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Dear Readers,
The two texts that follow are important parts of the more and more widespread movement to assert united Europe as the only form to keep alive the emancipatory inheritance of the European Enlightenment and thus to enable European civilization to survive, a movement which I fully support and in which I participate. The first text is a programmatic declaration co-written by Klossa, Trautmann, and me, appeared in many European media, and is also available at the platform Project Syndicate. The second text, written by Kaja Puto, was originally published in Polish at www.krytykapolityczna.pl and was translated into English by Marek Jedliński.
Europe Must Choose Between Power and Dependence
Guillaume Klossa, Catherine Trautmann, and Slavoj Žižek
In 2027, high-stakes national elections will be held in nine countries—France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Greece, Finland, Estonia, Slovakia, and Slovenia—that together account for over half of the European Union’s population. Although these contests, as well as an indirect federal presidential election in Germany, will hinge on issues such as cost-of-living pressures, immigration, public debt, security, and social protections, a more fundamental question will run through them all: Do we Europeans want to remain masters of our own destiny, or will we allow the decisions that matter most to be made elsewhere?
The urgency of this choice is already apparent. The Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) recent victory in Saxony-Anhalt is a warning not only for Germany but for all of Europe. Controlling our own destiny requires that we can defend ourselves as the United States scales back its commitments to allies. It also means maintaining support for Ukraine; upholding democracy, the rule of law, and media pluralism; harnessing AI for the common good; securing our military, scientific, technological, energy, and industrial autonomy; and preserving our social and environmental model.
Although the ingredients of European power already exist, they have yet to be melded into an effective compound. We Europeans often discuss defense without defining the sovereignty it should protect. We allude to competitiveness without adequately implementing the solutions already identified to address Europe’s strategic vulnerabilities, and without pursuing the policies needed to significantly and structurally raise Europe’s growth potential. We speak of reindustrialization without deciding how to finance it. And we proclaim the importance of AI without offering a social vision for it.
Such muddling through will not do. Echoing the Strasbourg Declaration of November 27, 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accurately described the breakdown of the international order as a result of the growing use of energy, technology, finance, and supply chains as instruments of power and coercion.
This issue will come into sharper focus in Strasbourg on September 16, when Carney will attend European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address as a guest of honor, before addressing the European Parliament the following day. Carney has urged middle powers to act together as great-power rivalries intensify, and his presence will put this task squarely on the EU’s political calendar. But Europe’s ambition must go further. Rather than settle for middle-power status, it must become a democratic superpower—powerful, sovereign, and non-imperial. That is why we founded the Europa Power Initiative, whose goal is to bring coherence to Europe’s efforts to adapt to the geopolitical challenges it faces.
Europe must be careful neither to overestimate nor underestimate its strengths. Its powerlessness in some areas is real, but in others, it is merely presumed. Europeans must reckon with how to transform a supranational polity into a democratic, sustainable, and responsible power capable of defending its own interests, preserving its citizens’ freedoms, and offering a vision grounded in shared rules, cooperation, and multilateralism.
Fortunately, our citizens are not demanding “more Europe” in the abstract. They want the EU to be more than a mere market with shared rules and procedures. They want it to become a real power capable of protecting, investing, anticipating, deciding, and acting when national-level policymaking is no longer sufficient. The choice, then, is not between one’s country and “Europe.” It is between declining individually or exercising power together.
By transforming the EU into a democratic power capable of acting swiftly in a crisis, we would be creating not a superstate that erases nations, but rather a community that enables states to exercise powers that none can wield alone. Such a project would respect the will of Europe’s peoples and the diversity of its member states. It would establish common capabilities in decisive areas—defense, energy, research, semiconductors, cloud computing, data, AI, and investment—while keeping decision-making at the local or national level whenever that is most effective and legitimate (the subsidiarity principle).
True power does have a price; but continued powerlessness would cost more: deeper dependencies, weaker democracies, and the undermining of our social and environmental model and cohesion. The key challenge is to avoid impossible choices like spending more on defense at the expense of health, education, research, social protection, climate action, or culture. Pooling investments that require scale, for example, could overcome this dilemma by increasing the impact of every euro spent.
