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The Open Centre: Reimagining Europe’s offer to a fractured world

The Open Centre: Reimagining Europe’s offer to a fractured world The World Today iallan.drupal 8 June 2026 Europe must resist the temptation to become a fortress in a closed West. Instead, amid America and China’s gepolitical struggle, it has the history and values to be the place where the rest of the world finds common cause, writes Grégoire Roos. Introducing ‘The World Tomorrow’ The international order by which much of the world, for better or for worse, has lived for nearly eight decades is eroding. What might succeed it? To try to answer that question and the many others that come with it, we are introducing ‘The World Tomorrow’, a strand for fresh ideas about the direction of global order. To start, Grégoire Roos presents his vision of a new role for Europe – we hope you enjoy it and the occasional essays, interviews and conversations that will follow. Visitors to the recent exhibitions in Germany commemorating the 250th anniversary of the painter Caspar David Friedrich would have been struck by the peculiar, almost mystical, posture of his solitary figures on the edge of the void. So intent are they on the world dissolving into mist before them that they seem almost to overlook the first light gathering beyond it. Neither simply melancholic nor entirely despairful, those are figures of hesitation – poised between what is fading and what is beginning. Carney’s speech said what many European leaders hesitate to say aloud: we are living through a definite rupture, not a passing disturbance. Friedrich’s wanderers offer a fitting metaphor for Europe’s predicament today: a civilization pressed to decide whether it wishes merely to remember the world it once shaped, or to help mould the world now coming into view. That question is no longer aesthetic or philosophical alone. It has become brutally strategic for the whole continent. In this regard, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos earlier this year was striking not because it told us anything entirely new, but because it said plainly what many European leaders still hesitate to say aloud: we are living through a definite rupture, not a passing disturbance. Finnish president Alexander Stubb, for his part, has moved from describing a ‘triangle of power’, that is, a world order structured around three geopolitical blocs: the Global North, led by the United States and Europe, the Global East, led by China and the Global South, with no leading power. He now admits that it looks more like a ‘rectangle’, since the old transatlantic reflex can no longer be taken for granted given the accelerating split between the United States and Europe. And hovering over both is the bracing admonition of S. Jaishankar, India’s minister of external affairs, that Europe must outgrow the habit of thinking that ‘Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.’ Together, these interventions amount to a strategic summons. Europe can afford neither nostalgia nor delusion. The temptation is to respond to this moment in one of two familiar and equally sterile ways. The first is melancholy: to speak as if the answer lay in restoring the vanished certainties of the post‑1945 or post‑1989 order. The second is mimicry: to conclude that, since the age is one of hard power, Europe must simply become colder, harsher, more transactional. Both instincts miss the point. Europe’s opportunity to recover relevance and purpose lies elsewhere. A wider European grammar By Europe, what is meant here is not only the European Union but a wider civilizational basin encompassing all European societies that belong to the continent’s historical argument even when they do not sit within the same institutions. There are already faint signs of such a wider European grammar: the European Political Community, for all its looseness, convenes nearly the whole continent around a language of common stability and prosperity that reaches well beyond the EU’s formal borders. At its best, Europe has not abolished conflict; it has somehow civilized it. That opportunity is to become what one might call the centre that holds. The phrase matters. Europe has long been haunted by the fear that ‘the centre cannot hold’, W.B. Yeats’s 1919 description of post‑First World War Europe, where ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Today’s fear is that pluralism dissolves into chaos, that compromise decays into weakness, and that openness ends in fragmentation. Yet, for the centre to hold, it cannot close itself against plurality. It must remain open. This is not civilization as enclosure, still less as the closed‑West idiom now favoured in Washington. It is civilization in a radically different sense: not walls, but, in the words of Pope Leo XIV, ‘bridges through dialogue and encounter’. A centre holds not by suppressing difference, but by giving it form – by accommodating plurality without surrendering coherence. Europe’s deepest historical achievement has never been domination as such. It has been the difficult art of giving form to plurality; of building institutions in which rival powers, rival classes, rival memories and rival truths can coexist without tearing the political fabric apart. At its best, Europe has not abolished conflict; it has somehow civilized it. — Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Photo: DeAgostini / Getty Images. This is not a claim of innocence. Europe knows too much of empire, hierarchy, hypocrisy and violence to indulge in moral self‑worship. It has preached universalism while practising exclusion; it has spoken in the language of law while often living by exceptions. Precisely