Global disorder and the fragile European house

The year 2024 ends in international unrest. There are 56 armed conflicts in the world. Two wars (Ukraine and the Middle East) have taken on the characteristics of 'total wars' (as Mara Karlin of the Johns Hopkins University explained in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs), in which thousands of people from civil society die every day due to the military action of private terrorism (of Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi) and state terrorism (of Putin's Russia and Netanyahu's Israel).

It is an international disorder that is becoming institutionalised, turning into a quasi-permanent disequilibrium. While equilibrium produces certainty and regularity, disequilibrium fuels the opposite condition. There is no inevitable outcome from the current disorder. As Ivan Krastev, president of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, has written, 'history never marries anyone. It is a single that can have many lovers' (Financial Times, 21 December 2024). If there is to be an outcome, it will depend on the balance of power between the international players that matter. Hence the question, what consequences for the European Union (EU)?

The current international disorder is structural and not contingent. It stems from the decline of the system that emerged with the end of the Cold War. We made a mistake in thinking that history was over with the collapse of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, acknowledged Joschka Fischer, former German vice-chancellor, in Social Europe on 27 November. History did not end, not only because of the mistakes made by the Americans during their unipolar hubris (think of the invasion of Iraq in 2003), but mainly because the Western model (based on the two pillars of liberal democracy and the open market economy) was progressively rejected by widespread components of the international system. Liberal democracy has been rejected (in India or Turkey) because its emphasis on individual rights is considered irreconcilable with the predominant culture within them, characterised by communal patriarchy and religious tribalism. The open economy was only accepted (in China or Vietnam) if it was managed in a unidirectional way, so as to favour their own exports and penalise those of others. Two pillars supported by America's military power, seen as the expression of an unacceptable political hegemony. In just a few years, autocratic or semi-autocratic international actors have challenged the system of rules on which the post-Cold War international order rested, without having the strength and legitimacy to replace it with new rules. Between America and China, a plurality of intermediate powers have asserted themselves, in search of their own regional power (think of Turkey in the Middle East) or their revival as nation-empires (think of Russia). With the United Nations paralysed, there is no longer a place to agree on new rules for a new international order. It is in this vacuum that conflicts have sprung up like mushrooms. International disorder is here to stay.

That disorder is also fuelled by processes within democracies, not only by the ambitions of old and new autocracies. In America, the rejection of a rules-based international system constitutes the governing programme of the incoming Trump presidency. The latter's nationalist unilateralism aims to dismantle the regulatory systems of trade, health, and environmental protection. Trump even wants to review international agreements on Panamanian ownership of the Panama Canal (established by a 1977 treaty) or Danish sovereignty of Greenland (in force since 1953, with the island being granted its own special autonomy in 1978). He even ventilated the possibility of making Canada his country's 51st state. In Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán works tirelessly to dismantle the European Union (EU), Slovak Prime Minister Fico loses no opportunity to declare his loyalty to Russia, German Chancellor Scholz maintains personal relations with Putin as if he were an old friend, French President Macron oscillates between a clever statement and a denial that he is not. Some propose that Italian Prime Minister Meloni act as a bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic, as if the EU were a floating platform to be docked on dry land. All this, with national public opinions increasingly tired of living in international disorder, ready to follow the first Pied Piper who promises to free them from the rats that threaten them. A confusion, there and here, dramatic.

The institutionalisation of international disorder poses an existential threat to the EU in particular. If it does not rid itself of nationalism internally, the EU will not be able to confront the external nationalism of Trump, Putin, Netanyahu or Hamas. Since it will not be possible to create a supranational political and military actor with the consensus of 27 national governments, a group of countries could leave the Treaties to create a coalition of the 'able and willing'. It is no longer the time for politics made by condominium administrators. The European house, with its values and interests, is at risk. Wishes are not enough to defend it.