Sometime in the late 1990s, India’s ‘accidental’ Prime Minister for a few months IK Gujral raised the hackles of the ancein regime when he termed the United Kingdom “a fourth-rate world power”, implying that it was living on past glories much like the rest of Europe.
Not known for his prescience in many spheres, Gujral got this right. European establishments have known the truth of this rather impolitic statement for a while, but it has taken them the better part of two decades to factor it into policy formulation and posit realistic outcomes from their multilateral initiatives. Europe’s self-realisation that it carries limited heft in global affairs, however, may result in the most profound pivot for the countries of the continent since they embarked on their respective colonial quests.
The European Union has, post-World War II, succeeded in realising its so-called ‘foundational peace project’ ~ war between old continental adversaries is today unthinkable. But the world faces formidable challenges outside the relatively calm continent, to coin a phrase. Kemal Dervis of Brookings in a recent essay has suggested that there are today two significant “global missions” that Europe could embrace: Climate change and dual-use technologies.
The COP26 in Glasgow last month produced notable new pledges but given the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, ambitious mitigation efforts have to be delivered in this decade if a carbon-neutral world is to be a reality by the middle of the century. Depending on pledges alone won’t cut it. The problem countries in the climate change mitigation effort,
it is well-known, are USA, China, and the large developing economies. Europe, it is argued, can have a positive influence on US and Chinese climate policies, particularly through a carefully implemented carbon border adjustment mechanism that imposes a levy on carbon-intensive imports into the EU. And it can have a more decisive influence on mobilising the required resources to provide financial help for emerging economies by supporting capital increasesfor multilateral development banks in which European countries are large shareholders.
Dual-use technologies such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, on the other hand, which offer humanity tremendous opportunities for longer lives and greater well-being, also imply existential risks like those posed by nuclear weapons and climate change. It is difficult to draw the line between these technologies’ peaceful use and their deployment to gain strategic superiority over rivals as can be seen in the no-holds-barred technological competition between China and the USA and the efforts by non-state actors to acquire the ability to weaponize innovations.
Europe, with its cutting-edge expertise in these areas, is in a position to help design new rules and treaties resembling the arms-control pacts that previously helped protect the world from nuclear war. Europe’s devastation in two world wars has stripped it of the desire to dominate others, says Dervis, making it easier for the EU to act as a peace broker through these two crucial interventions. Godspeed.