Tectonic Geopolitics

By Adrian Garcia-Esteve

We live in an age of headlines. Whether it is as citizens of Europe or the United States, as transatlanticists, or as globally minded students of political science, it seems that nearly every new day brings breaking stories of potentially game-changing developments. It is a surreal experience to live through day in and day out, with the pace and magnitude of current events simultaneously numbing and exhilarating.

I began the JMU EUPS programme in 2014. This was only a few months after Crimea had been de facto annexed by the Russian Federation in March, a few months after the EU-wide European Parliament elections in May, and a few months after the formal declaration of a new caliphate by the rebranded IS in June. This, as it turns out, would be a fairly standard year.

Our cohort graduated the following summer, and in October 2015 I moved from the hot, sunny banks of the Arno to the slick grey stones of Brussels for a traineeship at the European Parliament. I was building on the connections I had made and the first-hand experience of the institutions that we had received over the course of the programme. As part of the Secretariat of the EP’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, I supported the Committee’s report on what would become the EU’s Global Strategy, diving into sanctions and restrictive measures, misinformation campaigns and counter-propaganda, EU-NATO relations, cyber capabilities, and Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) at an uncertain time when many Europeans still seemed uncomfortable even discussing what kind of defence and security actor the EU could or should be.

This debate would need to happen sooner rather than later, however, as the luxury of indecision would not be able to survive the shock that was the UK’s referendum to leave the EU. The unthinkable had happened, and many in the Brussels bubble – myself included – were in a daze: days, weeks, and months would go by with everyone obsessing over the questions “how?” and “why?”, occasionally punctuated by rather colourful expletives. A new relationship would need to be established, not just between the UK and the EU, but between the remaining 27 member states themselves: the UK would no longer serve as either a counter-balance or a handbrake inside the EU, and the remaining countries would need to find a new spirit of unity to face the next few years of difficult and highly politicized negotiations.

If the unthinkable could happen once, then there is no reason it couldn’t happen twice, and 2016 was not yet over. If Brexit was a shock, then the November election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America was nothing short of cataclysmic. As candidate and as President, Trump and his vitriolic and unapologetic capriciousness, have captured the very worst of the populist movements which have been churning the waters in European societies, and his election has thrown years of domestic progress and decades of international investment in liberal, multilateral institutions into the fire.

There are two great ironies in both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. The first is that both of these events were heralded as crises for Europe, which would not only weaken the EU in real terms but which might also undermine the institutional foundations that had allowed the European project to slowly evolve. In reality, however, the EU has not unraveled and has in fact shown signs that these challenges will instead lead to further drives for integration and a more pragmatic assessment of Europe’s place in the world.  

The second and perhaps greater irony is that despite campaigning on the promise to “make America great again,” President Donald Trump has done more in the last year to make America just like any other democracy than any foreign adversary has managed to do in our country’s history. From asinine domestic policies to toxic moral leadership, from spontaneous trade wars with allies to a wholesale abdication of global leadership, the United States is in many ways in crisis with itself, a crisis which tests not only the strength of the ideal of the shining city on the hill, but, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “whether [our] nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

My EUPS colleagues and I came to Europe in 2015 with the confidence befitting citizens of a global hegemon, one which not only upheld the liberal international order but one whose protection and support had in many ways enabled European integration to flourish. We came with the self-assurance that we somehow shared in the creation of the unique political community we had come to study, and that firsthand experience of the success of the transatlantic bond would enrich our understanding when we returned to the U.S., whether to continue building our local/national communities or our liberal global order.

What we did not expect was that in the turbulence of the coming years, this order might be turned upside down and that our experience in the history and politics of the European Union would be not a validation of our exceptionalism, but a gathering of arms in its defence. It is incumbent upon us as students of both the old world and the new to differentiate not only ourselves but our professional contributions, to bear at the forefront of our minds the lessons we learned from a continent ravaged by nationalism, and then united by diversity.

While it is true that without the EUPS programme I would likely not be where I am today, more important is how it contributed to my understanding of why I am here at all. Even though I elected to remain in Brussels, the values and the institutional links that bind Europe and the United States must continue to be reinforced from both sides of the Atlantic, and as EUPS alumni we have both the knowledge and the consciousness to do this work. Make the most of your learning opportunities and seek out your next adventure boldly, but remember: if the weight of this experience sits a little more heavily on your shoulders when you return, that will be a good thing.

Adrian is a consultant at Burson Cohn & Wolfe (formerly Burson-Marsteller), one of the top 3 global public affairs and communications agencies in the world, where he covers government relations, political clients, and defence issues. He is also the Chair of the Working Group on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defence at LYMEC, the European Young Liberals organisation. He graduated from the JMU M.A. in Political Science EUPS program in 2015, with a focus on foreign policy and justice and home affairs.