Europe Must Overcome Its Impostor Syndrome
Europe has become fashionable to mock. Criticism comes from every direction. U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance has warned that the Old Continent has lost its vitality and drifted from the values that once anchored the West. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has urged Europeans to leave their protectionist attic and join China’s market gym.
Yet if Europe is so irrelevant, why is everyone spending so much time talking about it? Far from signalling decline, the growing fixation on the European Union suggests that it might be becoming a third force in the global order.
The euro was supposed to collapse. Brexit was supposed to trigger disintegration. COVID-19 was supposed to dismantle free movement in the bloc. Russian aggression was supposed to expose fatal geopolitical paralysis.
A fashionable narrative treats Europe as a museum: overregulated, ageing, militarily dependent and strategically slow. Europeans often internalize this view. The continent suffers from impostor syndrome, constantly measuring itself against American dynamism or Chinese scale while overlooking the distinctive form of power it has built.
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The concept of middle-power cooperation, recently revived by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and others, isn’t a novel strategy for a fragmented world. Europeans have been practicing it for more than half a century. Long before the term became fashionable, the EU was organizing collective action among states too small to shape globalization alone but too interconnected to retreat into sovereignty myths.
Europeans have built a unique system that allows smaller nations to punch above their weight by pooling resources and standards. This approach is particularly relevant today when climate risks, migration, and economic interdependence create challenges that no single border can contain. By sharing the burden of collective defense and energy resilience, the bloc ensures that a minor disruption in one member state does not spiral into a systemic crisis.
Yet even this description understates Europe’s position. The EU is not simply a middle power. It is increasingly a third force: neither a traditional state nor a classical international organization, but a political system with its own capacity to shape markets, standards, regulation and collective action across borders.
Europe’s mistake is its failure to recognize the originality of its own power. The EU’s success lies in developing what could be called effective sovereignty, rather than becoming a federal superstate. This is achieved by building the capacities Europe needs at the level where they can work, without pretending legitimacy can be conjured into existence through institutional design alone.
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Effective sovereignty means providing European public goods that no member state can secure by itself: a continental market, monetary stability, bargaining power in trade, coordinated sanctions, industrial policy, border management, energy resilience and defense cooperation.
The EU succeeds not because it eliminates contradictions, but because it absorbs them without disintegrating. It holds together conflicting preferences, divergent economic models, varied foreign-policy traditions and even liberal and illiberal governments within a single political framework.
That balancing act is not a temporary phase of integration, but Europe’s central achievement. From its inception, Europe evolved through adaptation rather than constitutional grand design.
After 1945, integration emerged as a strategy of survival for a devastated continent. The Schuman Declaration and the European Coal and Steel Community sought to make war materially impossible by pooling the industries essential to war. Subsequent crises forced further reinvention. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s accelerated monetary cooperation. The fall of the Berlin Wall opened the path to eastern enlargement.
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The eurozone crisis produced instruments no treaty had foreseen: the European Stability Mechanism, tighter fiscal coordination and the beginnings of banking union. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the EU’s first large-scale joint borrowing program, the Recovery and Resilience Facility.
Europe acted as a union not by following a master plan, but by improvising solutions under pressure and turning crises into catalysts for institutional change. This adaptive architecture often looks messy, especially to outsiders. Europe rarely speaks with one voice. It hesitates, bargains and delays. But it also learns. It has repeatedly shown the ability to survive shocks without collapsing into authoritarianism or fragmentation.
None of this means Europe is guaranteed success. Its productivity problems are real. Its defense capacity remains underdeveloped. Its demographic pressures are mounting. But the persistent prediction of irrelevance misunderstands the nature of European power.
