A MOST LONELY UNION

IN SEPTEMBER 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insisting that the European Union needed to change. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen promised a new “geopolitical Commission,” but on the other, she wanted the EU “to be the guardian of multilateralism.” The difficult question was left unstated: How exactly is the EU supposed to reconcile the great-power maneuvering of geopolitics with the more level playing field of multilateralism?

Geopolitics is the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by powerful states, no matter the cost to others. Multilateralism involves mutual agreements among states pursuing their collective welfare. At a minimum, the two sit awkwardly with each other; at the worst, they are radically incompatible. The latter is true of the current system of globalization, which has been supported by a complex system of multilateral rules and agreements among states.

Von der Leyen—and the EU—faces a fundamental strategic dilemma. More than any ordinary nation-state, the EU is as pure a creature of multilateral globalization as exists in the world. It is most comfortable when the outside world mirrors its traditional internal principles of organization: free economic exchange and mutually beneficial cooperation.

Deglobalization has cut the EU adrift. In the new world order, geopolitics—in the form of newly assertive great powers like the United States and China—is coming to trump old trade commitments and international cooperation. Europe, for its part, has been vacillating between defending the remnants of multilateralism and building up geopolitical muscle so it can pursue its own strategic self-interest.

The coronavirus crisis—in which other member states have been willing to leave Italy high and dry—shows how the EU may suffer if it does not figure out how to reconcile these clashing