We are heading towards a fragmented, chaotic world, dominated by regionalism and power politics once again, speakers at the MCC Brussels’ latest event on March 9th accentuated. The event, titled The Return of Geopolitics?, brought scholars, former diplomats, and security experts together to discuss the state of the world one year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The prestigious Solvay Library, serving as the conference venue in the heart of the European district, was filled to the brim with an audience eager to hear Europe’s foremost conservative intellectuals debate our time’s most pressing questions.
“Whenever I look at Europe today, I can’t help but see the Europe of the pre-First World War era,” Professor Frank Füredi, executive director of the conservative think tank, said in his opening speech. “There is a sense of foreboding, a sense that something bad is going to happen.” MCC’s conference, therefore, came to discuss exactly that, to make sense of the geopolitical transformation that we are currently witnessing all over the globe as a consequence of the war in Ukraine, and to help us better understand the world we live in.
Contrary to the conference’s title, geopolitics never went away, all speakers seemed to agree. It was only hidden, for a time, under the surface of the U.S. hegemony, whether manifested in neoconservative democracy export or liberal internationalism, as Dr. Petr Drulák, professor at the University of West Bohemia and former Czech ambassador to France, explained. But as the U.S.-dominated unipolar world is waning, power politics naturally takes a central role again.
But what are the accompanying signs of this current geopolitical shift? According to Dr. Robert Castel, a prominent Israeli security expert, the war in Ukraine saw several fundamental changes on the battlefield. What we see today is the revolution of quantity, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness, as cheap, easily mass-produced, inelaborate weapon systems are dominating the complex, more expensive arms previously produced in the West. Moreover, he believes small and elite military forces will again have to be replaced by mass mobilization to support tomorrow’s territorial warfare. “Europeans, you’ll have to change your sneakers to military boots in the coming decades,” Castel warned.
What this means, in practice, is that the next three decades are going to look quite different than the last three. We’re going to see a world of “uncertain multipolarity,” absent of clear superpowers (as the U.S no longer seeks to intervene everywhere, but the aging China could never truly replace it as a global hegemon), where regional and middle powers will be incentivized to pursue their interests through armed conflict.
“This is the end of the end of history,” the Founder of the French think-tank Geopragma, Dr. Carolin Galactéros said, referring to Fukuyama’s famous thesis about the ultimate victory of the liberal democratic global order—which now appears to be canceled. Once Putin demonstrated that one can, in fact, stand up to Western hegemony, the genie is out of the bottle and others will inevitably follow suit as well, she said, since most of the world only saw the liberal order as an instrument of realizing Western interests to the detriment of their own.
This global shift, returning to a Clausewitzian view of conflicts (that shatters Western Europe’s “illusion” of trying to portray war as an illegitimate form of politics, as Dr. Jean-Robert Raviot, professor of post-Soviet studies at the Université Paris Nanterre explained), will also bring about the significant weakening of global institutions.
“There will be fewer and more flexible rules in the world of geopolitics, but understood by all,” Dr. Réka Szemerkényi, a senior advisor for transatlantic strategy at the International Republican Institute and former Hungarian ambassador to the U.S., underlined. “This is the end of naïve, mindless globalization,” she said, but added that the world will still need global institutions to face global challenges in the next decades, such as “migration, climate change, engineered pandemics, or uncontrolled AI.”
The keynote speech, delivered by Prof. John Tsagronis of the Institute of World Politics, presented a different perspective, as seen from the other side of the Atlantic. Tsargonis insisted that what Europe is perhaps too quick to criticize as “American decline” is actually Washington’s re-positioning on the global scene. America will not cease to be a global power anytime soon, but it will gradually decrease its involvement in world affairs to focus on itself.
Our complex, multipolar world is nothing like the straightforward bipolarity of the Cold War, when America’s goals were clear and enjoyed widespread domestic support. Now the U.S. foreign policy “lacks coherence, consistency, and consensus” to serve as the ‘global policeman,’ which leaves Europe to find a way to ensure its own long-term security. “Europe is not irrelevant,” Tsargonis said, but rather lacks the instruments to fully realize its strategic goals. The commitment to democratic values is important, but you need a large military force to actually make a difference.
There is no way to know when this horrible war of attrition in Ukraine will come to an end, but after this conference, it seems clear that it will leave behind a different world: one of fewer rules and authority, but more conflicts and uncertainty. The only question that remains, therefore, is whether we are prepared to navigate this change, or cling to old ideas and perish along with them.
