Mark Leonard - Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century

If Europe’s peaceful twenty-first century will benefit from the wisdom of an American banker, the horrors of the first of half of the twentieth century can be traced back to a banker from Italy. The man in question was Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose family ran Florence in the fifteenth century. At that time it was one of five city-states that dominated the Italian peninsula – along with Rome, Naples, Venice, and Milan. These cities were immensely wealthy and in perpetual competition: at that time Florence had a higher annual income than the King of England, while Venice’s revenue was double that of England and Spain. 9 In 1454, Francesco Sforza, the ruler of Milan, approached de’ Medici to propose an alliance between their two states. He wanted to gang up on Venice before it grew too powerful. De’ Medici agreed, but insisted that they must not destroy Venice as one day its power might itself be needed to stop Rome. His reply contained the historic phrase: ‘the affairs of Italy must be kept in balance’. He is credited with being the first person to talk explicitly of a ‘balance’ of power, a principle that became one of the key foundations of European order (or disorder) for five hundred years. 10 The system was based on the mechanical idea that groups of states needed to be brought into equilibrium – like the scales that bankers used to measure gold – so that no single one could dominate the continent.

Europe’s invention of small nation-states – and a system to stop any one of them overpowering the others to create an empire – was a mixed blessing. The fierce competition between them spurred them on to develop the most advanced technology in the world, and allowed a continent that was a sleepy backwater to overtake the empires of the East and assume global dominance. 11 But the logic of the balance of power was also perpetual war: the Thirty Years War, the Franco-German War, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War were all fought to stop any one country rising to hegemony.

All that has now come to an end in Europe. No one fears a rising Germany or France because all the countries of Europe have formed themselves into a network that is bound together by laws and regulations. 12 Instead of competing with each other to build up arsenals of weapons or build regional alliances, their interests are defended through mutual vulnerability, pooled sovereignty, and transparency. But outside the warm womb of the European Union, the balance of power lives on: between India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in Central Asia, and the Far East.

Although these countries are all trying to balance each other, no one is trying to check Europe’s rise. In fact, Europe has even managed to reverse the very idea of the balance of power. As its strength grows, it is becoming a powerful magnet for its neighbours who want to join it rather than balance it. The American political economist Richard Rosecrance has shown that this is the first time in history that a great power has arisen without provoking other countries to unite against it. In a remarkable survey of the formation of empires and states he shows how every major power from Spain in the sixteenth century through France, Britain, and the United States in the nineteenth century to Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century and the USA in the twenty-first century has provoked its neighbours to unite against it. 13 So why has Europe managed to become more united and powerful without attracting hostility?

One argument is that Europe is an economic rather than a political superpower. Walter Russell Mead argues that economic might draws people in while political power creates hostility. He explains this theory by comparing economic power to the carnivorous sundew plant: ‘a pleasing scent lures insects towards its sap. But once the victim has touched the sap, it is stuck; it can’t get away. That is sticky power; that is how economic power works.’ 14 There is something in the claim that economic power doesn’t create the same fears in its neighbours as political power, but it does not explain why the United States, China, Russia, and India look more benignly on the growth of the European economy than they do on each other’s economic development. There is an entire industry of US foreign policy thinking based on the need to balance China’s growing economic power, even though by some definitions its economy is still smaller than Italy’s, but there is very little concern about a European Union whose economy is the largest in the world.

The most compelling explanation comes from the unique nature of the European Union: as a network rather than a state. International relations scholars have compared the relationship between states to billiard balls on a table. They have a hard shell and repel each other when they clash. But while it is easy to clash with another state, it is difficult to clash with a network that is made up of a cacophony of different voices. The point of a network – or club – is that it doesn’t have a hard centre like a billiard ball, so when you try to balance it, you are often sucked into a process of engagement with its different members. The most surprising example of this was the crisis in Iraq.

There are few creatures more potent in Greek mythology than the Hydra, a beast with the body of a serpent and nine heads. Each time you chopped one head off, two others would grow in its place. With its many member-states, the EU is like a modern day hydra – as Colin Powell discovered when he tried to build an international coalition for invading Iraq. Each time he managed to sign one country up, he found another one still had doubts. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the conventional wisdom was that the Americans had won – dividing the European countries and prevailing on some of them to invade Iraq on American terms, without a United Nations mandate and against the wishes of a majority of European citizens. A headline in the Financial Times on 12 March 2003, as troops prepared to invade Iraq, seemed to say it all: ‘Europe is the first casualty of war.’ 15

Most people think that Iraq was a disaster for Europe, and I shared their distress at the political fall-out from the crisis. But with hindsight we can see that some good came out of it. The European project has survived the transatlantic train crash, and its multilateral agenda has in fact made a comeback. Though the Continent was divided on tactics for handling the United States, all EU countries shared three fundamental goals: to preserve the transatlantic alliance, to restore the authority of the United Nations, and to prevent unilateral preventive war from being established as a norm. Europe has somehow met all these objectives – not by putting up a united front, but by engaging the Americans with competing factions. The negotiations in the run-up to the war were reminiscent of the routines in so many Hollywood detective movies where the ‘bad cop’ scares the suspect into submission, while the ‘good cop’ wins his trust. Between them they manage to get him to confess.

In 2003, the transatlantic relationship seemed as if it was on the cusp of being discarded when the American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, grouped Germany with ‘problem states’ like Iran and Libya and Germany’s justice minister compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Robert Kagan’s fashionable thesis that Europe and the United States were two tectonic plates inevitably moving apart seemed irrefutable. 16 In retrospect, however, the fact that some European countries supported the war meant that the transatlantic relationship survived. As long as Bush needed Blair alongside him, there was at least an incentive for America not to be too destructive towards a political project valued by the British government.