Technological sovereignty is not merely about limiting the risks of AI. It also calls for harnessing new tools to improve health care, education, research, and governance. It requires shared digital infrastructure controlled in Europe, measures to protect our citizens’ and businesses’ data, and expanded rights and freedoms to give everyone greater agency.
The 2027 elections will be national in form but European in consequence. Any decision by one state on defense, energy, immigration, industrialization, Ukraine, or technology affects the others. Every European therefore has a stake in elections where they will not vote. Managing this asymmetry demands better coordination among national campaigns: candidates should be asked similar questions, and the implications of their proposals for the EU should be compared. The point is not to erode European voters’ sovereignty, but to ensure that they are exercising it with full awareness of their interdependence.
Independent, diverse, innovative, and high-quality media—especially public-service media—have an essential role to play here. Joint investigations and transnational debates would give next year’s elections a European perspective, thereby cultivating a sense of shared consciousness. The Europa Power Initiative was founded in Strasbourg in this spirit. With the goal of turning our interdependence into democratic debate and common proposals, our October 21–23 conference will bring together political leaders, experts, media representatives, and citizens to prepare for challenges Europe must confront.
Building the power to exercise sovereignty and preserve Europeans’ way of life means restoring our freedom to act together. There is no other way citizens can gain control over their future.
Europe is waking up from the American dream. It won’t survive without radical self-criticism
Kaja Puto
It’s official: Washington is relinquishing its role as global hegemon. The National Security Strategy signed by President Donald Trump brings an end to the postwar logic under which the United States guaranteed European security and democracy. In the new American view, Europe is no longer an ally—it is now a problem. It cannot guarantee its own security, it is unable to rein Russia in, it is censoring social media and destroying national identities.
Elon Musk added fuel to the fire when he wrote on X that “the European Union should be abolished.” He was reacting to a €120 million fine imposed on his platform by the European Commission for breaching transparency obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act—including misleading identity verification, opaque advertising, and preventing researchers from being able to scrutinise the platform. “Exactly,” chimed in Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.
On Tuesday, Trump turned up the heat on Europe in an interview with POLITICO. He described it as a “decaying group of nations” governed by “weak people.” “I think they don’t know what to do. Europe doesn’t know what to do,” said the U.S. president.
It is hard to contest that last point. EU leaders’ response to American scoldings has been characteristically cautious. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas stressed that Europe and the U.S. “are the greatest allies and should stick together.” European Council President António Costa expressed satisfaction that the United States “still considers Europe an ally.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen waited until Thursday—almost a week later—to respond.
“From the bottom of my heart, I’m a convinced transatlanticist”, but it is “important that we take pride in being the European Union,” she concluded, rather vaguely.
European leaders behave as though they were trapped in a bad dream that will end as soon as Donald Trump leaves office. As though they believed that the United States will eventually return to its post as guardian of Europe and democratic values—or as though they could see no other way out. The trouble is that for decades the United States has “defended democracy” selectively and instrumentally—and Europe has eagerly benefited from it.
The U.S. sold the world the language of values. It was always about interests
You have to give the Americans this: they are masters of storytelling. The story of Pax Americana—the American order imposed on the world—begins sometime around 1944. Europe lies in ruins, Hitler’s armies are losing their offensive capabilities, and the Soviet Union is beginning to throw its weight around across what is now Belarus and Ukraine. And then he appears: Uncle Sam, like a Marvel-designed superhero.
He lowers the ramps of the landing craft for soldiers in Normandy, displays superhuman might over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and dispenses justice at the Nuremberg trials.
In the second half of the 1940s, Hitler’s rants disappear from German radio, replaced by swing and hillbilly bop. Uncle Sam first unveils the Marshall Plan, saving Europe from starvation, then brings forth NATO to deliver it from the Soviet threat. He protects the world from the next Great Depression by making the dollar its main reserve currency through the Bretton Woods system.
