The recently completed COP-30 in Brazil begat no roadmap for a fossil fuel phaseout, disappointing an EU delegation that had hoped to rope the rest of the world into an approximation of its own Net Zero plans. The EU team was always at a negotiating disadvantage: While it proposed to save the world from climate change, national delegations decided that saving the world was less important than advancing their own prosperity. China and India brook no interference with their plans for industrial development, while poor developing economies want reliable electricity and fat monetary distributions from the West. Carbon emissions roadmaps with verifiable milestones may suit the EU with its army of nosy bureaucrats, but are at best a polite fiction and at worst a serious obstacle to states with basic material objectives, like the elimination of dire poverty and the provision of clean water and sanitation.
The ramifications of the “Bust in Belem” are greater for Europe in that they reveal a disquieting truth: The world’s climate is changing less rapidly than are its geopolitics. The EU remains ideological stranded in that Edenic moment in the late 1990’s, when the world appeared to be moving toward free trade and free societies, all free from great power competition. Capitalist development in China and Russia would surely bring about durable democracies as property owners demanded political rights. Mutual trade dependencies would moderate conflicts, subordinated to a thriving rule-based world order. The prosperous, peaceful and eco-conscious social democracies perfected by Europe would be models for global development.
Francis Fukuyama all but guaranteed Europe’s bien pensants that liberal democracy was not only a superior way of organising society, but that it would prevail over retrograde authoritarianism. Mark Leonard earned his place as the EU’s pet intellect with his book Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. The EU’s rococo regulatory apparatus would prove an asset as European companies gained first mover advantage in this new world of similar rules designed by global elites. The magic of the “Brussels Effect” meant all would look to Europe for best practices, and seek reciprocal access to the EU’s enormous internal market. The world would integrate in as pleasing a fashion as Europe had.
Wasn’t it pretty to think so? Why yes it was, but sadly the world evolved in ways inimical to this rosy vision. The EU may have tamed the nation state, but everywhere else the old monster is back and in cracking form. Donald Trump may be a convenient avatar of this change for beleaguered Europeans, but his vigorous assertion of national interest now animates leaders from Delhi to Tokyo. None are interested in emulating Europe’s ritual sacrifice of its industrial base to appease the climate gods. Russia and China are convinced their fusion of capitalism with despotism is a better model, and clearly do not defer to any international agreements regarding the use of military force. Fossil fuels remain the key to prosperity everywhere.
Practices that govern relations between Europe’s liberal democracies are not easily adapted to regions formed in different cultural and historical circumstances, where more primal motivations of national advantage prevail. While Europe seeks collective “win-win” solutions to every problem, other nations simply want to win, either in trade negotiations or on the battlefield. China’s use of the WTO to advance its industrial expansion at the expense of the West is ample evidence that international institutions alone cannot instil the cooperative habits preferred by Europe. Self-interested competition defines the world more accurately than benign EU practices, which evolved only after the United States and its occupying army removed the possibility of national conflict. Deriving universal prescriptions from this highly unusual circumstance was always a quixotic delusion.
Can the EU adapt to a world defined by neo-mercantilism, military power, and bellicose assertions of national interest? The foundational philosophy of the bloc since the completion of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union suggests not. Over thirty years later, “ever closer Union” has yet to birth an EU executive with the power to take military action, collect taxes, issue debt, or even protect the common Schengen frontier from migrant inflows. The fraught plan to use Russian assets to support the bankrupt government in Kyiv only highlights an EU crippled by the lack of an indigenous fiscal capacity. Functionalism promised a smooth glide from monetary union to fiscal and political union, yet member states still block attempts to give the EU these capacities. Practices designed for that gentle world where the EU could lead without recourse to hard power are now a threat to Europe’s future.
What this union has done is bequeath Europe with a regulatory structure that cripples the capacities needed to compete in this pugnacious new world. Top down environmental rules have jacked German electricity prices to among the highest in the world and impose ruinous costs on the country’s exporters. Net Zero will require an estimated €3 trillion in grid, storage and generation upgrades from already strapped national budgets. Worker productivity has fallen to 80 per cent of American levels as capital investment stalls. Regulatory compliance is an increasingly expensive exercise that shifts corporate investment to China, Turkey or the US.
“More Europe” has in practice meant less prosperity. The failure of the EU at Belem should serve as an epiphany for Europe. It must either gather the powers needed to compete on an equal basis with nation states, or cede powers to its members so that they can.
China’s climate envoy humiliates the EU