On civilizational erasure – Anton Jäger in NYT:

‘It is important not to mischaracterize this development. Complaints about the European Union’s failure to produce its own Silicon Valley and comparisons of gross domestic product with a country of over a billion people are not fair proofs of decline. Yet it is undeniable that Europe has been “provincialized,” as the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once termed it. The negotiations to end the war in Ukraine show that the bloc has been steadily reduced to a second-rate participant in world affairs. In President Trump’s eyes, it is “decaying” and at risk of “civilizational erasure.” All of this sounds menacing enough to Europeans. Yet perhaps demotion need not be traumatic. Rather, a reckoning with European decline — cultural, political and, above all, economic — could give rise to a healthily modest approach to the present.’

(…)

‘Yet many of the remedies in circulation today are likely to aggravate the disease they purport to cure. The far right offers a familiar prescription: a racial cordon around the continent. Europe’s center, in turn, vaguely gestures at a strategy of renewal through remilitarization and technological advances. The left, for its part, either rails against European overreach or welcomes the continent’s retreat. What is needed is a new “politics of decline,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Eric Hobsbawm, one that looks both inward and outward.
Internally, it requires a break with the austerity fetish that has gripped European policymakers since the 1990s. It is with good reason that the economic historian Adam Tooze has castigated E.U. technocrats as “the Taliban of neoliberalism” for their intransigent attachment to market principles in an age that has declared them obsolete.’

(…)
‘On the political front, that would mean conscious centralization and pooling of sovereignty. This would be a major break from business as usual: Fragmentation has long held sway in Europe, stymieing the development of genuinely continental policy. Bringing together countries in common endeavor would be paramount, with the proviso of democratic accountability that European institutions have generally scanted.’

(…)

‘If Europe is to reinvent itself, it must think in more heterodox ways. Mostly, it will have to contemplate something considered beyond the pale in Brussels: critical integration with China. “Critical” is meant in both senses of the term. On the one hand, such engagement is vitally necessary for the fight against climate change, an effort now mostly led by China. Yet it should also be conditional, involving neither submission to Beijing nor blindness toward its grim record on trade or labor rights. Export controls, where necessary, can go together with cooperation.’

(…)

‘ In a striking echo, Josep Borrell Fontelles, a former vice president of the European Commission, has described Europe as a “garden” surrounded by a hostile “jungle.” The continent’s center and far right, despite their differences, clearly agree on some essentials. Yet that Europe should become either a wasteland or a gated community is not divinely decreed. Cut down to size, Europe may find that a pleasant public allotment in the suburbs of the new global order might be more than enough.’

Read the article here.

A pleasant provincial garden, a kind of Dominican Republic maybe? I’m not sure what pooling sovereignty might mean, you can be sovereign the next four years and then I’ll be sovereign the four years after that?

Provincialized anyhow it is. Grandeur is for the ruins and the museums.