The University: A European Power Project

In spring 2025, Europe finds itself confronted with the stark reality of its own fragility and the imperative to act. It must first decide whether it still prioritizes its desire to exist and persevere, and thereby to claim ‘the right to do justice for itself and to be the sole master of the decision to fight or not to fight,’ as Raymond Aron put it in Peace and War Among Nations.^[1] This is not a foregone conclusion. The desire to exist can wither in a political entity. In the second century BCE, the Kingdom of Pergamon bequeathed itself to the Roman Republic. Is this, silently and gradually, the path Europe is now taking? It is a plausible interpretation, given its relinquishment of the material capacity to preserve ‘the decision to fight or not to fight’, which lies at the heart of sovereignty, by foregoing critical military capabilities, a responsibility outsourced to a far more powerful ally. The paradox is that this ally now urges Europe to no longer remain a vassal. In a reference to De Gaulle, US Vice President J. D. Vance recently stated that ‘it is in neither Europe’s nor America’s interest for Europe to remain indefinitely a security vassal of the United States’^[2] – a remarkable invitation, regardless of its ulterior motives, to choose autonomous existence.

A European Singularity

To persist as Europe is first and foremost to understand ourselves through our historical and political uniqueness. As an institution, the European Union is an experimental and remarkably subtle model of governance.

In its highly technical economic integration, Europe sought to turn the page on five centuries of near-perpetual warfare culminating in two world wars that reduced the continent to rubble. Over that half-millennium, Europe experienced only three extended periods of peace: after 1815, between 1871 and 1914, and then again between 1989 and the early 2000s. In a 1933 letter to his brother, the philosopher and historian Élie Halévy observed that ‘from 1870 to 1914 we lived sheltered from history.’^[3] Whether or not Francis Fukuyama was aware of this remark – perhaps via Alexandre Kojève – the resonance with his own ‘end of history’ thesis is striking.

The Italian novelist Antonio Scurati recently asked, ‘Dove sono ormai i guerrieri d’Europa?’^[4] (‘Where have all the warriors of Europe gone?’). He argues that the historical exception of the past eighty years of peace (which nonetheless includes the Cold War) has had profound anthropological consequences for the pacified Homo europeanus. With peace becoming the norm rather than the exception, the grammar of war has ceased to be self-evident for Europe, as can be seen in both military budgets and the syllabi of our Master's seminars.

This approach rests on the assertion that open, inclusive and rights-protecting systems will ultimately prevail in the competition between entities. It is also based on a critical reading of the notion of power^[5], aiming to introduce so many new ingredients that the foundation of power itself is obscured. Finally, it is grounded in a degree of naivety, not without condescension, that involves ignoring the intentions of others when they do not align with our worldview: Europe had no enemies because it did not seek them, believing it could convince others through the example of the superiority of law over force. It believed in the peaceful promises of gentle commerce without seeing the extractivist implications of this ‘carbon peace’^[6], and the very real risks they pose to humanity as a whole. In short, Europe believed in the post-Westphalian world and now finds itself thrust into a pre-Westphalian one, an ‘era of predators’, as it was recently described by Giuliano Da Empoli.^[7]

The Bet on Scientific Knowledge

In the face of the return of imperialism, European strategic autonomy is obviously a matter of means and resources. It is also a major intellectual issue for schools and universities across Europe. The grammar of power should not be confined to a limited body of diplomats and military personnel, who themselves have been marginalized within the affairs of the state and Europe as other functions, economic and social, have developed.

Through education and higher learning, it is our responsibility to instil in our youth an awareness of what makes Europe unique. I would like to propose three main avenues of work – and I do so at a moment when I myself am transitioning from the world of diplomacy and the daily management of power relations to the university.

Firstly, Europe must fully embrace the role of universities as a central element of its identity and its power. It is on our continent that universities were born, governed by protective rules that allowed for the development of knowledge that was independent of immediate practical use, but whose social utility would become evident over the long term. From the twelfth century onwards, with growing intensity, the emergence of European rationalism could not be separated from the increasing prominence of the university as an institution. For centuries, the university and the Church were the only institutions capable of ensuring the circulation of ideas across the European continent. Today, as in the past, we must defend spaces where all dogmas can be freely contested. The freedom of research and of inquiry must be preserved at all costs. Freedom of speech and academic freedom are their contemporary translations, and the public authorities must commit to these principles in the national and European interest. At the same time, higher education institutions must act with equal vigour against attempts at intrusion from above, or from outside, as well as from below or within. If certain attempts to impose a particular viewpoint are received with more leniency than others, it is the contract between universities and our societies that is broken. Sciences Po has been dealing with this challenge in the last year and a half, and it has crafted a doctrine of its own on the sensitive issue of institutional positioning, adopted by its governing bodies after long deliberations.^[8]

