For the sake of the future of Europe and Europeans, showing the slightest sign of shyness or pusillanimity would merely be a form of cowardice.
In her speech to the EU ambassadors on 9 March 2026, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, calls for a radical shift in Europe’s geopolitical self-perception: “Europe can no longer be the guardian of the traditional world order”, she rightly stated, without, however, explicitly naming the key players in the current deadly dynamic. Indeed, Europe needs much more than a mere rhetorical adjustment, but a genuine structural transformation designed to make it endure within the international system. The President of the European Commission’s somehow resigned attitude to the erosion of the rules-based order bodes ill for the willingness – or indeed the commitment – to understand the nature, depth and urgency of the institutional reforms needed to remedy the general inadequacy of the current European framework, which confers neither political status nor real power on a supposedly united Europe. This inadequacy may be worsening, but it has unfortunately existed for over seventy years. The sudden upheavals in the state of the world we live in may be nothing more than the last opportunity we have to realise this, before the crush of European civilisation.
A radical shift in Europe’s own geopolitical self-perception, certainly. But above all, a move to produce a radical shift in how the world’s nations perceive Europe, implying a profound structural transformation that completely changes the nature of European institutions.