Over the following decades, Uncle Sam entertains the world with ever more seductive stories about himself, amplified by mass television and pop culture; makes a fortune from the globalisation of trade; and valiantly defends Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile, Korea, and Vietnam from the locust plague of communism. In 1989, he scores his decisive victory. Pink Floyd plays amid the ruins of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev appears in a Pizza Hut commercial, and caps emblazoned with red stars flood market stalls as tourist trinkets.
Francis Fukuyama proclaims the end of history—the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy in every corner of the globe. But Uncle Sam cannot put his feet up just yet, because villains are still marauding along the final stretch of this highway: terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya; drug traffickers in Panama, Colombia, Bolivia.
Meanwhile, China is becoming a formidable power, Europe’s engines of growth begin to splutter, and Uncle Sam discovers Twitter. He no longer seems capable of acting towards anything beyond immediate gratification and stays out of the way of the powerful villains, yet he still sees himself as democracy’s defender—although increasingly the place where he feels called upon to intervene in its defence is Europe.
In Trump’s language, values recede into the background and naked interests come to the fore. Interests were always what drove Uncle Sam’s actions, if not his rhetoric. The United States entered the Second World War to defend its sphere of influence in the Pacific and freedom of navigation along global trade routes. Putting the economy on a war footing triggered a boom that, in the decades that followed, enabled millions of Americans to fulfil the dream of a white pickup truck, a house with a porch, and a quiet life.
The Marshall Plan opened European markets to American capital and bound them to the dollar system, while NATO made Europe dependent on U.S. security policy, in which the continent served as a buffer against the Soviet Union. The Cold War “defence of the free world” against communism, the “stabilisation missions” of the war on terror, and “law-enforcement assistance” in the fight against drug crime were likewise subordinated to the logic of American economic interests.
It was the same logic that allowed the United States to turn a blind eye to the anti-democratic sins of its allies—Suharto’s Indonesia, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
And it is the same logic Trump invokes today as he abandons Europe, plays down Russia’s ambitions, and concentrates on economic, technological, and military rivalry with China.
Why is the U.S. abandoning Europe?
Pax Americana, the postwar global order, may have been the best of all political worlds. At least it seemed best for Europe and the entire Western world, because it was in the United States’ interest for Europe to develop, remain secure, and amass wealth. For Germans to take pride in their cars rather than in their blue-eyed DNA, and for the French and British to compete, at most, over whose high culture was more pompous. For people in the Eastern Bloc to get a close-up look at capitalism with its most human face possible.
And for Europe to be rich enough to keep buying American goods.
Today’s ageing, economically short-winded Europe is neither a crucial export market nor an essential technological partner for the United States. Nor, unlike during the Cold War, is it a central theatre of global operations. If anything, Europe gets in the way of America’s attempt to focus on the Indo-Pacific, the arena that now matters most to Washington.
Only now is Europe discovering first-hand the kind of logical somersaults the United States is capable of when something gets in the way of its imperial plans.
Until now, it was an experience most familiar to the countries of the Global South. Repeated displays of American hypocrisy and double standards have globally discredited the language of Pax Americana—the language of fostering democracy, humanitarianism, and human rights. Today, it inspires hope in almost no one. It has been drowned out by the roar of bombs falling on Iraq, the snarl of chainsaws in the Amazon, and the hum of air conditioners inside corporations responsible for deforestation, hunger, and climate change.
That is why Russia, once it had recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, married its own tradition of sheer political mendacity to the American habit of veiling imperial interests in the language of democratic values. First, it borrowed the U.S. discourse of the “war on terror” to legitimise its own crimes in Chechnya. Then, to the delight of much of the non-Western world, it began trolling American rhetoric by announcing that it was “defending the Russian-speaking population”—a story that later metastasised into the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
To be clear: Russia bears responsibility for its own imperial excesses, above all for its war against Ukraine. Contrary to what many of my fellow leftists in the West and elsewhere seem to believe, neither is American hypocrisy their cause, nor does it excuse them. Equally, however, Russia would not have been nearly so effective at promoting its narrative of this war had Uncle Sam not done so much to discredit the very idea of democracy and self-determination.
