OPINION: The Old European Order is Fraying. Can Keir Starmer Help Hold it Together?

An extraordinary new version of what used to be called the Concert of Europe will convene today at Blenheim Palace, in the heart of England. More than 40 European national leaders, together with top figures from our continent’s key international institutions, will meet for a day of talk. This is only the fourth meeting of the European Political Community (EPC), a brainchild of the French president, Emmanuel Macron. The exclusive away day will reach no collective conclusions, but it’s a good occasion to reflect on the fragile condition of our current European order.

First, this is a great opportunity for Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, to show that Britain is back as a leading player in the Concert of Europe, as it has been for centuries. The meeting place is called Blenheim because the land, and the money to build a palace on it, were granted to John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, in recognition of his leadership in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. While the English have traditionally remembered this as one of their great victories over the French, in reality this was a battle fought near the Bavarian village of Blindheim by British, Dutch, German, Austrian and Danish forces to defend what was still known as the Holy Roman empire against the French and Bavarians. In short, this was Britain acting as a European power, joining with one set of European allies against another.

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At issue, then as now, were the top jobs in Europe. But whereas the question of whether Ursula von der Leyen is reappointed as European Commission president will be decided by a peaceful vote in the European parliament today, in the early 1700s the question of who should be the next king of Spain was to be resolved in more traditional European fashion – by war. From the war of the Spanish succession to a purely metaphorical “war” of the Brussels succession.

In Blenheim Palace, the British hosts can also invite their continental guests to view the modest bedroom where Winston Churchill, a descendant of the 18th-century Churchill, was born in 1874. This 20th-century Churchill played a crucial part in the liberation of Europe in 1945 and then became a visionary advocate of a united Europe built around the reconciliation between France and Germany.

The perfect place and time, then, for Starmer to take forward the “reset” with the European Union on which his government has energetically embarked. In an advance statement, Starmer said: “We must do more and go further … so our future generations look back with pride at what our continent achieved together.”

Yet the hard fact is that Britain has left the EU and Brexit can’t easily be reversed, even if Starmer’s government showed any intention to do so, which it doesn’t. So the larger question behind this meeting remains posed. Our current European order is unprecedented in history and unmatched anywhere else in today’s world. Most European countries are democracies, gathered in multiple institutions of peaceful cooperation and conflict resolution – a majority of those countries in the EU and NATO, almost all in the Council of Europe and all in the just-about-surviving Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. But is this order getting stronger as it responds to new external and internal threats? Or is it starting to fray and crumble, as all earlier European orders did sooner or later?

After the assassination attempt on Trump, and with the announcement of JD Vance as his vice president, it now seems ever more likely that Trump will win the presidential election on 5 November, try to compel Ukraine to sue for “peace” with Russia and demand that European members of NATO do more for their own defence. In an interview published this June, Vance suggested a peace deal for Ukraine could involve freezing the lines of territorial division “somewhere close to where they are right now” and guaranteeing Kyiv’s independence “but also its neutrality”. That would be defeat for Ukraine and victory for Putin.

As for European security more broadly, Vance wrote in a recent commentary in the Financial Times that “the United States has provided a blanket of security to Europe for far too long”. “As we watch European power atrophy under an American protectorate,” he added, “it is reasonable to ask whether our support has made it easier for Europe to ignore its own security.”

It’s a fair question. In truth, it’s extraordinary that more than 80 years after US forces landed in Normandy – along with the British and Canadians – to liberate western Europe from nazism, Europe still relies so heavily on what has been called the US “pacifier”. (In American English, the term also means a baby’s dummy.)

For all the celebration at Nato’s recent Washington summit of western support for Ukraine and increased European defence spending, Europe is still far from having the collective political will and military means to achieve the first of these objectives on its own, and the second is equally in doubt. Victory for Putin would not only be a tragedy for Ukraine: it would also mean a chronic destabilisation of the European order constructed after 1945, initially only in the west, and extended to central and eastern Europe since 1989.

While the transatlantic west has, broadly speaking, united to support Ukraine and sanction Russia, it has found that China, India, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa are happy to go on doing business with that neocolonial aggressor. China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi embrace Putin as a valued ally. And these non-European great and middle powers now have sufficient economic and military strength to counterbalance the efforts even of a united west. So the war in Ukraine reveals that we have entered a post-western world.

For countries everywhere, this enables what Modi has called “multialignment”: cultivating multiple, shifting ties with different partners in pursuit of your own interests. Even inside Europe, Serbia has been doing this quite successfully, and so, most shockingly, has Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, despite being an EU and NATO member. Witness Orbán’s recent trips to discuss a capitulation “peace” for Ukraine with Putin, Xi and Trump. And guess where the next meeting of the EPC, this cacophonous Concert of Europe, is to be held? In Budapest this November.

So here’s the Europe that gathers for a day in the gilded salons of Blenheim Palace, torn between external challenges that create an evident necessity for more concentrated, effective European power, and internal ones that mean we are unlikely to achieve it.

 Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.

This article is reprinted from The Guardian with the author’s permission. See the original here.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.