The “end of history” is over and Europe is experiencing a “transatlantic crisis”, says Ursula von der Leyen, former Angela Merkel acolyte turned European Commission supremo.
“Another, new European Union” is needed to shape the “new world order” emerging out of power struggles between the United States, China, and Russia the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen told a German newspaper.
Speaking to Die Zeit, the top Eurocrat expressed her interpretation of events that “The West as we knew it no longer exists”, stating that beyond the old understanding of what countries were Western and which not, the European Union is now in talks on working “together with us on the new order” with countries like New Zealand, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico and South America.
Asked by Die Zeit whether she is now the leader of the Western World now President Trump is back in office — former German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been called the same by liberal Europeans in Trump’s first term — and if the EU is now the main guarantor of Western values, Von der Leyen demurred, but repeatedly made the point an old order had fallen and a new one is being crafted. She said: “When the Wall fell in 1990, the end of history was proclaimed.
“Now history is back, and so are geopolitics. And we see that what we had perceived as a world order is becoming a world disorder, triggered not least by the power struggle between China and the United States, but of course also by Putin’s imperialist ambitions. That is why we need another, new European Union that is ready to go out into the big wide world and to play a very active role in shaping this new world order that is coming.”
Von der Leyen’s remarks throughout are full of implicit criticism of the Trump administration without mentioning him by name, with repeated assertions that the European Union offers a haven of stability during global change.
This is an extremely charitable take, certainly, but not wholly without merit: the European Union is so waterlogged with bureaucracy it is incapable of rapid change by design. On one hand this might give an external impression of stability, on the other when flash crises appear its members are becoming accustomed to stepping outside EU structures to agree rapid solutions among themselves while Brussels wades towards catching up.
Such implied criticism came for the U.S. from all angles. Among Von der Leyen’s assertions were that because many democracies in Europe are so new, they are better democracies because the fear of authoritarianism from communist East Europe to fascist Iberia exists in living memory. With this comes the tacit assertion that American democracy is weakened because it is centuries old and its voters don’t understand what is at stake.
Nevertheless despite the jabs at the U.S. and President Trump, the top Eurocrat asserted that she feels herself a “great friend of the United States of America, a convinced Atlanticist. I firmly believe that the friendship between Americans and Europeans remains”.
Ursula von der Leyen was Germany’s notoriously poor defence minister under Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2019, she demonstrated her fitness for higher European office with the essential skill of falling upwards, going straight from that ministry to President of the European Commission.
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