Europe’s technocracy is killing your global dreams

Since December 2019, the European Union defines itself and the continent in general as “geopolitics”. The arms of the European Commission have been renamed, ostensibly to push the continent, including non-EU countries, into becoming a global geopolitical force, from energy, research and education to trade. and finances.

Among the main early proponents of the vision of a “geopolitical Europe” was the French president Emmanuel Macron.

A central part of that vision is Macron’s idea of ​​a European Political Community (EPC), which includes the EU’s 27 nations and 17 neighbours, some of whom want to join the EU, including Ukraine and Turkey, and others like Britain who have left.

However, the reality of what appears on the surface to be a policy of enlargement is rather disappointing. The second meeting of the EPC, held in Moldova on June 1, 2023, was an occasion to return to express support for Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while promising North Macedonia, an EU candidate for 18 years, that it will finally join the Union, by 2030. This is too slow and careless, considering Russia’s growing influence in North Macedonia. .

At the end of the day, the EPC sounds and sounds like a pompous name for a series of international events, conferences, cultural festivals, and meetings of leaders from the 44 participating countries. It is not an entity of any kind but a platform for this “community” to come together. To expect anything more from this initiative would be as naive as to expect that EU investment and financing schemes, by themselves, would significantly boost Europe’s “global competitiveness”.

To understand why, look no further than the European Research Area (ERA), an initiative that seeks to integrate the scientific resources of the EU. Its strategy document offers a roadmap for achieving geopolitical relevance through “technological competitiveness.”

The document underlines how innovation, economic growth based on technological competitiveness and global geopolitical relevance are inseparable. The ambition is clear: to become an independent competitor to China and the United States, as well as to the other emerging global forces in the fields of technological innovation, digitization and green energy.

However, the results, at least so far, have once again been disappointing: technocracy, bureaucracy and supposed expert (academic) oversight hold back all efforts to become a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. The EU still lags far behind the US and China when it comes to tangibly transforming itself into a competitive geopolitical player by building an innovation-based economy.

Bold ideas and research plans are dragged down and suffocated by review panels that seek NGO-style project proposal writing and follow the grantmaking models of the golden age of neoliberalism in the 1990s. ambitious proposals under the EU’s major innovation initiatives are dismissed as unrealistic. This fosters a research environment that completely lacks the entrepreneurial approach of the EU’s global competitors.

Unless all this changes, the idea of ​​a geopolitical Europe driven by research and development will remain dead.

Currently, project proposals are qualified through a technocratic process that takes almost a year on average. And at the end of this cumbersome process of seeking financing, the money on the table is also far from competitive: the European Commission invested 100,000 million euros in research and innovation by 2021-27, below the US, China, and even multinational companies like Amazon.

All the talk about a geopolitical Europe will be for naught if the political community you seek to build is an NGO-style platform to meet, greet and talk, rather than a political force and legal entity that can truly transform the union and the commission into a global power.

If it remains a club that a country can join or leave, it is neither political nor geopolitical. Geopolitics is defined territorially; it requires a citizenry that can identify with a social and political system: its imagined political community.

Likewise, competition through innovation must be carried out at an increasingly accelerated pace so that an idea capable of transforming reality is not defeated by the sophistry of technocrats and professors in ivory towers, disconnected from the dizzying speed of transformation. global. Without that, the ambition to compete with Silicon Valley or China is a joke.

In other words, the “geopolitical commission” is nothing more than a dream that implodes under the weight of the suffocating technocratic control of the EU over the social, economic and territorial reality of the continent.

If Europe wants to compete, in geopolitics and technology, the technocrats must step back.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.