China’s emergency and Russia’s return issue a great challenge to the European Union. To defend its model, Europe must be a global player, refuse to be the United States’ back-up force, and accept the responsibilities that go hand in hand with power.

Europe can legitimately be proud of having triumphed over its old demons of religious wars, rivalries between national capitalisms, and the apocalyptic confrontation between Communism and Fascism. Over the past fifty years the Old Continent has effectively organised itself as an area of multilateral law guaranteeing peace and prosperity. However, with globalisation, the EU now faces four major challenges: North-South convergence, symbolised by China’s dynamic growth; South-South divergence, marked by the lags seen in Africa and the Arab World; the social divide in industrialised countries; and climate change. These factors are all linked by the same problem, that of the advent of a new age of market capitalism that connects the continents to each other, on the one hand, and connects economic systems and ecology, on the other hand. The impacts of these two deals of the cards, i.e., the economic hand and the environmental hand, are seen as tensions and new power balances in the geopolitical sphere.
Can multilateral law cut these trends short and organise these new equilibria in the making, thereby giving Europe a chance to participate in the concert of civil powers? Or will the weight of strategy continue to prevail on the international game board, through either influence or confrontation, so that an insufficiently organised EU will be forced to ask for and accept US protection? What would this protection cost the European societal model? These are some of the question that must be put not just to the States, but also to Europe’s people themselves, if they mean to influence their collective fate.

1. Asia’s blast-off
The first challenge that the EU currently faces is the powering-up of China. This is impressive because of its magnitude, speed, and consequences for the global economy and environment. However, this growth is truly singular because of the socialist market economy model that frames it. The movement began in 1978, when a then improbable alliance between the Chinese Communist Party and multinational enterprises was being forged, with the latter providing technology and foreign market access to a China that was rich in savings and motivated, abundant manpower. China’s inclusion in the WTO in 2001 confirmed and cemented the deal: Beijing embarked on market-oriented domestic reforms and in exchange got “insurance” against Western protectionism.
At its 2006 party congress, the CCP announced rebalancing policies in three areas – social, regional, and environmental – as part of its striving for a “harmonious society”. Will these three pillars of the Chinese sustainable development model suffice to maintain the high rate of growth that is indispensable for socio-economic advancement and direct the latter towards a fair distribution of wealth and sustainable environmental management? No one would dare to swear to it, but one noteworthy fact cannot be denied: China is building its own acculturation of market capitalism. This approach may be borrowing some features from the American model and others from European models, but it remains intrinsically Chinese.
China’s emergence has a number of important consequences. It symbolises the take-off of Asia as a whole, with the exception of a few large Muslim countries. This boom will nevertheless depend on the continent’s ability to continue its rather uninstitutionalised but de facto very real economic integration, despite a host of strategic tensions. Next, by increasing global energy demand, China’s growth gives Russia a new strategic dimension. Moreover, it could help the world’s commodity- and energy-supplying countries to diversify their production structures by making use of the resources that they reap from their massive exports to China. This time some Latin American countries might succeed in this, provided that they prove able to make reducing their disastrous domestic social inequalities a political priority.

2. South-South disparities
The second challenge is one of security. It derives from the threats attending Islamic fundamentalism, failed States, regional and ethnic conflicts in Africa, and these developments’ links with the risk of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
It goes without saying that everything must be done to contain these threats. However, in taking the paranoid form that Republican neo-Conservatives have given it, the neo United States’ mobilisation around the theme of the “war on terror” is turning attention away from the underlying causes of extreme tensions. Populations in the throes of abject poverty and despair are left to their own devices, as in the case of a rash of African countries that lack robust, stable institutions, or kept down under the iron rules of authoritarian, even despotic, regimes that are preoccupied little with development and are usually outrageously corrupt, as too many Arab countries can attest.
These stalemates and injustices prevent these countries from boarding the globalisation boat, which, moreover, the people often see only as it is reflected by their television networks, thereby making them even more frustrated and pushing them to take the route of haphazard illegal migration.
The advanced countries’ responsibility for this failure extends well beyond the meagreness of development aid and various protectionist trade practices. The US and European governments have often supported Western economic interests’ collusion with local oligarchies. The United States’ actions in Latin America and European interests’ pillaging of mining resources in the Congo illustrate this great responsibility. China could play this “bad guy” role tomorrow.

3. The social divide
The third challenge consists of the worsening inequalities in America and Europe that result primarily from the rapid doubling of the global labour supply due to China’s sudden bursting onto and India’s more gradual arrival on the world employment market. However, this imbalance is amplified by the unprecedented amounts of money that the financial sphere is taking out of the true economic sphere. This is being done through the demand for double-digit yields that the stock markets are making on listed companies, which in turn are squeezing wages, either directly or at the expense of the SMEs that serve as their suppliers or subcontractors. The gaps between the earnings on capital and labour and the disparities between workers’ wages according to their level of qualification have widened considerably in the United States and Europe over the past twenty years and are currently reaching historic proportions.
In parallel, we see a loss of tax revenue from financial capital because of the growing integration of tax havens in the European and international financial systems, thereby facilitating all forms of white-collar crime. This is a formidable challenge, for it undermines both the cohesion of our societies and the legitimacy of the construction of Europe in the eyes of those who are losing in the great globalisation game. If this trend persists and worsens, the risk of a protectionist backlash in first the USA, and then in Europe, with the concomitant prospect of major trade conflicts between continental blocs, cannot be ruled out.

