Europe Needs to Create Its Future. If it doesn't rise to the occasion, others will define it for it.

Europe needs to finally find its footing and realise that if it doesn’t shape its future, others will. And the long obsession with letting the US define the rules of the game is biting us ever harder.

You don’t persevere in a competition if you let your competitors and opponents define and structure it, yet Europe seems hellbent on doing exactly that. We look to China and see infrastructure buildout, manufacturing prowess, scale, and quality improving at breakneck pace. We look at the US with envy for capital markets flush with cash compared to pretty much anywhere else. And we look at China again, where DeepSeek showed that without unlimited capital or access to the latest Nvidia chips in unlimited quantities, you can still compete successfully.

International competition between countries was never a level playing field—the West was very good at telling itself it was. If you disagree, I recommend having a longer conversation with a friend from a non-Western country and listening. Europe should figure out what its strengths are, play to them, and start forming its own vision of the future that goes beyond what bureaucrats say and formulate. One of the most pressing needs in Europe is this: we have a lot of union at the political level, but we don’t have a European public space. We have national politics. The closest we have to a European government—the European Commission—is accountable to national governments. The national governments are the ones who put forward commissioners for a vote (and the parliament can say no, but being able to say no is not the same as choosing who to put on the pedestal).

Action precedes evidence. If Europe waits for evidence to form before choosing a direction, it will wait forever—or find evidence it doesn’t like (or, some might say, evidence of what it exerted on the world in prior centuries). Europe and more specifically the European Union should recognise its remarkable achievements: no war in central Europe, economic integration, high safety both physical and social, workers’ rights, citizens’ rights, high-quality food, and so on. I for one am happy that my chances of being run over by a car—and dying as a result—have dropped, thanks to effective EU regulation (in stark contrast to the US, for example).

Europe needs to formulate what future it wants—but the first step is realising that it can’t sustain the status quo. The story of the “end of history” was a nice lullaby for Europe’s societies. Why think about what future to form, create, shape, and build when it’s the end of history and life is good? The dawning realisation that society’s muscles for forming an opinion about a desirable future have grossly atrophied is harsh, but it’s not too late—I would argue it’s still kind of early. But the mental shift is important. Europe can’t sustain the status quo and has to work out what future its citizens want to create, form, and build for themselves in this world over the coming decades. That is the challenge ahead.

Europe has had a ton of wake-up calls—but it’s not about waking up. It’s about recognising that the present is not the future and the future is not the present. It’s about recognising that a muscle that was once very strong—a muscle exercised when envisioning a future and making it reality—hasn’t been used in decades, and we need to get back into the gym not only fast but also consistently. We are no longer living in the 90s or early 2000s.

Let’s start building up the societal muscle again. Happy new year.