MCC Brussels: A World of Conflict Awaits
We are heading towards a fragmented, chaotic world, dominated by regionalism and power politics once again, speakers at the MCC Brussels’ latest event on March 9th accentuated. The event, titled The Return of Geopolitics?, brought scholars, former diplomats, and security experts together to discuss the state of the world one year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The prestigious Solvay Library, serving as the conference venue in the heart of the European district, was filled to the brim with an audience eager to hear Europe’s foremost conservative intellectuals debate our time’s most pressing questions.
“Whenever I look at Europe today, I can’t help but see the Europe of the pre-First World War era,” Professor Frank Füredi, executive director of the conservative think tank, said in his opening speech. “There is a sense of foreboding, a sense that something bad is going to happen.” MCC’s conference, therefore, came to discuss exactly that, to make sense of the geopolitical transformation that we are currently witnessing all over the globe as a consequence of the war in Ukraine, and to help us better understand the world we live in.
Contrary to the conference’s title, geopolitics never went away, all speakers seemed to agree. It was only hidden, for a time, under the surface of the U.S. hegemony, whether manifested in neoconservative democracy export or liberal internationalism, as Dr. Petr Drulák, professor at the University of West Bohemia and former Czech ambassador to France, explained. But as the U.S.-dominated unipolar world is waning, power politics naturally takes a central role again.
But what are the accompanying signs of this current geopolitical shift? According to Dr. Robert Castel, a prominent Israeli security expert, the war in Ukraine saw several fundamental changes on the battlefield. What we see today is the revolution of quantity, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness, as cheap, easily mass-produced, inelaborate weapon systems are dominating the complex, more expensive arms previously produced in the West. Moreover, he believes small and elite military forces will again have to be replaced by mass mobilization to support tomorrow’s territorial warfare. “Europeans, you’ll have to change your sneakers to military boots in the coming decades,” Castel warned.
What this means, in practice, is that the next three decades are going to look quite different than the last three. We’re going to see a world of “uncertain multipolarity,” absent of clear superpowers (as the U.S no longer seeks to intervene everywhere, but the aging China could never truly replace it as a global hegemon), where regional and middle powers will be incentivized to pursue their interests through armed conflict.
“This is the end of the end of history,” the Founder of the French think-tank Geopragma, Dr. Carolin Galactéros said, referring to Fukuyama’s famous thesis about the ultimate victory of the liberal democratic global order—which now appears to be canceled. Once Putin demonstrated that one can, in fact, stand up to Western hegemony, the genie is out of the bottle and others will inevitably follow suit as well, she said, since most of the world only saw the liberal order as an instrument of realizing Western interests to the detriment of their own.
This global shift, returning to a Clausewitzian view of conflicts (that shatters Western Europe’s “illusion” of trying to portray war as an illegitimate form of politics, as Dr. Jean-Robert Raviot, professor of post-Soviet studies at the Université Paris Nanterre explained), will also bring about the significant weakening of global institutions.
“There will be fewer and more flexible rules in the world of geopolitics, but understood by all,” Dr. Réka Szemerkényi, a senior advisor for transatlantic strategy at the International Republican Institute and former Hungarian ambassador to the U.S., underlined. “This is the end of naïve, mindless globalization,” she said, but added that the world will still need global institutions to face global challenges in the next decades, such as “migration, climate change, engineered pandemics, or uncontrolled AI.”
The keynote speech, delivered by Prof. John Tsagronis of the Institute of World Politics, presented a different perspective, as seen from the other side of the Atlantic. Tsargonis insisted that what Europe is perhaps too quick to criticize as “American decline” is actually Washington’s re-positioning on the global scene. America will not cease to be a global power anytime soon, but it will gradually decrease its involvement in world affairs to focus on itself.
Our complex, multipolar world is nothing like the straightforward bipolarity of the Cold War, when America’s goals were clear and enjoyed widespread domestic support. Now the U.S. foreign policy “lacks coherence, consistency, and consensus” to serve as the ‘global policeman,’ which leaves Europe to find a way to ensure its own long-term security. “Europe is not irrelevant,” Tsargonis said, but rather lacks the instruments to fully realize its strategic goals. The commitment to democratic values is important, but you need a large military force to actually make a difference.
There is no way to know when this horrible war of attrition in Ukraine will come to an end, but after this conference, it seems clear that it will leave behind a different world: one of fewer rules and authority, but more conflicts and uncertainty. The only question that remains, therefore, is whether we are prepared to navigate this change, or cling to old ideas and perish along with them.
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