Europe has had a good run. It has been at the top of world affairs for half a millennium, since the great age of exploration connected all continents and first gave man a global perspective. The great European empires – initially Portuguese, then Spanish, British, French – dominated much of the planet for some 350 years. The places that lay beyond European control were either inward-facing civilisations like China and Japan, or regional powers without truly global ambitions like the Ottomans, Russia and the United States in its first century of independence.
But over the past 150 years, Europe’s collective weight in the global balance of power has been on a declining path. Two world wars, the loss of empire, the rise of new players with global reach – first America, then the Soviets and now China – have seen Old Europe give up its primacy in international affairs but nonetheless retain a seat at the top geopolitical table.
Since 1945, however, Europe’s influence and status have been entwined with and increasingly dependent on American power, as part of what we have come to call “the West”. The transatlantic relationship became so close, complex and deeply rooted in the consciousness and political culture of both Europe and the United States, that trying to assess European power independently of American power – i.e. to disentangle them – had become conceptually impossible. This has served to conceal the underlying erosion of Europe’s real standing in global affairs.
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