Europe’s current elites still live in what can be called a “narrated world,” a reality facilitated by institutions, consultants, and public relations machinery. Narration replaces analysis; virtue replaces vision. For three decades, European societies were told that history had ended and that globalization would dissolve geopolitics. The illusion produced intellectual disarmament. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine or China weaponized trade, the continent was shocked, not because these events were unforeseeable, but because they contradicted its preferred narratives. Strategic communication cannot substitute for strategic comprehension.
This reminds me of the triumph of imagology, as described by Milan Kundera decades ago. I’ve written about the concept many times here; this is Kundera’s 1990 quote:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
From that first link, a remedy of sorts is offered:
To recover agency, Europe must first articulate what it stands for beyond comfort and regulation. The starting point is intellectual: to acknowledge that the new Cold War is not a metaphor but a structural reality. The DragonBear will not dissolve through diplomacy, and America’s patience is not infinite.
Next, Europe must translate awareness into capacity by linking industrial and defense policy, incentivizing capital investment, and embedding innovation within security planning. Dual-use technologies, from AI-driven tools to quantum encryption, should define the next generation of European deterrence.
Finally, Europe must reform its leadership class. Institutions that cannot prioritize or exercise agency will never produce strategy. Renewal will come only with a generational shift, led by those who understand that freedom is not merely inherited, but must be safeguarded, defended, and sustained.
… Without a guiding vision, Europe oscillates between moralism and denial. It preaches multilateralism to a world of blocs, advocates dialogue to adversaries who weaponize it, and confuses consensus with strength. The outcome is strategic drift and irrelevance.
Because the US, like Europe, participated in both WWI and WWII, I think we tend to underestimate how different the US and European experiences were in both wars. Both originated in Europe and much of the damage done was accomplished even before the US entered. The number of deaths in Europe were on a different scale, the physical destruction phenomenal and widespread, the suffering far greater. Even the UK, which was never invaded and conquered, endured a great deal of destruction both physical and economic. In many ways, I don’t think Europe ever has recovered, and this even affects younger generations that experienced nothing of the war.
America only started to lose its confidence with the Vietnam War, and although the left has pushed the idea of shame onto Americans it hasn’t quite taken. Trump is hated by the left in part because he refuses to deal in American shame, but instead invokes American pride.
I don’t see Europe taking the advice offered in that article – at least, not western Europe. Eastern Europe, having experienced life under the Soviets, was forced into accepting reality over imagology to a greater extent.