for that reason, any serious European project for the 21st century must begin not in self‑congratulation but in humility. An ‘open centre’ is not a closed fortress with better manners. It is not a sanctimonious core issuing instructions to a wayward periphery. It is not the centre to which everyone must return, but the point at which differences can still be held in balance, and a common direction can still be forged. In that sense, it is not an exclusive point of reference, but it has the potential to act as a force for measure and equilibrium in a world of excess and instability. Jaishankar’s witty provocation should be heard in Europe not as an insult but as a moral reality check. Asia, the Persian Gulf, Africa and Latin America do not organize their priorities around Europe’s anxieties. Their concerns lie elsewhere: development, debt, technology, borders, food security, urbanization, energy access and sovereign room for manoeuvre. If Europe wishes to matter in such a world, it must first accept that it is no longer the measure of all things. And, paradoxically, that act of decentring is a moral necessity as well as a geopolitical one. Europe’s ‘fourth way’ French philosopher Paul Ricœur understood early that the true test of universality in a plural world is whether it can be translated without turning imperial. His idea of ‘linguistic hospitality’ offers a clue: Europe will recover credibility not by renouncing universality, but by learning to translate it. Europe will matter more, not less, once it stops mistaking its own experience for the measure of the world. Europe will matter more, not less, once it stops mistaking its own experience for the measure of the world. But accepting that the world is no longer Europe‑centric does not mean renouncing the European vocation altogether. It means redefining it. In the emerging configuration sketched by Carney and Stubb, Europe’s ‘fourth way’ would not be a nostalgic third way warmed over for a harsher age, but a path between American volatility, Chinese‑style authoritarian capitalism, and a wider world increasingly tempted by transactional hedging. Europe’s offer would be neither hegemonic nor passive, neither imperial nor merely procedural, but something rarer: a power of reconciliation. It would be the proposition that liberty can be married to protection, innovation to conscience, prosperity to social cohesion, sovereignty to cooperation, and identity to openness. Carney’s phrase – actually borrowed from Stubb – for this is ‘value‑based realism’. The term is useful precisely because it refuses both sentimental idealism and crude simplification. Yet, such a project cannot be proclaimed abroad before it is built at home. World order – or order abroad – rests on order at home. This is the point on which too much Brussels rhetoric and too much national politics across the continent still founders. Europe’s external incoherence is not only the result of institutional complexity. It is the outward symptom of an inward crisis: distrust in politics, social atomization, cultural pessimism, waning prosperity, exhausted public services, generational frustration and, perhaps worst of all, the growing sense that democratic governments are failing not only in action, but also in imagination. 58% of respondents across 10 countries in Europe were dissatisfied with how democracy was working, according to a Pew study. The malaise is measurable. In 2025, Pew found a median 58 per cent across 23 countries dissatisfied with how democracy was working, with satisfaction in Europe ranging from 75 per cent in Sweden to just 19 per cent in Greece. No society will sustain ambition abroad for long if its citizens experience only drift at home. Politics depends on the existence of what Hannah Arendt aptly called a ‘common world’ in which citizens still feel they have a stake, a voice and a future. Once that world frays, public life gives way to resentment, passivity or tribal retreat. Foreign policy follows the same rule. A society unsure of its own future cannot sustain ambition abroad for long. A Europe that doubts itself will oscillate between sermon and retreat, proclamation and paralysis. Arendt, writing in the aftermath of Europe’s totalitarian collapse, understood as much. Domestic renewal So, the first chapter of any credible European playbook for the new world order is domestic renewal. Not as a preface to geopolitics. But as geopolitics’ very condition of possibility. Europe needs a new civic and material bargain with its own citizens. It needs to prove, in visible ways, that democracy can still build, protect and inspire. That means affordable and reliable energy, yes, but also housing in which the least privileged can imagine living with a sense of pride and dignity; transport and digital infrastructures that reduce distance rather than reproduce fractures; universities and research ecosystems capable of attracting not only the best minds unsettled by America’s academic crackdown, but also talent from Africa, Latin America and Asia; culture and the arts made accessible to everyone; manufacturing strength in the sectors that will define technological sovereignty; public institutions that are competent enough to be trusted and simple enough to be legible. The World Today Related work The decline of the West and the rise of ‘the Rest’ will lead to a new world order Recent efforts to present Europe as a haven for research freedom suggest that some have begun to grasp the stakes, even if slogans still fall well short of strategy. Yet in this age, power requires more than capability. It requires promise. Europe’s greatest strategic deficit is not merely military or fiscal; it is narrative. It does not sufficiently know