During his big trip to China, Emmanuel Macron declared that Europe should become a “third superpower”, with strategic autonomy from the United States. The trip and the declaration sparked a huge controversy in Europe, with some agreeing and others enraged. Macron has continued with this line of rhetoric since returning from his trip.
I’m not in the “enraged” camp. First of all, Macron’s comments were specifically about how Europe should stay out of a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan. But I never really expected Europe to get directly involved in such a conflict; it’s not one of the EU’s core interests, and Putin is already giving the Europeans all they can handle. Also, this kind of declaration seems pretty typical for a French politician — loudly proclaiming that France is not America’s lapdog has been a staple of the country’s domestic politics since WW2. Macron, facing domestic unrest in the wake of painful pension reforms, is simply reverting to this playbook but subbing in “Europe” for “France”.
In fact, I’ll go farther and say that it would be good for the world if Europe became a third superpower. A multipolar world is inevitable, and having a second pole committed to democracy and human rights, rather than having these notions inextricably associated with American power, would be a good thing. There are also times when Europe is right and the U.S. is wrong, such as the Iraq War. And it would be great for the U.S. — and bad news for Putin — if the transatlantic alliance were more of a partnership of equals.
The thing is, Macron’s dream of Europe as a “third superpower” looks like nothing more than typical French politician guff. The truth is that the region is simply not prepared to become anything resembling a superpower.
For one thing, Europe is politically disunited, as the uproar over Macron’s trip shows — its constituent states are not quite independent, but the whole is not quite a superstate either. This disunity was on display in the Eurozone financial crisis a decade ago, in which only after years of bitter infighting did the euro states agree on a bailout package and quantitative easing similar to what the U.S. did almost instantly. It has been on display in the Ukraine war, where the EU states have carried out their own uncoordinated approaches toward military and financial support for Ukraine, as well as on sanctions toward Russia. The nation-state is still the level at which key policy decisions are made, and Europe has not yet decided whether it’s a single nation-state or a collection of them.
Europe also appears incapable of keeping its main military threat at bay without massive American assistance. On paper, it looks as if European power should dwarf Russian power; Europe has at least three times Russia’s population and at least ten times Russia’s manufacturing capacity:
And yet the military aid that has kept Ukraine from being overrun by Putin’s armies has come almost entirely from the United States, not from Europe:
Part of this military feebleness is due to the lack of a unified European military command, which means that NATO — which is dominated by the U.S. — is left to fill the role of “army of Europe”. But part of it is because European countries just don’t spend much on defense. Russia spends over 4% of its GDP on its military, while the core European states of France and Germany spend much less:
Now, these countries have so much bigger of a total GDP than Russia that even with lower percentages being spent, France and Germany’s total spending exceeds Russia’s by 50%. But given the much higher costs in these countries, it’s an open question how much combat power that spending is actually buying. Russia had thousands of main battle tanks before the Ukraine war; France and Germany had fewer than 300 each. Russia had over 3000 multiple rocket launchers; France had 13, and Germany 38. Russia had over 6000 self-propelled artillery pieces; France had 90, and Germany had 121. Between them, France and Germany had fewer than half as many combat aircraft as Russia. And so on, and so forth. Since most of the military assistance to Ukraine has been in the form of hardware rather than cash, it’s little wonder that the U.S. has done all of the heavy lifting here; Europe simply doesn’t have the hardware to give.
Even in terms of total armed forces personnel, all of Europe combined had only about 30% more than Russia before the war.
As long as Europe doesn’t have the ability to hold a weakened, dysfunctional Russia at bay without massive American help, all Macron’s talk of “European sovereignty” will continue to ring hollow. Instead, like China and the Roman Empire both did during past periods of weakness, an independently acting Europe is more likely to try to buy off the Russian barbarians — by paying economic tribute in the form of gas purchases, and by allowing Putin small bits of territorial conquest in the hope that he will eventually be satisfied. This placating strategy was at the core of both Germany’s and France’s approaches before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and it would almost certainly be at the core of a European foreign policy strategy that cast the United States aside.
But increasingly, Europe’s weakness isn’t just military; it’s economic and technological. A region that once dominated the global economy is now falling behind in almost every important area of industry, and in economic importance as a whole.
It’s impossible not to notice that Europe is being economically eclipsed. The EU’s GDP was equal to America’s in the early 1980s, but since then it has grown considerably more slowly. As for China, its economy eclipsed Europe’s in size as of 2020.
Much of Europe’s relative decline is demographic, even though Europe now lets in tons of immigrants and has a total fertility rate only slightly lower than the U.S. A more worrying issue is slow growth in per capita output. Though East Europe has grown quickly since its communist days, and Germany has mostly kept pace, France and Italy have seen living standards grow much more slowly than those in the U.S.
But even more disturbing is the way Europe’s core econo
