As the historian Mark Mazower has argued, when ideologists of Trumpism such as US Vice-President JD Vance support xenophobic, far-right parties like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), they are in a strange way playing the music of Europe’s own anti-liberal, nationalist past back to Europe. And to some effect. Recent polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations reveals a fascinating new polarisation of European political parties on a double axis. Many hard-right nationalist populist parties are now, to put it simply, pro-Trump and anti-EU, while most liberal centrist parties, whether centre-left or centre-right, are anti-Trump and pro-EU.

So a great political battle is joined between these two Europes. Although this is a Europe-wide struggle, the outcome will be decided in multiple national arenas of democratic politics. The essential structural challenge for Europe today is that the policies it needs are increasingly European but the politics are still national. Defence, technology, capital markets and the digital public sphere call for the scale only Europe can give — and which the EU already has in trade and regulation. In a world of giants, you’d better be a giant yourself.

Detailed policy reports by former Italian prime ministers Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta have laid out some of what a Europe genuinely determined to be a major independent power in the world would need to do. Yet how much of that it actually does will depend on the results of national elections over the rest of this decade. Even the so-called European elections — those to the European parliament — are in reality the aggregation of multiple national choices.

The forces are finely balanced. In Romania this May, an anti-liberal nationalist was defeated in the second round of the presidential election, but in Poland’s presidential run-off on June 1, the hard-right nationalist Karol Nawrocki narrowly beat the liberal internationalist Rafał Trzaskowski. Nawrocki is not pro-Russian, but he is anti-liberal, anti-German, anti-EU and very closely connected to Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS).

The Polish election result is now disputed, with numerous claims of votes miscounted in Nawrocki’s favour. A PiS-dominated chamber of the Supreme Court, whose legitimacy is not recognised by the EU, is due to rule on some of these appeals this week. If that partisan chamber upholds the election result, and the government of Donald Tusk does not challenge it, central Europe’s most powerful country is condemned to a period of rancorous “cohabitation” between anti-liberal president Nawrocki and liberal prime minister Tusk, until a parliamentary election to come (at the latest) in 2027.

There’s an entirely possible future in which in 2027 the Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen — or Jordan Bardella, if Le Pen remains legally disqualified from standing — succeeds Emmanuel Macron as president of France and PiS wins the parliamentary election in Poland, while in 2029 the AfD and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK are the top-performing parties in parliamentary elections in Germany and Britain respectively. At that point, anti-liberal Europe would have the upper hand. But there’s another future in which the liberal centrist forces prevail in a series of national contests, with a crowning triumph in German, British and European elections in 2029.

Both external and internal factors will influence the outcome. Accepting the Charlemagne prize last month, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen argued that we need an “independent Europe”. Yet this rhetoric of European independence backhandedly confirms just how dependent on the US the old continent still remains 80 years after the end of the second world war. This month’s crowded summit agenda, from G7 to Nato to European Council, has been all about how to react to, and if possible keep on board, President Trump. One Canadian official nicely described the run-up to the G7 meeting as “preparing the red carpet for Godzilla”.

How much more radical Trump becomes, what happens to the American economy, whether the US descends into violent chaos or Hungarian-style electoral authoritarianism, who wins the 2026 midterm congressional and 2028 presidential elections — all this will be existential for Europe. Since many of Europe’s populist nationalist parties have identified with Trump, saying they want to Make Europe Great Again, their own political success or failure will be impacted by his.

The America we had before will never return, but there’s a wide range of possible trajectories for a post-Trump US. In the best case, building up European power will require a negotiated transition, or “burden-shifting”, with the US doing less, but still providing key strategic assets. That starts with the war in Ukraine where, given a few major military essentials only the US can provide (eg satellite intelligence, Patriot air defence missiles), Europe can make the difference between success and failure.

The outcome in Ukraine will not be total victory or total defeat for either side. Rather, it will depend on a long, complex military, economic and political struggle between Ukraine and Europe, on the one hand, and Russia and its partners on the other. The ongoing wars in the Middle East, and a potential conflict between the US and China over Taiwan, will also directly and indirectly affect Europe.