Europe did more than turn a blind eye to this disgrace when it suited its interests: it contributed to it. France, for all its pride in its revolutionary heritage, waged a brutal colonial war in Algeria. Britain, the birthplace of parliamentarianism, crushed an uprising in Kenya, used torture in Northern Ireland, and supported anti-communist juntas from Athens to Oman.
Italy quietly supported mafia networks as part of its struggle against the Italian Communist Party, while Germany—even before reunification—built its power partly on energy trade with Russia.
European liberal project is losing support
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Europe stepped into a role similar to the one the United States had played towards it after the Second World War. Its economic expansion eastwards was accompanied by the language of democracy promotion and the promise of a shared European emancipation.
The effects of European integration are, of course, nowhere near as grotesque as the outcome of the U.S. “stabilisation mission” in Afghanistan. Quite the opposite: millions of Eastern Europeans are better off today than they were after the collapse and dislocation of the post-socialist transition—even if many had to leave their home countries to achieve it.
But powerful EU actors’ habit of paying lip service to values while pursuing their own interests has soured people on the Union’s periphery, alienating them from the European project itself. Greece and Spain have never forgiven Brussels and Berlin for imposing austerity after the Euro crisis, and later for their indifference to the migration crisis emerging in those countries.
The Visegrád states have good reason to feel they’ve become mere assembly lines bought up on the cheap by the richer Western countries, which threw a mass of inferior-quality products into the bargain. Countries bordering Russia have legitimate grievances against Brussels for turning a blind eye to doing business with Moscow. And the Brussels bureaucracy’s blindness to local circumstances and unintended consequences—from unfair hikes in energy prices and subsidies favouring the largest farms to those wretched bottle caps tethered to our plastic bottles—has turned thousands of EU citizens against systemic solutions that are perfectly sensible, even if imperfectly designed.
A common argument among European liberals is that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are responsible for strengthening anti-democratic and anti-EU narratives in Europe. But what they are really doing is exploiting for their own purposes frustrations that already exist.
Hostility towards the European Union is increasing even in Poland, a champion of absorbing EU funds. According to a Eurobazooka poll commissioned by the French magazine Le Grand Continent, 92 per cent of Poles supported remaining in the EU in 2022. Today, a record 25 per cent favour Polexit.
The liberal Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza speculates that this may be the result of Karol Nawrocki’s victory in the presidential race or of Jarosław Kaczyński’s own escalation of anti-EU rhetoric. It is an easy enough conjecture, but it fails to explain why that rhetoric is falling on fertile ground.
It does not probe into how Poles have been changed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; how, at least initially, they were impressed by Ukrainians’ assertiveness towards the West; what instincts have been activated by the newly acquired sense of danger; how the already fragile trust in Germany, Europe’s supposed leader, has withered; or, finally, how the weakness of European leaders themselves is perceived.
That last factor seems crucial today. The international POLITICO poll bears this out. Europeans share Trump’s assessment: their leaders are weak. And they want those leaders to stand up to Trump rather than try to cut a deal with him at any cost.
The right likes to compare the European Union to the late Soviet Union. It sees the EU as a colossus with feet of clay, run by out-of-touch apparatchiks incapable of tolerating criticism or navigating change.
This is not an entirely inaccurate assessment—and it applies not only to the EU, but more broadly to liberal democracy in the now-defunct world of Pax Americana. Adam Curtis captured this perfectly in his 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation. The term was coined by a Russian anthropology professor to describe the late Soviet Union, when everyone knew the system was collapsing but no one could imagine an alternative, so everyone carried on pretending that things were fine. A decade ago, Curtis argued that a Western world mired in crisis was heading down the same road.
