The European Union will soon be the last to believe that it is playing politics. Her regulatory superego comforts her in a satisfaction for which she needed no encouragement. It has been signaled in recent days by yet another threat to Elon Musk: banning Twitter if the company refuses to comply with “good practices against disinformation”. The last time she asked to speak on a similar topic was to announce the “first artificial intelligence regulation”, an “achievement”, in such a short time. The EU brags about its ability to react, what if it reenters the realm of action instead? On pain of becoming an agency whose mission is to award a label of virtue with variable geometry.
This is one of the questions posed by the latest issue of the excellent magazine Le Grand Continent, “Fractures of the Extended War”, so aptly subtitled “From Ukraine to Metaverse”, where intellectuals (Carlo Galli, Helen Thompson) and world leaders (Yolanda Diaz, Jack Sullivan) reflect on the future of a strategically determined, and concretely indecisive Europe. His feats of glory, or presented as such, are most often akin to the convening in record time of meetings of heads of state, who now manage to form a single voice, let’s say it quickly.
Yes, the famous “political Europe” has made progress in terms of unity and coordination. The invasion of Ukraine will have forced it. However, this conflict has highlighted a contradiction between its ambitions and its achievements. The constitution of a defense force seems compromised insofar as many Eastern European countries, and others less Eastern, such as Germany, buy more American F35s than French Rafales. The articulation with NATO, the nuclear protection of Washington, is a considerable and unresolved problem. Defense is not the only matter held as optional by Brussels. As the United States and China clash in an unprecedented technological war, at the heart of which are the famous semiconductors of which Taiwan is a leader, the future of Western supremacy in terms of innovation joins the future of his supremacy.
International history professor Chris Miller writes, “Whether Europe and Japan support or undermine US efforts to limit China’s access to advanced chips will help determine whether the advantage of the West in military technology will endure. The distance taken by Emmanuel Macron vis-à-vis Washington during his trip to Beijing (“Are we interested in speeding up on the subject of Taiwan? No […] Our priority is not to adapt to the ‘agenda of others in all parts of the world’) is part of the answer, and a clue to the future.
This realistic reversal obviously went against known EU doctrines on the matter. However, no details have been given since. China and America innovate, challenge, fight on almost all terrains, and Europe is content, whether we like it or not, the majority of the time, and for what it appears to be, to record , to validate, to invalidate, to criticize, to salute what others are doing. Everything happens as if the European Union were, at best, the self-proclaimed arbitration firm of a world order that does not recognize its competence or power, at worst, the grumpy good student and killjoy that we continue to listen out of habit because, after all, he is part of the class.
What a waste, though! Since she wanted to be a force for progress. But progress is not declamatory. It cannot be reduced to this hybrid form of moral and political paternalism at the end of which the mission of Brussels would be reduced to systematically setting limits of all kinds to the risk-taking of other powers. Artificial intelligence is exemplary here. Yes, it poses a challenge to humanity, which has seen others. Man sees himself, once again in his story, summoned by his own creativity; he drags his civilization into an unknown, dangerous and fascinating land, sets himself an additional obstacle, with one goal: to grow. Not in the name of progress, as fearful people suggest, but of nature.
To live is to change. Between inertia and movement there is not stability, which does not exist in any area of ??life, but regression. This is how the West has been training for its own survival for centuries. The EU cannot depart from it, on pain of disappearing under the pressure of forces it cannot dominate, populisms for example, insofar as they are opposed to it. Ecology, the promotion of human rights and economic freedom are not enough on their own. It is vital to defend them, it is just as vital not to disgust others with them by ignoring the laws of otherness, by denying this simple and indubitable fact: the world is changing, and it no longer revolves around the old continent. . The only way to be powerful is to be.
This volume of the Grand continent ends with the transcription of one of the last lectures given by the late Bruno Latour. This profuse intellectual, by nature difficult to summarize, notes the anachronism in which the West continues to live, that is to say think and act: “If the expression of free world is problematic and even more that of ‘ “Powerful Europe” is that they correspond to the previous reign, which is rightly said to be over. […] Bringing up this formula, which dates from the post-war period, is certainly going out of history and getting the wrong era, since it belongs to the new inter-war period that is now closed. »
book reference
Under the direction of Gilles Gressani, Mathéo Malik, Le Grand continent, “Fractures of the extended war, from Ukraine to the metaverse”, Paris, Gallimard, 2023.
* Born in 1990, Arthur Chevallier is a historian and editor at Passés Composites. He curated the exhibition “Napoleon” (2021), produced by the Grand Palais and La Villette. He has written several books devoted to the political and cultural posterity of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empire, Napoleon told by those who knew him (Grasset, 2014), Napoleon without Bonaparte (Cerf, 2018), Napoleon and Bonapartism (Que do I know?, 2021), or Napoleon’s Women (Grasset, 2022).
