One of France’s most influential foreign policy voices has delivered a stark warning: In relative terms, the European Union is declining three times faster than Imperial China did during the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in the 19th century.
In a major essay published on Le Grand Continent, Luis Vassy — recently appointed director of Sciences Po and a former senior French diplomat — argues that Europe is failing to grasp the brutal realities of power politics in a world increasingly dominated by strength rather than Western rules and values.
Vassy writes that Europe has moved from a position where it projected its ideas, values and influence onto the world to one where the world is now projecting onto it.
“The conditions of possibility of our common life, our social model, our freedoms, our ability to choose collectively our path, are determined for a good part outside of us”, he notes.
Between 1990 and 2005, Vassy writes, the sum of American and European GDP accounted for more than half of the world’s wealth. This opened the door for “end of history” theories and transatlantic cultural unity.
Now there is a demand to focus on security and defence.
He says Europe currently suffers from a blind spot, as social sciences and political thinking in Europe excel at studying societies internally but neglect the external dimension of power, conflict, and strategy.
“To give up thinking about power is not to be emancipated from it; it is to accept in advance that others exert it on us and can decide for us to give up freedoms, rights and a social model that we have taken decades, even centuries to conquer.”
He compares the current trajectory of the EU to the dramatic fall of China’s Qing Dynasty, noting that while China’s decline took decades, Europe’s relative loss of power and influence is happening at a much more accelerated pace.
“France now accounts for one per cent of the world’s population and 2.5 per cent of overall production. The European Union has seen its weight in the global economy drop from 30 per cent to 17 per cent between 2008 and 2025, or 17 years. China made the same way between 1820 and 1870”, Vassy notes.
“In relative terms, we are declining three times faster than the Qing dynasty”, he finds.
The Qing era ended with China’s “Century of Humiliation”, marked by foreign invasions, internal decay, loss of sovereignty, and technological backwardness.
Vassy uses it to illustrate how quickly a once-dominant civilisation can lose its position when it fails to understand and adapt to shifting global power dynamics.
He criticises the dominant European mindset, especially in France and Brussels, for treating international relations as an extension of domestic politics rather than a domain of power, competition and security.
He calls for a major intellectual reset, urging European elites to rediscover the language of power, strategic autonomy, and hard realities of international anarchy.
For this, he proposes placing power politics and strategic thinking at the centre of elite education.
The intervention is particularly notable because it comes from within the French establishment rather than from populist or Eurosceptic voices.
COMMENT: The supposed “normalcy” of people like Merkel, Scholz, Sunak, Macron or Biden has put their respective countries on a course of decline, and while they are at different stages of the journey, the direction is the same, writes @Raphfel. https://t.co/GkbqNFErXy
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) November 4, 2024