In the domestic politics of Europe, there are significant shared features but also major national differences. Across the continent, politicians in often heavily debt-burdened states face the challenge of how to persuade ageing populations, accustomed to high levels of welfare provision but allergic to both higher immigration and higher taxation, that things must change. That’s before governments even start making some efforts to reach — at least “ultimately”, to note the most telling word in a recent FT op-ed by Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz — the new Nato target of spending 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, plus 1.5 per cent on infrastructure that may be construed as relating to security.

Everywhere, you have large parts of society, especially men and women without higher education and those living in poorer regions, who feel both economically and culturally neglected. Immigration is the hot-button issue on which populists focus all these discontents. Meanwhile, young voters fear their life prospects are less good than were their parents’, starting with the widespread problem of unaffordable housing. Many of them turn to anti-establishment parties, of right or left.

Politicians of the liberal centre are struggling to come up with a credible election-winning counter-recipe. Some challenges, such as providing affordable housing, should be areas of core competence for the kind of rational policymaking on which liberals traditionally pride themselves. Others, such as working out what a 21st-century state should and should not do, call for a rethink comparable with that done by European social and Christian democrats after 1945.

On immigration, liberal centrist parties repeatedly make the mistake of adopting the rhetoric of the hard right (Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers”, trumpeted UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer) without actually controlling irregular migration. This combination merely drives voters to the populists.

What they should do is the precise opposite: effectively manage irregular migration while at the same time highlighting the positive economic, social and cultural effects of legal migration. It’s odd that the British Labour party seems incapable of making this argument, when its own parliamentary benches are filled with living, breathing examples of the diversity of talent that flows from immigration.

One interesting success story is that of Denmark’s Social Democrat prime minister Mette Frederiksen, who has combined an extremely tough crackdown on irregular migration with generous welfare spending and an avoidance of extreme xenophobic rhetoric. But what works in Denmark may not work elsewhere. At the end of the day, the politics of different European nations remain very different, and it’s often the specific rather than the shared feature that’s decisive.

So it may be a case of “horses for courses”. In Germany, a key question is whether the AfD, already the leading party in much of east Germany, can further increase its support in the country’s more populous western part. (One AfD politician in the old iron and steelmaking city of Duisburg had hats printed saying Make Duisburg Great Again.)

Locally as globally, individuals matter. Europe’s most successful anti-liberal populist, Viktor Orbán, who has been in power since 2010, now faces strong political competition from the Tisza party of Péter Magyar. Given the nature of Orbán’s regime, Hungary’s parliamentary election next year will not be free and fair; but, as Slobodan Milošević found to his cost in 2000, even an unfair contest can still go against a sufficiently unpopular longtime incumbent.

In Poland, a growing number of younger voters are frustrated by what they see as an endless grudge match between two grumpy old men, Kaczyński and Tusk, who have dominated Polish politics for the past 20 years. Tusk, who has made an extraordinary personal contribution to both Polish and European affairs, now needs to find a charismatic successor to fight the next election. In France, following Macron’s hubristic decision to call an unnecessary parliamentary election last year, a lot will depend on who emerges as the presidential candidate to take on Le Pen or Bardella.

EU founding father Jean Monnet famously remarked that “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”. Still true; but one must add that Europe will be forged in a series of national political struggles and will be the sum of the election results issuing from them.

If liberal Europe wins in the majority of these national arenas, if it enables Ukraine to see off Putin’s Russia, and if its transatlantic soulmates prevail in the US by 2029, our multiyear Zeitenwende may yet be seen as the start of a bright new era of European history. It’s not likely; but it’s still possible.

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This is a very slightly updated version of the FT Weekend essay for 28/29 June 2025. Please use this link if reposting.

As a reminder, I addressed the issue of Europe and Israel-Gaza at length in my last essay.

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