Dear friends,
“It is my strong personal view that the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe.”
What a statement. And notably, not from a European.
The quote comes from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who spoke at this week’s European Political Community as the first non-European leader ever to participate. Carney has emerged as one of the clearest external voices pointing to Europe’s growing role.
He understands: the European Union remains the last liberal bastion in the world with both the potential and the responsibility to help shape the international order.
Potential, because it is the world’s largest single market, a major financial power, and, collectively, a serious military force. Responsibility, because of that potential, but also because of Europe’s history and role in the world, past and present, which carry a special obligation.
And this is where I diverge from Carney.
The international order will not be rebuilt “out of Europe”. But “with Europe”, together with the many countries across the world, who have a shared interest in a predictable, rules-based order. Nor are we starting from scratch, as Carney’s speech in Davos on an “international rupture” might suggest.
The order is neither fully intact, nor fully dead. Declaring the order finished risks inadvertently accelerating its erosion, unintentionally strengthening those who seek exactly that outcome. This is why statements suggesting that the EU can no longer rely on a “rules-based” system, such as those made by Ursula von der Leyen, risk backfiring. In conversations with partners abroad, such messages create uncertainty rather than trust.
What is true, however, is that Europe must become far more effective in using its capacity for international order shaping. Two strands are decisive: its capacity to act and its capacity to partner.
First, Europe must strengthen its capacity to act. We all know, if the EU wants to be a global actor that shapes outcomes rather than reacts to them, it must be able to move faster, more flexibly, and with greater political will.
Second, it must deepen and expand its partnerships. Here, the picture is more positive than often assumed. The EU is already building an extensive global network, through trade agreements with partners such as India and Mercosur, and potential future deals with countries like Thailand and the Philippines.
Beyond trade, this extends increasingly into security and defence. In a new Böll EU Brief to be published tomorrow, we map over 1.000 security and defence partnerships between the EU, its member states, and Indo-Pacific countries, many of them established only in recent years. The German daily Handelsblatt has already covered our findings.
But partnerships must go beyond trade and security alone. If the international order is to endure, it must also deliver on global public goods, above all climate stability. Here, Europe has both credibility and leverage, yet its green partnerships often remain underdeveloped and secondary. That will need to change.
Taken together, the picture is one of progress, but also of unfinished business. The direction of travel is clear. Europe is doing more than it often gets credit for. But it also needs to become more strategic, more coordinated, and ultimately more decisive.
I invite you to join our webinar on 11 May, where we will unpack the EU’s defence partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, as well as our panel discussion on 8 June looking at how Germany, Korea and Japan can work together for a more stable world.
In the meantime, don’t hesitate to read our post-election analyses on Hungary, here and here, or watch our conversation with Karen Hao on her New York Times bestseller Empire of AI.
And with Europe Day approaching, I leave you with a recap of our LinkedIn Campaign "Facts over fatalism", highlighting the strong cards that Europe holds.
Warm regards,