4. Climate change
The fourth challenge concerns the environment and has to do in particular with the link between the use of fossil fuels and climate, a problem that the Kyoto Protocol is trying to settle. The rationality of market capitalism, which is based on accumulation and growth, and the emerging economies’ legitimate needs explain the great inertia of our global environmental model. It is hard to imagine the system’s being able to adjust within the deadlines imposed by the pace of the climate’s deterioration, whether the adjustments are sought in the area of technological innovation, changes in our energy production and consumption patterns, or a combination of the two.
The risk that we shall have to cope with certain effects of climate change, which are already noticeable, cannot be discounted. It is not impossible that this impact will change the equilibria of production and consumption globally and spawn new strategic perils. Environmental uncertainty is henceforward part of our world and we will have to learn to deal with it.

Which European model?
What can the European Union do in the face of these challenges? From the economic point of view, everything at first glance would seem to point to reasonable optimism for the medium and long term. Of course, Europe, as the first continent to enter “demographic winter”, will inevitably see its share in global GDP fall over the next three decades, even if its productivity gains remain high or, even better, improve. On the other hand, it has economic and political means to manage its interaction with globalisation so as to maximise the benefits and diminish the costs.
The European response must be on two different levels, to wit, adjusting to the new conditions of globalisation by ensuring a good balance between competitiveness and solidarity within Europe, and changing the rules of the multilateral game in the areas of finance, taxation, social affairs and employment, and the environment.
The key question, nevertheless, concerns political will: Does Europe want to maintain the integrity of its model, which means modernising it from top to bottom, but in line with its founding principles of freedom and social justice? Or does she, on the contrary, want to use globalisation as a pretext to replace the European model with one that is closer to the more inegalitarian US model, on the unproven argument that it would be more efficient? This eminently political question was at the heart of the French debate over Europe’s Constitutional Treaty in 2005. The question will remain unanswered as long as the choices of competition and the harmonisation of the Member States’ labour and tax laws within the Single Market are not clarified.
The European Union’s true ability to influence the three pillars of global economic governance, i.e., trade, finance, and standardisation (especially as regards labour and social policy and the environment) will be determined by its political cohesiveness, that is to say, a consensus on its internal model, for a country projects abroad only what exists within its borders.

Europe as a power
Today’s strategic givens raise some more fundamental questions that cannot be separated from the previous one, given that a Neo-Liberal Europe would be more security-conscious and dependent on the United States than a Europe that is a champion of fair, sustainable development and protected by its own defence apparatus. Faced with the growing power of China, India, and Brazil, Russia’s comeback as a major energy power on the international stage, and the danger of American adventurism in the Middle East, does the EU intend to be a European power or a European area? Must she opt for a post-modern notion of the State, that is to say, an ad hoc organisation founded on multilateral law and comprising both a competitive economic area and a regional security system (necessarily within the North Atlantic orbit), achieving this through “enlargement without borders”, as the English-speaking world is encouraging it to do? Or does it intend to set itself up as a “United States of Europe”, with its own defence capacity and allied with the United States but in a relationship such that the US will no longer be able to divide its members in order to create ad hoc coalitions to meet the needs of a strategic agenda that it intends to set alone?
Can Europe content itself with being merely a civil power in tomorrow’s world, acting by influence and osmosis, through its influence on neighbouring areas or through its weight in the multilateral standardisation process? What strategic role could it play if the “big three” – the United Kingdom, France, and Germany – tried to take advantage of Europe’s weight on sensitive major issues for their own needs or if their interests did not dovetail seamly, or even clashed, when dealing with China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, and the United States? How could it safeguard its autonomy to make decisions regarding global economic governance, preserve its own social model, and safeguard its credibility as a civil power if it relied on the United States for its security?
Such an alternative suits a great many Europeans whose States lost even the memory of a global power culture in the Cold War. Too many Europeans effectively prefer the comfort of the ethics of conviction to the weight of the ethics of responsibility in a world that is constantly confronted by threats, violence, and chaos. The result is that the EU has found itself confined to the role of a back-up force: dispensing humanitarian aid in Africa, playing at peace-keeping in the Balkans, Asia, and Africa, and providing Blue Helmets in Lebanon, where it is actually operating as a subcontractor for a US-Israeli policy, despite not having supported this policy during the summer of 2006 war.
The choices before the EU today relate fundamentally to its desire to exist as a global player. Can a civilisation survive if it ducks this mission? For lack of its own strategic alternative, Europe runs the risk of seeing itself reduced to serving as US bridge heads in Eurasia and being sucked up into the US security spiral. This option would not only be dangerous for Europe; it would run counter to the mission incumbent on Europe gradually to spread the multilateral system on which it founded its own stability to the rest of the world.
The best way to consolidate this multilateralism is to ensure multipolarity. If the EU gives up being one of the poles in the global system, alongside today’s States of continental proportions (the United States, China, India, and Brazil) and Indonesia, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo tomorrow, it will be doomed to disappear. That is where the key to Europe’s choice resides, i.e., wishing to exist as a civilisation because it still has so much to offer the world.