Europe Between Empire and Rules
The EU is learning the language of power, but its future depends on whether it can use it without abandoning the norms that made it what it is. A keynote speech by Nathalie Tocci
This article is an edited transcript of the keynote speech delivered by Nathalie Tocci at European Security in an Age of Rupture – Event in Memory of Achille Boroli, held at Bocconi University on 4 May 2026. Nathalie Tocci will also speak at the IEP Bocconi webinar How Can Europe Confront the Russian Threat in a Post-American World Order?, with Bill Browder, on 27 May 2026, 14:00–15:30 CEST, online on Zoom. Please join us. Registration link:
https://forms.unibocconi.it/index.php?rif_quest=4171
There was a time when Europe was swimming with the tide.
It was an age of multilateral institutions, international law, regional cooperation and globalization. In that world, the European Union was not necessarily a superpower. It did not even aspire to be one in the conventional sense. Yet it was, in a deeper way, a superpower, because the spirit of the age worked in its favour. The EU was the gold standard of regional integration. Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and others looked to Europe as the model of what deeper regional cooperation could become.
That world has gone.
This is not a revelation Europe discovered yesterday. For more than a decade, European leaders, documents and debates have increasingly used the language of strategy, power, pragmatism and transactionalism. These words entered the European public domain because Europeans gradually realised that the world in which the EU was born and developed no longer existed.
Sometimes this language of power has been turned into action. The most obvious example is Ukraine.
Europe often complains about its own slowness and inadequacy. Yet if one looks at the trajectory since 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, European defence spending began to rise. Donald Trump likes to think this happened because of him. It did not. It happened because of Vladimir Putin. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this trend accelerated dramatically.
Germany is the most striking case. By 2030, it is likely to become the third-largest military spender in the world. One may debate whether this is good or bad, wise or dangerous. But if that does not show a Europe that has woken up and smelled the coffee, it is hard to imagine what would.
The same is true on the battlefield. In 2022, Ukraine was almost entirely dependent on external military assistance, most of it from the United States. Today, more than two-thirds of Ukraine’s military capabilities are produced inside Ukraine. Of the capabilities that still come from outside, the funding is overwhelmingly European. Since the second Trump administration entered office, U.S. military assistance has fallen from roughly $16bn a year to less than half a billion. Europe has stepped in.
Ukraine is thus the clearest case in which Europe’s language of power has been substantiated in practice.
Other cases are more partial. Take Africa. In recent years, Europeans have looked at Russia’s role in the Sahel, China’s presence in sub-Saharan Africa, and U.S. competition, and concluded that development policy could no longer remain what it was.
The Global Gateway is still wrapped in the language of development and sustainable development, but many of its projects reveal a more transactional European identity. The Lobito Corridor is a clear example: an infrastructure project aimed at transporting critical minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola and on to Europe.
This shift in development policy has its supporters and critics. The aim here is not to say whether it’s good or bad, simply to point out the partial change in the making.
The Middle East tells a darker story. There, Europe has mostly failed to translate awareness of a changing world into action.
In the old world, Europeans could play a supporting role to the United States: financing development and supporting Israeli-Arab peace efforts. But as U.S. policy changed, Washington increasingly turned directly to Gulf states as its second fiddle. Europeans, meanwhile, struggled to find an autonomous role.
So Europe has reacted differently in different theatres. In Ukraine, it has acted. In Africa, it has partially adapted. In the Middle East, it has often been absent.
But the deeper question is not simply whether Europe can act in a harsher world. It is whether, in adapting to that world, Europe risks losing itself.
The EU is constitutionally constrained in foreign, security and defence policy. These remain national competences. For that reason, when people speak about Europe’s role in the world, the first word that usually comes to mind is division. And of course Europe is often divided. If foreign policy remains largely national, there will always be differences between European countries, and divisions will therefore exist.
But to stop there is intellectually lazy. Divisions are frequent, yet they reveal only part of the story.
European divisions have often produced paralysis, but they have also generated later moments of collective action.
In the 1990s, the wars in the Western Balkans exposed Europe’s impotence. Europeans had to wait for U.S. intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. Yet that shame helped produce a more active European role in the Balkans in the 2000s: the EU accession process, the peaceful dissolution of the Serbia-Montenegro union, conflict prevention in North Macedonia, and eventually the resolution of the name dispute between Greece and North Macedonia.
The Iraq war was another moment of profound division. France and Germany opposed the war; the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain supported it; Donald Rumsfeld spoke of “old Europe” and “new Europe”. Yet that rupture helped produce one of Europe’s most successful collective diplomatic efforts: the Iran nuclear negotiation.
Javier Solana, then EU high representative, understood that Europe needed to rebuild bridges internally and across the Atlantic. Together with France, Germany and the United Kingdom, he created a format that reached out to Russia and China and kept the door open to the United States.
