Britain Must Choose Europe--and Its Leaders Need to Admit It [View all]

The great powers have competing theories of victory; Britain's path leads inevitably to alignment with Europe.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/britain-must-choose-europe-and-its-leaders-need-to-admit-it



Social Europe and the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) of the Hans Böckler Stiftung are launching a new series on how Europe and Germany should respond to Trump’s divisive politics. The question is urgent: the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy represents nothing less than a declaration of economic and strategic war on the possibility of Europe emerging as a co-equal great power. In this opening essay, I analyse the competing strategies of the world’s major powers and argue that Britain’s political class must finally admit what the logic of events makes inevitable—that when forced to choose, Britain will choose Europe.

I have been to numerous defence and security-focused seminars since Donald Trump launched his National Security Strategy, and even two months later, I am still hearing people say: “I can’t work out what Trump wants and none of it makes sense…” With events flowing thick and fast—from the seizure of Maduro, the crisis over Greenland and now a US armada off Iran—politicians and security analysts alike are rightly prudent when it comes to calibrating how bad things are. But the options are clear enough. I am currently writing a new history of the League of Nations: the one-line summary of why it failed is that the authoritarians had a better theory of reality than the democrats.

Lenin, Mussolini and, later, Stalin, Hitler and the Japanese militarists all had worldviews based on force, destiny and economics, while the liberal and conservative elites of Europe were operating with a mixture of illusions in international law, collective security and principle. Put more simply: the authoritarians had theories of history—in which “laws” work behind the backs of rational agents. The democrats simply believed in intent. Using that framework, I want to suggest that the options of the four potential great powers of the mid-21st century are essentially binary: each has an explicit theory of victory and an implicit theory of failure.

China’s rational gambit

China’s theory of reality is premised on its slow rise to dominance, becoming the strongest country on the planet in terms of national power by 2049. It does not need revolutions or collapses elsewhere to achieve this: Sinified Marxism under Xi Jinping is—as one of its supporters, the late Domenico Losurdo, pointed out—completely shorn of millenarianism. It sees state-run capitalism as the route to civilisational dominance and the 100-million-strong Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the voluntaristic force that will make this happen. Its theory of victory is embodied in the massive buildup of People’s Liberation Army combat power, together with the New Quality Productive Forces (NQPF)—18 industrial sectors that do not currently exist, which China plans to dominate before the West can even make a start.

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