In 2025, the liberal elites—along with those who have their reservations about those elites but still believe that liberal elites are preferable to whoever is destined to follow—resemble less the apparatchiks of the late Soviet Union than the communist hardliners behind the Yanayev coup, who tried to turn back the clock in August 1991.
The world they want to save no longer exists. Pax Americana no longer exists. And that means the very purpose of the European project designed within its framework is now in question.
Europe needs to lose its baby teeth
In a sense, Europe is back in the year 1945. It has to tell its story anew—this time on its own, without help from the United States. If it fails, the far right will make itself at home in the ruins, and perhaps—at least on Europe’s eastern periphery—so will Russki Mir, the “Russian World”.
But fear of the latter must not be the only glue holding this new story together. The more unevenly Russia directs its threatening gaze towards different parts of Europe, the weaker that glue will become—as the deep divisions within war-torn Ukraine already demonstrate.
Nor can the old story of a common European nation serve as that glue—and I say this as one who, to some extent, identifies as European. Anyone who has visited the House of European History in Brussels knows how poorly that story works.
Opened in 2017, the exhibition was designed so as not to offend anyone. The result is a story without emotion, conflict, or heroes. It is a technocratic narrative about the inevitability of integration, guiding visitors through those events that happen to fit the thesis.
We learn a great deal about the First World War—the story of the second is harder to tell—the Spanish Civil War and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Visitors will not find a word about the costs of the various transformations, though. Nor will they be exposed to local nuances or conflicts of memory.
The main problem with this story is not that it is highly selective and false. Every national story is selective and false to some degree; none fits perfectly with every local memory. The real problem, as I wrote shortly after the House of European History opened, is that it produces no agency.
In the Brussels exhibition, the story of colonialism ends with self-flagellation over the Iraq War; the story of the Holocaust ends with refugees drowning in the Mediterranean; and the story of the oil crisis and the neoliberal 1980s ends with the financial crash of 2008.
Everything has been duly acknowledged, but very little follows from that acknowledgement beyond a message that is not especially stirring as political propaganda: “We know we’re getting everything wrong, but let’s plod on anyway.”
Europe needs to lose its baby teeth and grow a permanent set—to prove that it has strength of its own and can stand independently of mad Uncle Sam. That act of unclecide requires a radical break with the legacy of Pax Americana.
We need to condemn the sins committed by NATO under American leadership and the global sins of liberal democracy, including our own. Only then can Europe become an independent actor in the eyes of its own citizens and distinguish itself from the United States in the eyes of the Global South.
The new European story must make a radical break with the decay of the American world. It needs to say clearly: we do not want homeless people lining the streets of obscenely rich European cities, trailer parks of destitution, or fentanyl zombies multiplying in direct proportion to the revenues of pharmaceutical corporations.
We do not want a broken arm to be punished with bankruptcy, school shootings to become fixtures of the academic calendar, or politics to be written by billionaires’ bank transfers.
We want prosperity for the many, technological sovereignty from Big Tech, green reindustrialisation, and energy autonomy. We want Scandinavian prosperity, Germany’s culture of dialogue, French agency, Estonian digital prowess, Ukrainian resilience, Dutch urban planning, and Polish creative ferment.
At the same time, this story has to abandon the discredited, moralising language of values. That does not mean following Trump in reducing everything to the rhetoric of the deal. We need to speak the language of interests rooted in values.
Interests, plural—because Europeans’ needs are diverse. Brussels must stop pretending those needs will eventually converge, stop hunting for—and imposing—rotten compromises.
That means reforming not only an extremely rigid bureaucracy, but also the logic underpinning the European economy, which has so far served only the strongest countries best.
Southern Europe needs support in fighting energy poverty and the gentrification of tourist areas, and in strengthening public services. Eastern Europe needs investment in local supply chains, energy, and security infrastructure. Countries bearing the weight of migration routes need solidarity from Brussels. Smaller countries need room for different models of development.
Last but not least, France and Germany need to understand that Europe is their only route back to significance.
Radical criticism of Europe is not an invitation to dismantle it.
It is the only way to save it.
