Finding Europe’s Historical Footing

‘A week is a long time in politics,’ British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is famously supposed to have said. The seven days between 12 and 19 February delivered some of the most dramatic politics for Europe’s leaders since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago. Despite everything having been announced in advance, the pace of unfolding events still caught everyone off guard. 

On 12 February, Trump called Putin and opened peace talks without involving Ukraine or Europe; the following day, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that Washington expects Europe to enforce a ceasefire on its own; that Friday, Vice President J. D. Vance launched an ideological attack on the German government in Munich. As all too cordial US–Russian talks began in Riyadh, Trump then slandered his Ukrainian counterpart Zelenskyy as a ‘dictator’. 

A startled Europe began to react after Munich, with the French president at the centre of the response. Macron called an emergency defence summit in Paris on 17 February, assembling the leaders of eight European states plus two EU presidents and the NATO secretary-general. Since it was lacking in consensus or progress and criticized for its improvised composition, a second meeting – with further EU and NATO allies – was hastily arranged at the Élysée Palace. Hoping to salvage the transatlantic bond, the French president met Trump in the Oval Office on 24 February; underscoring his role as Europe’s spokesman-in-chief, he briefed the other European leaders afterwards. This was followed by British PM Keir Starmer’s White House meeting the same week, and Starmer then announced a third defence summit with an ad hoc constellation that took place on 2 March in London. But on 28 February, events lurched forward with the public dressing-down in the Oval Office of Ukraine’s ‘ungrateful’ leader by the American president and his consigliere J. D. Vance. Scrambling in the face of a rapidly deteriorating situation and outright spats, European leaders found themselves caught up in ‘events politics’ with a sequence of improvised emergency summits. The extraordinary European Council summit on 6 March, convened by President Costa, will be the provisional final act of this sequence, in which binding decisions for all the EU27 can be made.

It is unsurprising that European initiatives started with France, the strongest state militarily and diplomatically with its dual role in the EU and NATO. Although the UK has begun to rediscover, with striking speed, its geography and core security interests – as an island off the continent rather than halfway across the Atlantic – and draws strength from its position as Europe’s other nuclear power, after Brexit it can no longer purport to lead its counterparts in Europe. Germany’s absence, although partly explained by post-electoral uncertainty, has structural causes that go to the heart of the fundamental question underlying the frantic summitry of these past weeks: How to begin a new historical era?

At a moment when history is accelerating dramatically, Europe needs to maintain its agency, to get out of reactive mode and into that of anticipating action. To do so, we need to be able to look further back, to know where we have come from. At a moment when the foundations of the 80-year-old order are subsiding, this means seeing beyond 1945.

Here lies a major challenge for both Germany and the European Union. The Federal Republic is a product of Europe’s postwar security order; its life and identity are bound up with the US role as its protector. Founded in 1949, it is the exact contemporary of NATO (1949) and the EU’s earliest forerunner, the Coal and Steel Community (1950), and has embedded itself in these structures. This may explain why the Germans were so distraught during the first month of Trump 2.0, more than any other European nation. Their discomfort goes beyond the humiliation of being scolded by a US vice president in Munich, one week before a pivotal national election. It is more serious: Germany is losing its historical footing. 

France, for its part, rediscovers, during such historical moments, the bedrock of its centuries-old history and its role as a European impetus – as embodied by successive kings, generals and presidents. The UK too has a national image to draw on, and reserves of historical action that predate the Atlantic Alliance and membership of the EU. Germany, in contrast, is cut off from its past by the Nazi years. It must now transcend this temporal frame and find an acceptable historical antecedent. In view of its place, size and weight, this is essential not just for Germany itself, but also for Europe, as a precondition for shaping an adequate joint response to the current crisis. Friedrich Merz, federal chancellor-in-waiting, has said that Europe must ‘become independent from the US’, indicating he at least acknowledges the stakes: his EU colleagues should hold him to these words and ensuing action.

As we enter a new, post-transatlantic era – as BIG suggested four weeks ago – the question is: How do we combat a sense of powerlessness and disorientation?

One way to get a clearer sense of our temporal contours is to revisit the previous turning point of 1989. That year divided historical time into before and after, heralding the end of the Cold War and infamously the end of History itself: liberal democracy had defeated communism. While it is easy to question such collective illusions today, it is another challenge to undo them. The ‘return of History’ has been proclaimed many times since 1989, but only Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine finally realized this sentiment for the European public at large. It is only now that we can grasp the consequences of our misreading of 1989, such as our positioning vis-à-vis Russia as well as the United States.

BIG is publishing, starting right now, a series of interviews with actors and contemporaries from the political, diplomatic, intellectual and cultural spheres in a collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, with the aim of better understanding the meaning of 1989 for today. It is our belief that for Europe to take its destiny into its own hands as a geopolitical power, it needs to rearm itself not only militarily, but also intellectually, to redefine its relationship to space and time and find its historical footing.