The Abduction of Europa, by Tizian (1562)

I attended a talk by british historian Timothy Garton Ash today on "Europe in a non-European world". Garton Ash spoke at the University of Zurich, in the same place where, 54 years ago, Winston Churchill famously proclaimed "Let Europe arise!" Today, given the incredible development of Europe and the European Union, even Churchill would be surprised, said Garton Ash. Yet Europe, he continued, is also in trouble; it faces three big challenges that it must tackle:

The first is the challenge of improving relations with "Islam" (by which Garton Ash mostly meant the Arab states). Turkey, he argued, must become a full member of the European Union; furthermore, it is in Europe's own vital interest to build a real neighbourhood policy towards the Arab states and help them develop. Without this, Garton Ash warned, the pressure of mass immigration from these states could "tear our society apart".

The second challenge is what Garton Ash calls the "Renaissance of Asia". The power that shifted from Asia to Europe 500 years is shifting back to India and, most of all, China. Garton Ash compared the emerging superpowers with 19th-century European states that believe in their absolute sovereignty. Periods of power-shifting have always been periods of war, he warned, a danger that is aggravated because it is likely that China will endure an economic crisis in the near future. To avoid tensions, Garton Ash called for "massive constructive engagement": European universities, he said, should take in as many Chinese students as they possibly can.

The third challenge, finally, is the global issues; first and foremost global warming. There is a need for collective action, Garton Ash said, but supply of it is still lagging behind. He called for a G-3 - a group consisting of China, the U.S. and the EU - to set a strategic global agenda.

The underlying question with all these challenges is, of course: Why did the European Union do so little until now to tackle them? Europe, concluded Garton Ash, lacks leadership, lacks proper institutions - but most of all, it lacks a coherent public opinion. In fact, the one thing that Europeans have in common is America. Everywhere in Europe, people know what is going on in American politics - much more so than what is going on in other European countries, or even other countries outside Europe. 

The European Union, said Garton Ash, is a victim of its own success. It could only be so successful because it was a vision, a telos - and now that it has been achieved, the problems start to show. Germany, for long a motor of European integration, has become "a second France" (which is to say just a normal European state), because it has lost one of its main reasons to drive forward the European project - unification.