Finis EuropaStuck between the U.S. and Russia, Europe is the loser of the Ukraine conflict.
By Nicolas Hausdorf
March 24, 2022
It’s too early to comment on the tactical situation in Ukraine. The experience of Iraq, Libya, and Syria has brought a keen awareness of the fog of psychological operations in wartime. For now, it should suffice to say there are two different 21st centuries awaiting, depending on whether Putin succeeds there. But while the success or failure of Russia’s intervention remains uncertain, Ukraine has been apocalyptic for European power, unveiling its absence.
Who could forget Germany’s awkward maneuvers, first sending helmets and later dysfunctional missiles to Ukraine? Who could forget France’s minister of the economy, Bruno Le Maire, promising “total economic and financial warfare” against Russia only to backpedal shortly after? The skittish European dance between the U.S. and Russia demonstrates how little has changed about Europe’s status since the Cold War ended, and how illusory the period of Euro-optimism of the mid-2000s was, which forecast the E.U. “running the 21st century.”
Ever since those days, Europe’s shares have declined. Quite literally: The Global Financial Crisis temporarily reduced the EU’s production levels to those of the 1990s, while European firms dropped entirely off the list of the world’s top ten companies in any industry by market capitalization.
At the same time, China has emerged as Europe’s industrial competitor with cheaper products ever more closely matching European quality. Germany is saving itself in a niche of investment goods, while France, which is producing nothing much really anymore, is trading in its remnants of global political and military power.
But were does Europe’s weakness stem from? The continent has arguably accrued a strategic debt for more than half a century. Its shortcomings are both technological and military. This has been apparent since at least 1967, when French journalist and politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber warned of a “technology gap” between Europe and the United States in his widely read book, The American Challenge. European states have not been able to alleviate this gap to this day. They failed to meaningfully build common strategic projects that could have enabled the scale of necessary investments to challenge technological powerhouses like America’s DARPA, a source of considerable envy.
The reasons for this failure include European states’ infamous national egotisms and the reluctance of Europe’s national champions to share their top technologies. Successful cooperations like the French-German Airbus remain an exception, and French-German high technology projects like the undercapitalized search engine Quaero—conceived between German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac in 2005—have failed spectacularly. To this day, there is a marked absence of European digital giants of the likes of the U.S. GAMA or the Chinese BATX. At the same time, Europe continues to be sorely deficient in technologies like semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/finis-europa/
