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Europe: The quiet superpower

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Abstract

This article challenges the conventional view that Europe's global influence is declining. Since 1989 realists have predicted Europe's demise, as well as greater intra-European and transatlantic conflict. The reverse has occurred. This outcome suggests the superior predictive power of liberal international relations theory, which stresses the importance of the varied national interests of states, reflecting specific social coalitions, patterns of global interdependence and domestic institutions. According to a liberal analysis, Europe is and will foreseeably remain the only superpower besides the United States in a bipolar world – and its relative power is rising. Europe is the world's pre-eminent civilian power, and its second military power, far more influential than China or India. None of this is likely to change much, because Europe's influence rests on stable factors such as high per capita income, long-term institutional advantages and convergence of underlying national interests between European countries and other great powers, notably the United States.

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Notes

  1. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (2009). Even corrected for purchasing power parity, these numbers would show a substantial advantage for Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures.

  2. http://www.icasualties.org/oef/, accessed 20 August 2009.

  3. http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/who/partners/international-organisations/index_en.htm, accessed 23 August 2009.

  4. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2078rank.html, accessed 23 August 2009.

  5. In 2008, the EU's exports to China amounted to €78.4 billion and its imports to €247.6 while US imports from China were worth $69.7 billion and its exports $337.8 (EU Commission http://ec.europa.eu/trade/issues/bilateral/countries/china/index_en.htm, accessed 23August 2009, and US Census Bureau International Trade Statistics http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html#2008, accessed 23 August 2009).

  6. OECD database: http://stats.oecd.org/qwids/#?x=1&y=6&f=4:0,2:0,3:0,5:0,7:0&q=1:2+2:1+4:1+5:3+3:51+6:2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008+7:1, accessed 23 August 2008.

  7. The US National Intelligence Council has suggested: ‘The drop-off in working-age population will prove a severe test for Europe's social welfare model, a foundation stone of Western Europe's political cohesion since World War II. Progress on economic liberalization is likely to continue only in gradual steps until aging populations or prolonged economic stagnation force more dramatic changes. There are no easy fixes for Europe's demographic deficits except likely cutbacks in health and retirement benefits. Defense expenditures are likely to be cut further to stave off the need for serious restructuring of social benefits programs. The challenge of integrating immigrant, especially Muslim, communities will become acute if citizens faced with a sudden lowering of expectations resort to more narrow nationalism and concentrate on parochial interests, as happened in the past. Europe's strategic perspective is likely to remain narrower than Washington's. Divergent threat perceptions within Europe and the likelihood that defense spending will remain uncoordinated suggest the EU will not be a major military power by 2025’ (National Intelligence Council, 2008, pp. 32–33).

  8. This is a historical generalization. In the days of British imperialism, the Empire's population and economy, and the GDP and population of single portions of it, such as India, were far larger than that of Britain itself. This did not matter: critical was the disparity in per capita GDP, control over technology, administration, knowledge, finance and allies.

  9. I set aside tactical disagreements over the timing and mode of Bosnian intervention, eventually resolved.

  10. The only consistent exceptions were the Western interventions in Lebanon.

  11. During the Cold War years, the NATO alliance against the USSR can be modeled as something akin to an n-country prisoner's dilemma game in which individual governments had an incentive to defect by not contributing full military effort to collective defense, or by resisting controversial steps toward that defense, such as missile deployment (Sandler and Hartley, 1999, pp. 225–226).

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Mareike Kleine and, in particular, Marina Henke for research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 443 Robertson Hall, Princeton, 08544-1013, NJ, USA

    Andrew Moravcsik

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This article draws on a forthcoming chapter in a book published by the Brookings Institution entitled Rising States, Rising Institutions. Comments may be addressed to the author at [email protected].

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Moravcsik, A. Europe: The quiet superpower. Fr Polit 7, 403–422 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2009.29

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