Chad Europe
The multipolar world we need but don't deserve
A beautiful Dutch woman absolutely ripped into me last night when I said, “If you’re hard-working and talented, the United States is the best place in the world to immigrate to.” She waxed poetic on the welfare state, public education, and social mobility in Europe all while dismantling the myth of the American dream. For what it’s worth, I agree with her about the virtues of Europe. She just was engaging in copious amounts of cope regarding European dynamism. If I didn’t care so much about my career, I would seriously consider moving to Madrid, Paris, or Vienna. Europe is lovely!
While Europeans do need to take a long, hard look in the mirror regarding economic stagnation and other woes, I love how worked up my Dutch friend was. It was refreshing. Most of my European friends (mainly French) are so pessimistic about their continent, the strongest critique they even can summon of the US, a country for which they often have a profound distaste, is a sarcastic comment. Typically, it’s only the leftists who go on diatribes against America.
I believe in America, but right now the US feels more like Latin American republic falling for the trap of authoritarian populism than the exemplar of Western liberal democracy. That’s one of the reasons the world needs a united Europe that proudly stands for democratic values. We caught glimpses of this possibility in the reaction to Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine. What I’m hoping Europe can provide, however, is not merely a response to American chauvinism, but an alternative model of the best society for human flourishing.
As my French-American friend Michel puts it (I’m paraphrasing): The problem with France is that it there’s no vision for the future. A country is like a company: if there is no shared mission, it fails. But Europe has something to stand for. They’ve pioneered the welfare state. They have the most liveable cities in the world. They have united 27 nations that warred ceaselessly for centuries into a peaceful confederation. They just need to get their act together and start behaving like the fate of human civilization depends on them. Because it just might.
As Balaam’s Steed observes, “we are entering the era of scale, and to scale, you need to consolidate.” Rapid technological change is about to reshape all aspects of society, and only the biggest political actors will have the power to influence the rules of the game that define the coming era. Right now, the United States and China are competing to create that future. No individual European state has the weight to move geopolitics, but a united Europe possibly could.
Europeans have different tastes than Americans, let alone the Chinese. For one, they’ve placed more value on privacy in the age of the internet. If these different preferences and values are to be preserved in the age of AI, then Europe must fight for them. I may be typically American in my own views, but I value pluralism. And I’d be more optimistic about a world that Europe has a hand in building.