Europe is the Entire World’s Whipping Boy

In the global discussion, it has become fashionable to bash Europe and make it responsible for non-European problems. The “Europe-bashing” from President Obama, who has missed no opportunity to show contempt for the continent, comes to mind.

Since the presidential election in 2008, Obama has incessantly emphasized that Europe will become less and less important in comparison to Asia, not only in day-to-day politics, but because it is structurally incapable of getting its crises under control. The tragedy is that they think the same about China, the second world power of the 21st century.

Meanwhile, emerging geopolitical regions like South America speak openly of the need for an economic and diplomatic departure from Europe. Even a “forgotten continent” like Africa that is becoming more strongly dependent on China has, during the 50-year celebration of the African Union, made the decision to “forget” Europe—regardless of interventions such as that of France in Mali.

The African Union was based on the European Union, but its new seat in Addis Ababa is a present from China. Many Africans are convinced that the “dictator’s chat club” has been until now a mirror image of the “EU chat club”—both equally useless and incapable of acting.

Europe is Seen as a Past Culture

However, Europe’s alleged descent is not only purported in the fields of economics and politics, not forgetting the waning cultural influence, as seen in the decline of European languages and the regression of its colleges.

Europe is also regarded as the loser in two other key fields of global development: demography and technology. European nations are seen as too small to compete globally.

The biggest European nation, Germany, has a population of 82 million, and is shrinking. This is in comparison to 315 million in the United States, or China’s 1.35 billion, and India’s 1.24 billion—even compared to Brazil’s 197 million people, or the 143 million in Russia, it is small.

With its focus on sustainability, Europe is identified as a past culture by practically all other big geopolitical zones, whereas it relies on resilience through technological innovation, and therefore sees itself as a future culture.

Religion and Spirituality are on the Rise

Additionally, Europe is seen as isolated in the field of ultimate justification discourses. In particular, these include religion and spirituality. These have been on the rise in all major world civilizations for years.

They have experienced an unparalleled rise not only as political factors, but also in influencing the collective rationality of the emerging global society regarding political values and relationships—except in Europe, the only region in the world that is stubbornly secular. Europe’s “otherness” is likely to intensify in coming years.

Europe’s collective reputation is also in the dumps. However, talk is generally exaggerated about Europe as the center of global crisis, because today’s crisis is not European, but is at least tri-polar: European, American and Chinese. America is also stuck in the deepest ideological polarization in its history under the reelected President Obama.

While America’s institutions function, the population’s world view has been divided, paralyzing the political decision-making process. Middle ground does not exist between the two sides. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is less about technical issues, but rather about the fundamental question of what America wants to be in the future.

America is in a Cold Civil War

The country finds itself in a type of “cold civil war.” “Corporate democracy,” the lobbying-dominated politics in Washington, and corporate personhood strike out at the principle of American individuality. Today is the first time that a large majority of the population is aware of this.

The shock of returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan finding that their homes have been confiscated by banks can hardly be described. In addition, under the influence of China’s rise, the United States is in a “post-empire” depression.

It could be in this situation, with its “Asia First” strategy and its aversion to Europe, that the United States is making the biggest strategic mistake in its history. Because what happens if America cuts its European roots and becomes more “Pacific” year after year? Can it still remain America at all?

In contrast, China juggles hard at the brink of implosion, with at least 90,000 popular uprisings, and unrest from more than 500 people in the public sphere in 2011, as in 2012—and those are just the official government statistics. International observers believe the true figure is twice as high.

China Has Grown Too Quickly

The reasons for this are to be found in the lack of grassroots democracy, growing social inequality, the rural-urban divide, thousand-fold forced relocations, destruction of nature and massive corruption among top leadership.

China has grown too quickly. The transition from the low-wage phase to a phase of international assimilation, the real estate and banking bubbles, the unresolved restructuring of the financial system and its ever-increasing global integration, the idle pension funds, the unbroken authoritarianism, the changing mindset of the now largely foreign-educated elites and the lack of rule of law and legal security are just a few dimensions. China is moving into the deepest upheaval since Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up policy in the second half of the 1990s.

As advisors to the Chinese government, such as Robert Martin Lees or Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, have already been stressing for a long time, China is nearing an internal collapse if there is no democracy. This challenge even rivals European unification.

Interestingly enough, there is today in the United States a similar self-fulfilling prophecy of decline as in Europe; while in China, the myth of relentless gradual ascent is undermined by increasing social problems. But both societies have the advantage of essentially unbroken, self-evident nationalism, which is fed by civil religion in America, and traditional culture in China.

Europe Negates Nationalism as Strength

Europe does not have this stability factor. Quite the contrary: It has tried to leave it behind. More Europe, less nationalism—and less faith in the self-evidence of the self.

But is that the only disadvantage? Couldn’t they gradually prove to the contrary that Europe is a forward-looking continent because it is trying something completely new and incredible: Not national unity and expansion, like all the others, but unity in diversity with self-limitation?

That is a completely new experiment. It could be that as a single continent, Europe anticipates all the elements coming to order, similar to the Schröder reform agenda that felt unnecessary or wrong, but is today the strength and model functions of Germany’s foundations.

The biggest question in the upcoming years will be less about whether Europe is or isn’t the continent in crisis. Rather, it will be whether there will be anything at all other than “crisis” in the future; if “crisis” does not contradict the basic feature of further global development; and whether crisis is therefore no longer cyclical, but permanent.

Upheaval is the Permanent State

Upheaval is the permanent state in times of general “shrinking of the present” (Hermann Lübbe), substituting culture with technology, and the globalized culture acceleration by the use of new communication mediums. Their real-time socio-psychological influence around the globe makes the international network more stable on the one hand, but more vulnerable to crises on the other because they tend to replace structure with process, create reality with imagination, and stability with change, if not volatility. This is the price for gaining speed.

Today’s crisis is a reaction to globalization in all major world civilizations, which account for the multi-polar world of the future, and will shape their interaction. After reaching a sufficient degree of saturation from previous incubations since 1989-91, the current global “crisis network” is shying away from the reality of this new world, and also a learning point to it. It is a type of immunological backlash of the current phase of globalization. It is necessary for a new order to emerge in order to unite mankind more strongly.

Europe is not at fault for this configuration; rather it is itself an expression of this change. Europe is currently the world’s least understood continent. Since uniting the geopolitical sphere, infighting unfolds again between traditionally major nations, and the world does not sufficiently understand that Europe is no longer interested in playing the new “great games,” like in Ukraine.

Instead, Europe chooses a new path: The experiment is not dedicated to self-enhancement, but rather to balancing interests, limits and legal relations. If this experiment even partially succeeds, who will become the world’s true continent of crisis remains to be seen.