In this spirit, we must take into account the particular relationship to knowledge and historical understanding that Europe has developed over more than five centuries, from Galileo to Carlo Ginzburg, passing through Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Marc Bloch. This bet on science and scholarship remains more relevant than ever. The member states of the European Union rank among the top countries in the world for research funding. With Horizon Europe, its framework programme for research and innovation for 2021–27, the EU has allocated €95.5 billion in funding to hundreds of universities across the continent. In his report published in September 2024, Mario Draghi advocates doubling this budget to €200 billion over seven years.

Secondly, Europe must preserve the capacity of universities as spaces where students, who will remain active for at least forty years, are trained to engage with long-term thinking. It is because of this relationship to scientific knowledge and the long term that Europeans read the reports of the IPCC, that we pay attention to what climatologists from around the world are telling us, that we have built a collective awareness of the climate emergency, so that Europe continues to champion the green transition. The challenges to be overcome are present now; and tomorrow, whether in financial institutions, industry and administrations, we will need young people who are well trained and intellectually equipped to enact an effective ecological transition.

The focus is often, and rightly, on the hard sciences. However, I would like to point out that there must also be a policy supporting research in the humanities and social sciences. Our students understand, in addition to the centrality of the climate issue, the extent to which international political and security shocks will affect them. There too, there is a time dimension, the capacity to look forward into the distant future and to look back deeper into the past is crucial. In today’s obsession with instantaneity, the university plays a crucial role as guardian of the temps long.

This is why European research funds must also better support studies dedicated to understanding the empires that threaten us, the actors who designate us as their enemies, or the major transformations in warfare currently unfolding, such as those observed in Ukraine. Yet, these areas of study remain underrepresented in Europe. In the third cluster, ‘Civil Security for Society’, under the second pillar of Horizon Europe (‘Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness’), perspectives on geopolitics or general strategy are not addressed. Likewise, the European Defence Fund (with a budget of around €7.3 billion between 2021 and 2027), an ad hoc instrument by the European Commission to support research and development in defence, focuses exclusively on technological subjects. How can Europe rearm itself militarily without rearming intellectually? The era of happy globalization has been over for almost fifteen years; it is time for this to be reflected in European research policy in the humanities and social sciences.

Thirdly, Europe must embrace the cultural heritage that is its own as the cradle of the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and site of the industrial revolution. The commitment to science among Europeans is no longer a given, even in its deepest foundations. The epistemic model, as once formulated by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn, was for Europeans a self-evident truth, just as the hypothetico-deductive method and the importance of evidence management were. Consider, for example, the rise of fake news and its manipulation by hostile powers, the cognitive maelstrom imposed on our children's minds by social media, or the effects of the development of artificial intelligence on learning, knowledge production and the human relationship to knowledge – effects we are not yet fully capable of discerning. This only further reinforces the need to reaffirm an authentic scientific policy that is firm in its foundations. Europe must also more clearly embrace its commitment to invest in scientific fields that are at the heart of its future capacity to exist as an autonomous body or entity.

We know, thanks to Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson,^[9] and many others, that inclusive societies tend to prevail in the long run. A democracy in retreat will see its universities weakened, and weakened universities will eventually harm our common democratic framework, this ‘critical infrastructure of all critical infrastructures’,^[10] as it was aptly described by Alexandre Escudier and Nicolas Leron. Although Europe has experienced a decade of setbacks and shocks, it has a card to play here, if it remembers that it is a continent of universities. Our self-interest, as well as our values, now command us to be the refuge for knowledge wherever it is under pressure. Moreover, our continent will gain in unity and stability as a result.

For our higher education institutions, preserving this democratic framework and remaining spaces of debate with respect for pluralism, spaces where we know how to create and innovate rather than suffer external innovation – this is the strategic challenge. The European project must indeed become a project of power, including in the academic and scientific realms, but in the service of one idea: that of a democratic Europe capable of showing the world that this singular and seemingly fragile model of academic freedom is, in reality, the most effective of all.

About the author

Luis Vassy is the President of Sciences Po and was previously the Chief of Staff of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs (2022-24) and France's Ambassador to the Netherlands (2019-22).