From the Postwar Order to a New Power Politics: Europe and the Illusion of Stability – A Historical Assessment of Errors
The European Union’s current strategic weakness vis-à-vis an increasingly power-driven world is not the result of a single mistake, but of a sequence of misjudgments, omissions, and missed course corrections. A chronological perspective makes clear how these developments accumulated over decades.
Phase 1: Postwar period to the end of the Cold War
Error: Outsourcing strategic responsibility
After 1945, Western Europe deliberately focused on economic integration and political stabilization. Security and the geopolitical order were largely delegated to the United States. While this division of labor was successful in the short term, it led in the long run to structural dependency. Europe failed to develop an independent strategic culture and internalized the notion that geopolitical power politics had been overcome.
Phase 2: The 1990s
Error: The illusion of the “end of history”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union came the belief that liberal democracy, free trade, and multilateralism were universal and permanent. The EU prioritized enlargement and the export of norms without simultaneously strengthening its security and power-political capabilities. Military capacity, resource security, and strategic spheres of influence were regarded as secondary or even anachronistic.
Phase 3: 2000–2008
Error: Economic globalization without strategic safeguards
In the early 2000s, Europe benefited greatly from globalization and open markets. In doing so, the EU failed to recognize economic dependencies as strategic risks. Supply chains, energy security, and key industries were insufficiently protected. At the same time, a common foreign and security policy remained institutionally weak.
Phase 4: 2008–2014
Error: Focus on internal crises instead of external power shifts
The financial and euro crises absorbed political attention and resources. Foreign-policy ambitions receded into the background. While other major powers expanded their geopolitical positions, Europe was largely preoccupied with itself. Its ability to respond to systemic changes in the global order continued to erode.
Phase 5: 2014–2019
Error: Underestimating the return of great-power politics
At the latest with the intensifying strategic competition among major powers, Europe should have reassessed its core assumptions about international stability. Instead, the EU clung to a rules-based ideal without possessing sufficient means to enforce it. Signals of power politics — including from the United States — were interpreted as temporary deviations rather than as indicators of structural change.
Phase 6: The Trump administration (2017–2021)
Error: Reactive rather than strategic action
The US administration’s open rejection of multilateralism, its rhetoric of territorial expansion, and its aggressive treatment of allies caught Europe unprepared. The EU responded defensively and ad hoc, instead of using this period to pursue consistent strategic emancipation. Instruments for economic self-defense were conceived, but not firmly anchored with sufficient political resolve.
Phase 7: The 2020s to the present
Error: Hesitant implementation of lessons learned
Although the EU increasingly recognized its strategic vulnerability and created new tools such as the Anti-Coercion Instrument, it has so far lacked the political will for credible application — particularly vis-à-vis powerful partners. At the same time, Europe’s role in geopolitically sensitive regions such as the Arctic has remained underdeveloped, while other actors have created facts on the ground.
Conclusion: Cumulative missteps rather than a sudden crisis
The current situation is the result of a long chain of European miscalculations: dependence instead of autonomy, norms without power instruments, reaction instead of strategy.
A genuine course correction requires not only new tools, but also a mental break with long-held assumptions. Without this critical reassessment of its own mistakes, Europe risks remaining an object of other actors’ strategies rather than an autonomous actor in the emerging world order.
