Europe’s role between the US and China

For seventy years, Europeans have been trying to forge a genuine political union. But, so far, the basic element of political unity has been missing: the fear of an external threat. Those days are over. In a world of giants, the EU must formulate a coherent foreign policy.

We seem to be back where we started. The world is divided between two opposing blocs and Europe struggles to find a new role for itself. Its own integration efforts depend on finding an adequate definition for this role.
During the early years of the Cold War, the term “Third World” seemed reserved for Europe. Many considered that, after economic recovery, it was more or less inevitable that Europeans would want to affirm themselves as a third pole of global power together with the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a plausible idea. Europe had been able to recover from the destruction of the First World War and a similar recovery was expected after 1945. It would take on ...