how to speak of itself except as a market, a rulebook or a risk‑averse peace project. None of that is irrelevant. But none of it is enough. Europe must relearn how to talk about greatness without drifting into a new form of megalomanic expansionism; about ambition without arrogance; about civilization without exclusion. It must once again sound like a place that knows where it wants to go. If it succeeds in doing so at home, then its external projection becomes clearer. The open centre would not present itself to the wider world as a tutor. It would act as a partner of choice in solving concrete problems: scaling research cooperation, widening access to education and training, financing infrastructure that is sustainable rather than extractive, designing AI and digital standards that protect human dignity and fair competition, building resilient supply chains without demanding ideological conformity or falling into moral lectures, and strengthening multilateral rules while accepting that those rules must better reflect non‑European realities. The open centre does not merely invite others into institutions Europe built yesterday; it is willing to reshape those institutions so that others can recognize themselves within them tomorrow. Inclusion is not charity That principle matters particularly in global governance. Europe cannot go on invoking the legitimacy of multilateralism while resisting any meaningful redistribution of voice within it. If the world’s demographic, economic and political gravity is shifting south and east, then institutional authority must begin to follow. That would start with Africa and greater Asia gaining a seat at the table of the permanent members of the UN Security Council – even if that alone would obviously not save the United Nations. A Europe serious about being an open centre would do the same more broadly: not out of self‑denial, but out of strategic intelligence. Inclusion is not charity. It is the condition under which legitimacy survives. Such openness also means taking science and risk seriously. A centre that holds in the 21st century cannot be merely juridical or diplomatic; it must be epistemic. It must be able to absorb uncertainty, marshal expertise and govern frontier technologies without either naivety or paralysis. A centre that holds is that in which citizens will see their dignity as human beings equally recognized and enshrined. Europe should not accept the false choice between hyper‑regulation and techno‑anarchy. It can be the place where innovation scales without shrinking the individual, and where technology remains bounded by dignity, judgment and purpose. A centre that holds is that in which citizens will see their dignity as human beings equally recognized and enshrined. The real point, then, is not that Europe should seek to become ‘No.1’. That would be to mistake yesterday’s grammar of power for tomorrow’s. Europe’s ambition should be more original than that. It should aim at becoming the indispensable organizer of cooperation among powers that do not fully trust one another but cannot flourish alone. It should become the arena in which compatibility is made possible: between markets and morals, states and societies, science and politics, plurality and cohesion. That is what an open centre is for. The virtue of steadiness This would also answer a deeper moral question. In a fragmented world, the highest political virtue is no longer purity; it is steadiness. For the centre to hold, it cannot impose uniformity as a citadel of self‑reference. It must remain open; what Édouard Glissant called a space of relation – an ‘initiation to totality without renouncing the particular’. It is to prevent disintegration. It is to create enough trust, enough credibility, enough competence and enough shared aspiration that differences do not become fatal. Having spent the past 12 centuries wrestling with plurality in a confined space, Europe is unusually equipped for that task. It has learned, often painfully, that coexistence is a political achievement, not a natural state. The world may yet find that capability useful. Viktor Orbán’s defeat may point to a wider truth: a politics of fortress nostalgia is unlikely to prevail indefinitely. None of this will happen through managerialism alone. The preliminary conclusion is therefore also an opening: Europe now needs political leadership driven by substance, steadiness and the audacity to dream. Substance, because rhetoric without delivery will deepen the contempt already stalking democratic politics. Steadiness, because the coming years will reward those who can sustain direction amid shocks. And audacity to dream, because no great political community has ever renewed itself by balance sheets alone. ‘Dream’ is not the opposite of ‘resolve’. In world politics, it is often its truest companion. Hungary’s recent turn after Viktor Orbán’s defeat may, in this respect, point to a wider truth: a politics of fortress nostalgia is unlikely to prevail indefinitely. Fear can mobilize; only a dream can awaken. That is why the next cycle of major European elections matters so much, beginning with France’s presidential contest in 2027. The question in those campaigns will not simply be who governs. It will be whether Europe continues to be narrated as a civilization in decline, oscillating between fear and nostalgia, or whether it rediscovers the ambition to shape the age in its own register. The continent does not need leaders who promise a return to the 19th century with better apps. It needs leaders willing to state, calmly and convincingly, that Europe can still be a maker of order because it is willing first to become a maker of confidence, possibility and purpose at home.