🇪🇺 Post-American Europe, Part III: Building a Citadel of Freedom in a New Geopolitical Age
How the EU can lead through technological sovereignty, competition reform, and a renewed liberal order abroad
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Note - this is part three in a three-part series. You can find part one here, and part two on the link below:
In the previous articles of this series, the historic roots and present state of European governance were examined. This final instalment provides strategic advice on issues I consider underdiscussed: information infrastructure and the political-economic relations with our near abroad.
Of course, there are well established sources of advice for European policymakers, both about Defense (the Niinistö Report) and the growth of the European Union’s economy and industry (the Draghi Report). We’re also fortunate to live in a time where the European policy discussion can be followed in publications like VoxEU and in a more accessible format in some substacks, among which I want to single out Luis and Pieter Garicano’s “Silicon continent”.
Technological sovereignty, knowledge commons and neutral intermediation
Both the new geopolitical reality in Europe and the economic belligerency of the United States imply that technological dependence from the United States must be replaced by control of critical national infrastructure.
Several tools are available for overcoming technical dependency in a confederacy that does not benefit from perfect strategic alignment:
First of all, Europe could begin a large program for Open-Source development and maintenance. There is already an “Open Source Software Strategy of the European Comission”. While this would be worthwhile in itself, the EU should go even further: active procurement and maintenance of Open Source projects should be made an important line in the European budget and Open Science should be made the new gold standard for European universities.
The traditional focus on scientific papers is likely diminishing, with future scientific endeavours increasingly directed towards the development of open-source software and database projects.
Modern academia must take a proactive role in managing and providing access to digital resources. Another straightforward (yet impactful) strategy would be to acquire patents and release them into the public domain, thereby enabling the production of various generic goods, with pharmaceuticals being a prime example.
The recent release of Deepseek has already proven a game changer in the IA competition space, but it is only an example of a more general phenomenon: the enormous transformative power of the Knowledge Commons.
Another important component of technological sovereignty relates to competition policy: in the last decades, American tech firms have enjoyed an exorbitant privilege in terms of immunity against the normal competition rules.
Lisa Khan, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden began her academic career with a harsh criticism of Amazon’s behaviour, pointing out how the uncontrolled behaviour of some tech companies as gatekeepers in important markets has denaturalized competition.
Beyond the narrow welfare of the consumers, competition policy for tech platforms should be focused on neutral intermediation, ideally by separating the “intermediation” from “recommendation and search” services, subjected to a public audit of the source code.
Europe’s past political engagements with the United States left Europe too reluctant to deal with the large American tech firms, which were considered too vital to the interests of our key ally.
Now those constraints have been removed, and Europe can regulate American tech platforms to keep a levelled playing field.
Liberal internationalism: from American globalisation to European irradiation
Since 1945, the United States, no matter its internal divisions, kept a stable foreign policy based on the promotion of its own internal regime for the World.
The “Pax Americana” was simply the Pax Democratica on American steroids, and for many has been the best international relations system in human history: under American Hegemony, colonial empires were liquidated, Europe was pacified and protected from communism and Russian imperialism, and finally (in the postwar years of the Cold War) globalization created the most equitably prosperous time for Humanity.
Unfortunately, this all depended on the internal stability of a well-designed but already obsolete institutional system: a two-party winner-takes-all system, which caused American democracy to polarise until it eventually experienced a meltdown.
American clients in Europe and Asia have been left in the cold, with dubious security guarantees and being cut off from the core of our informal democratic confederation.
Fortunately, in Europe the American Hegemony was not only based on bilateral ties with the United States, but also in a multilateral League. This happens to be the only hope for freedom on our continent if American finally falls into autocracy or simply withdraws from the World.
And in that case, Europe, even under its imperfectly aligned political system, is likely to be the most powerful liberal bloc in the World.
Our forces cannot be compared to those of the United States, nor our democratic internationalist will, but Europe can project its force in the Atlantic and Mediterranean basin by several means.
First, by replacing the flat world trade with preferential arrangements for friendly neighbours and development aid.
Every euro spent in our neighbourhood (Africa and the Middle East) generates positive political externalities in two ways: organically, by accelerating economic convergence and the demographic transition, and politically, by securing support in security and migration in exchange for market access.
Regarding Latin America, Europe should help all efforts of economic integration among the South American democracies: the Mercosur free trade agreement is more necessary now than ever, withRussia being excluded from international trade and the United States becoming increasingly unreliable.
Finally, international aid should be a defining feature of Europe's identity. If migration flows are restricted in the coming years, actively supporting development and improving lives in our neighbouring regions will be necessary to maintain our moral cohesion and credibility.
A fast expansion of European Aid should be designed to replace the United States, mostly in Africa and Middle Eastern countries. Foreign aid is less controversial than other tools of influence, and the European Union could easily compensate for its weaknesses through an intelligent use of its limited resources.
Arturo Macías is an Economist at the Spanish Central Bank. He has made several academic contributions on voting mechanisms, natural resource economics, and the mind-body problem, and regularly writes on the Effective Altruism Forum. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily coincide with those of Banco de España or the Eurosystem.
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The three articles of "Post American Europe" are now available:
In the first article, I examine the historical roots of the European Union (EU): Europe was an ecology of competing, often warring jurisdictions that, after the Second World War, were integrated into the American Pax Democratica. Our generational challenge is to maintain the greatest American legacy: the EU.
https://www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/post-american-europe-historical-roots-eu-integration?r=biy76&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
In the second article, the complex governance of the EU is characterised as a nomocracy, a harmonising and consociational confederacy which is less efficient but more robust than the other large international actors. Minimalistic institutional reform is proposed to strengthen European democracies in the age of populism.
https://www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/post-american-europe-eu-rule-based-democracy-authoritarianism?r=biy76&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The final instalment proposes policies to address technological dependency and the foreign policy stance of the post-American Europe: technological sovereignty, competition reform, and a renewed liberal order in Europe's near abroad:
https://www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/post-american-europe-eu-technological-sovereignty-liberal-order?r=biy76&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Very interesting and reflective thoughts, keeping in mind the current debates and trends. What do you think about decentralisation as regarding cryptocurrencies and blockchains in relation to the current laws in the EU?