Europeans don’t realize just how deeply in trouble they are geopolitically.

A fascinating measure of this is the “Critical Technology Tracker” compiled by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI): Which by the way is the only interesting output that’s ever come out of that institute but that’s besides the point…

The ASPI tracker looks at the 64 critical technologies of the future and tries to understand how countries rank relative to each other for each technology, based on the amount of high-impact research they output. So for how many of these 64 technologies do EU countries rank first? Answer: zero, not a single one of them. China leads in 53 of the technologies (!) and the US in the 11 others.

Let’s go to 2nd place then, there has to be at least one technology for which the EU comes second, right? Nope, again, the answer is zero.

You need to go to the 3rd place to finally find EU countries ranking for 14 technologies… And all in all EU countries are in the top 5 countries for only 37 technologies, meaning that for almost half the critical technologies of the future they basically aren’t even in the race at all, let alone in the lead…

You can see the concrete consequences of this in European tech companies. The biggest one created in the post-internet era (let’s say after the 1990s) is Spotify and is worth $59bn. Which is a dwarf compared with US tech companies (Apple for instance is worth $2.8 trillion, Google is $2.1 trillion) or Chinese ones. Plus we can question whether it’s really a EU company anymore given it’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange and has more employees in the US than anywhere else in the world (https://statista.com/statistics/813906/spotify-number-employees-by-region/)…

Technology is absolutely critical when it comes to geopolitics. That’s how the West got on top in the first place, with the industrial revolution that begun in the UK. Their technological superiority is how, first and foremost, paired with a culture of conquest and proselytizing, they managed to submit the rest of the world.

China understood that lesson all too well. During the Qing dynasty it got complacent and arrogant. This is best illustrated by the famous letter of emperor Qianlong to King George III in which Qianlong wrote “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders” (the whole letter is worth a read: https://china.usc.edu/emperor-qianlong-letter-george-iii-1793). A handful of decades later started China’s “century of humiliation”… Which is why they put so much energy into being on top technologically today.

The fact that Europe is a very distant laggard in the technology race today, after China and the US, bodes very badly for the future. The EU can very much be today’s version of China’s Qing dynasty.

Besides technological superiority, the other 4 key aspects of power when it comes to geopolitics are: military, economic, political and cultural. Let’s have a quick look at each of these for the EU.

Military power is easy: the EU is by and large “protected” (quotation marks on purpose) by NATO, which is a US-led organization. As such, as of today, they do not have independent military power to speak of. France during a long time, until president Sarkozy in 2007, was out of NATO, and as such Europe could boast having some sovereign military, but that’s over. We’re now under pretty much complete military tutelage.

As for the economy, the EU went from first economic power in the world 30 years ago in 1994, claiming almost 21% of the world’s GDP PPP (vs 20% for the US and 5% for China) down to 14% today, lower than the US at 15.5% and significantly lower than China at 19% (https://imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA). In other words it went from first economic power of the world to increasingly distant third. And given how tied economic performance is to technological development, the prospects for improvement are poor at best…

Politically speaking, does Europe still have its own voice? Given that the current debate in the EU is about “strategic autonomy”, meaning in large part the need for Europe to indeed have its own voice, the answer is clearly a no. We can see this with Gaza, or most important geopolitical questions of the day: is there a clear, distinct European position on critical matters? Nope. At the beginning of the century Europe still dared to have its own voice, such as when Chirac famously opposed the Iraq war, but that’s over today.

Lastly, the cultural realm. When is the last time you watched a contemporary French, German or say Italian movie? Or listened to a contemporary song from any of these countries? Or read an article from these countries’ media? I suspect that for the immense majority of the world, the answer to these questions is “it’s been a while”. Heck I’m French and I haven’t watched a French movie in something like 4 or 5 years (and I do watch maybe 1 movie a week), which says a lot… Europe is largely becoming culturally irrelevant.

So yup, the picture ain’t pretty at all… This post is already way too long so I won’t go into the reasons behind this obvious decline. I will just say that many Europeans feel rightly immensely betrayed by the EU, which was always presented to us as a way to stay in the race versus the giants that are the US and China… but delivered the exact contrary. And I am afraid that turning the situation around will necessitate extraordinary leadership, which seems to be the very thing lacking in the EU at the moment

We love to give lessons to the rest of the world but I’m afraid that if we’re being objective we’re becoming a global basket case, given how badly we mismanaged the extraordinary good hand we started with just a few decades ago. The US is often said to be on the edge of collapse and whilst their situation too is far from great, we objectively messed things up even far worse than they did, which is quite a feat…