Europe is in the early years of a new era. The continent is now witnessing a great struggle between two Europes: liberal and anti-liberal, internationalist and nationalist, the Europe of integration and that of disintegration. Who wins will be decided by the strength and skill of domestic political forces, but also by external developments over which Europeans have little or no control.
This still nameless new period of European history began on February 24 2022, with Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Beginnings in history, as in romance, are crucial. In the first seven years after 1945, the US-led west created most of the key international institutions we have to this day, including the UN and Nato. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1952, set the course for what eventually became the European Community. In the first seven years after 1989, Europe and the US effectively decided to extend the existing Euro-Atlantic order, including Nato and a European Community that was deepened to become today’s European Union, to much of the eastern half of the continent.
The two overlapping periods in which this order was created and extended, but then eroded — the postwar (ie after 1945) and the post-Wall (ie after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 1989) — came to a simultaneous crashing end with the start of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022. The institutions still exist, but the context is transformed. Now we’re in this new era’s Year Four — the counterpart, if you will, of 1949 for the postwar and 1993 for the post-Wall.