Opinion | Europe Is in Decline. Good.
If Europe is to reinvent itself, it must think in more heterodox ways. Mostly, it will have to contemplate something considered beyond the pale in Brussels: critical integration with China. “Critical” is meant in both senses of the term. On the one hand, such engagement is vitally necessary for the fight against climate change, an effort now mostly led by China. Yet it should also be conditional, involving neither submission to Beijing nor blindness toward its grim record on trade or labor rights. Export controls, where necessary, can go together with cooperation.
Europe should pay heed to Britain, an exemplar of decline in the 20th century. In the postwar world, as its empire was crumbling, the country saw two paths in front of it. It could serve as a sort of butler to the United States, fastening its economy and foreign policy to American imperatives. Or it could become a kind of greater Sweden, retaining its industrial base, welfare state and relative diplomatic autonomy. Eventually, after a tussle, Britain opted for the first route, forgoing national independence for the special relationship.
Europe need not become a supersize version of Britain. No longer in the driver’s seat of history, it can shed its damaging delusions of grandeur. On geopolitics and climate mitigation, it can meet its targets even if it no longer gets to be the star player. That will require downsizing some expectations: The aim should be what British soccer fans call midtable stability, rather than league leadership.
This will be a bitter pill to swallow, particularly for the continent’s elite. Some may prefer the seductions of apocalypticism to realism, not least Mr. Houellebecq. In his 2010 novel, “The Map and the Territory,” he grimly presaged a Europe where “the triumph of vegetation is total” and the continent’s factories are devoured by the wilderness. In a striking echo, Josep Borrell Fontelles, a former vice president of the European Commission, has described Europe as a “garden” surrounded by a hostile “jungle.”
The continent’s center and far right, despite their differences, clearly agree on some essentials. Yet that Europe should become either a wasteland or a gated community is not divinely decreed. Cut down to size, Europe may find that a pleasant public allotment in the suburbs of the new global order might be more than enough.