After 13 years of negotiation, that effort produced the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Without the Iraq division, there might not have been that European diplomatic initiative.
Ukraine offers a more recent example. At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war, many predicted that Europe would split between a “peace camp” and a “justice camp”: between those wanting compromise at almost any price and those insisting on a just peace.
When Trump returned to office, many expected paralysis. Some countries, especially those friendlier to Washington, were expected to drift toward compromise. Others would hold the line. Yet the feared split did not materialise. Viktor Orbán’s obstruction in Hungary was eventually overcome, and the EU’s €90bn support package for Ukraine moved forward.
European division is therefore real. But it is often not the deepest problem.
The deeper problem is identity.
The European project was exceptional because, unlike most states, it did not define itself against an external other. It defined itself against its own past. The Europe of the present and future would not be the Europe of nationalism, colonialism, fascism, Nazism and war. It would be an Europe of law, norms, institutions, liberal democracy and rules. It might sometimes be grey, bureaucratic and procedural. But beneath that institutional language lay a powerful political message: Europe would turn the page on itself.
After the Cold War, however, identities began to shift. More traditional ways of defining the self against an external other returned. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” entered European debates.
Turkey, which during the Cold War had been treated as part of “us”, increasingly became part of “them”. This change affected enlargement, migration policy, attitudes toward the Muslim world and the Middle East.
At the same time, as the world became tougher, Europeans began to say they had to become harder too. They had to become strategic, transactional, pragmatic. This is necessary. Europe cannot live in a world of power while pretending power does not exist. But there is a danger. In hardening itself, Europe may become less hypocritical by lowering its standards.
This distinction matters. Double standards presuppose standards. Hypocrisy in international relations can be understood as the gap between the affirmation of norms and the exercise of power.
There are two ways to avoid double standards. One is the Trump way: remove the standards. Trump is not hypocritical because he has no standards. The other is to try to live up to one’s standards and narrow the gap between norms and power.
Europe must not drift toward the first path.
The danger became visible in the recent war in the Middle East. European leaders recognised that there had been violations of international law, but initially many refused clearly to condemn them.
Some said, in effect: yes, there is a violation of the international order, but we neither condemn nor support. This is more dangerous than hypocrisy. If there is condemnation but no action, one can speak of double standards. But when recognition of a violation is not followed by condemnation, the standards themselves begin to disappear.
This does not mean that Europe is condemned to cynical transactionalism. In the Middle East itself, European positions gradually shifted. At one extreme stood Mark Rutte, strongly aligned with Trump’s war. At the other stood Pedro Sánchez, probably the clearest European voice against what he saw as an illegal war in Iran. The European mainstream began closer to Rutte but moved, gradually, closer to Sánchez.
This matters because Europe did not support norms and law because Europeans were morally superior. They were never especially good people. They supported norms because they understood their interests. For Europe, international law, rules and institutions are not decoration. They are conditions of survival.
The future now divides into two possible ideal types.
The first is a world of empires. This is the world imagined by Trump and Putin, and perhaps in a more ambiguous way by Xi Jinping. It is a world in which the foundations of international law — sovereignty and territorial integrity — are discarded. Empires may compete, but they may also collude. The movement coming from Washington today is not only toward imperial competition, but also toward possible collusion with Moscow and Beijing.
In that world, Europe is on the colonial menu: on Russia’s menu, on America’s menu, and potentially on others’. An Europe of nations, returning to the demons of its past, would be easy to colonise.
The second model is the world described by Mark Carney in Davos: a world of middle powers. Carney’s speech was powerful because he said openly what many had known for some time: the liberal international order has become a fiction. It was not always a fiction, but it is one now.
Once the fiction is over, however, there are two possible futures. One is empire. The other is a coalition of middle and small powers seeking to rebuild a world still based on norms, rules and institutions.
Some signs of this second future already exist. Trade is the clearest. Without U.S. protectionism, there is no way Europe would have moved so quickly on agreements with Mercosur, India, Indonesia and Australia. Some had been under negotiation for years, even decades. Their conclusion shows that rules and institutions still matter.
Climate may be another field. Europe was once a climate leader, then lost confidence and allowed the Green Deal to be described as an ideological project. The war in the Middle East is a reminder that the ideological project was not the Green Deal; it was the attempt to destroy it. Around climate, a coalition of the willing may return.
Security is more tentative, but not impossible. Europe cannot end the war in Iran. It is not Europe’s war. But once it ends, Europeans — perhaps led by France and the United Kingdom — could help keep Hormuz open and work on Gulf security, in a broader global coalition.
Europe’s future is not settled. But one thing is clear: in a world of empires, Europe can survive only if it remains united and remembers why it was built. Power is now necessary. But if Europe learns the language of power by forgetting the language of rules, it will have lost the very thing that makes it worth defending.
European Security in an Age of Rupture - Event in memory of Achille Boroli
IEP@BU does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
