Europe after America: The urgency of narrative emancipation

The US National Security Strategy (NSS) has dealt two harsh blows to Europe. Although seemingly at odds, they are part of one strategic move and require a two-part response.

The first blow concerns abandonment. The US, the continent’s benign protector since 1945, is retiring to its own Hemisphere, gifting room for manoeuvre to the other Great Powers in their spheres – and admonishing Europe to defend its territory and interests. The message is: ‘You are on your own’. The sense of loss is real.

The second blow is both an insult and an attack. The Trump Administration considers the European Union, the 27-member bloc with its transnational climate and tech regulation, as a foe to be dismantled. The MAGA voice in the NSS warns about Europe’s ‘civilizational erasure’ in view of alleged demographic trends; it calls on its nationalist and far-right sister parties across Europe to ‘cultivate resistance’ against centrist governments who betray the legacy of ‘the West’. Pretending to save Europeans from themselves, its message is: ‘We hate you, because we love you.’

Most EU policymakers remain in a state of denial. After a week of embarrassing silence, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen muttered that she remains ‘a convinced transatlanticist’. Kaja Kallas, the closest the EU has to a Foreign Minister, told an international audience that the Americans ‘had a point’. There is no sign of an understanding of the challenge, let alone a counterstrategy.

As to their aloneness, it has begun to dawn on some Europeans that the NSS underwrites a return to the realist tradition of Great-Power politics, with its 19^th-Century playbook of respecting sovereignty and wrestling a multipolar global order out of a balance of power. It is a truly historic shift, re-grounding the world’s geopolitical architecture. According to an unpublished full draft of the NSS, a core of five great powers (the ‘C5’ composed of US, China, Russia, India and Japan) could act as a global directorate, without a seat for any European actor.

Here, Europe’s response should be to accelerate its emancipation into a power itself, finding the means and mindset to pursue its interests. This first blow is relatively self-explanatory and easy to respond to in principle, which is why Europeans have agreed on a minimalist programme and discourse (encapsulated in Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 notion of ‘European sovereignty’).

The sucker punch of civilizational contempt and the open attack on Europe’s values is harder to digest and most often misinterpreted. It is taken purely as insult rather than the indispensable storytelling element of MAGA’s power. Which is why in the heat of the indignation, the challenge to propose a counter-narrative – grounding Europe’s agency – has not yet been heeded.

Any response has to start with decrypting the paradox within the NSS. The attack on Europe is at odds with the approach vis-à-vis the rest of the world (besides the Western Hemisphere), where the American post-1945 tendency to meddle in other powers’ internal affairs is traded for a less ideological, more pragmatic approach; an impulse of ‘Kissingerian’ realism is evident, which China and Russia will welcome.

However, when it comes to Europe, the US strategy fuels a culture war and aims to export the MAGA doctrine across the Atlantic, even going as far as to call for regime change. How is that compatible with the ideological restraint touted in the same document?

Various factors are at play. Even if Trump himself prefers a pragmatic deal over a doctrinal win, the MAGA base is a revolutionary movement which – not unlike the Jacobins or Bolsheviks – seeks to spread its gospel across borders. If you can have governments in Budapest, Rome or Warsaw waving your white supremacist MAGA flag, you feel stronger. A ‘transnational organization’ like the EU gets in the way of such unfettered patriotism.

This revolutionary zeal is exacerbated because the MAGA ideologues see a cultural twin sister in Europe, who has taken the wrong path. MAGA’s cultural premise is a reactionary idea of ‘the West’ and of Europe, with strong white and Christian undertones.

In this reading, ‘Europe’ epitomizes the despised progressive, liberal and cosmopolitan outlook which is associated with America’s East Coast urban elites of Democrats and old-guard Republicans, along with the media and academic establishments – namely, all the potential pockets of resistance the Trump administration aims to eradicate domestically.

In other words, in empowering its sister parties in Europe through a story of revolutionary change, the MAGA movement aims to discourage any domestic US opposition in one shot. The more MAGA (or ‘MEGA’) wins in Europe, the more Trumpism can claim to be an unstoppable force, to be ‘History on the march’, which it would be vain to attempt to resist in Baltimore or Los Angeles.

How should Europe respond to this ideological gut punch? It should take narrative power seriously. It should acknowledge the appeal and even the necessity of identity discourse and counter the MAGA attack with its own story. Europe urgently needs narrative emancipation from the US, precisely because we must claim our place in the multipolar world.

After World War II, Europeans relied on universal values and norms to give them a sense of a direction at a point when nationalist narratives had driven the continent to the brink of destruction. It allowed them to avoid revisiting the difficult and uncomfortable questions of identity, of what constitutes a political community, what distinguishes a group of ‘us’ from ‘them’, and how it lives and changes through time.

But historical narrative, when in the hands of political actors, should not be immediately dismissed as propaganda, pseudo-science or disinformation. Narrative is an inescapable feature of a geopolitical or multipolar world: it is the corollary of coexisting and occasionally competing with other powers or civilizations. It is about constituting an actor for the world stage which can credibly claim to speak on behalf of a ‘We’.

In this way, narrative can offer a political and policy compass for navigating difficult trade-offs. It is only thanks to a ‘Grand Strategy’ that concrete interests and goals can be determined, day-to-day policy decisions made, tragic choices facing the community presented to the public in ways that make sense, or that short-term losses can be traded for long-term gains. This is of course what the NSS aims to achieve for Americans and the EU economic security doctrine, published two days earlier, failed to even see.

A major risk for the EU is that, without American hegemony and the glue of universal values holding it together, it might fragment into conflicting national narratives. To counter that risk, the Europeans need to embrace something smaller than universalism and larger than nationalism, an idea of Europe as a unique entity, with a unique history, present and future.

Just as at the start of Trump’s first term, when Macron rebranded the notion of ‘sovereignty’ to jolt Europe into agency and power, a similar endeavour is required now to break another long-held taboo and allow Europe to speak about itself as a ‘civilization’ and as a polity worth defending.

The bruising MAGA attack on Europe’s self-esteem should not be treated solely as a bullying insult but as an invitation to claim our place and story under the sun. Once a foreign power dictates who or what we are or should be, the future lies in vassalage.