#51 Europe’s Misplaced Certainties

Hi all,

It has been a while. I have been finishing the manuscript for a book that hopefully will be published somewhere this year (in Dutch), doing a lot of swimming, and a lot of work. I don’t publish my Dutch columns and opinion pieces here — although I sometimes reuse fragments — but I find myself increasingly preoccupied with the state of the world. And, more specifically, with Europe’s delicate position in it.

One of the questions that keeps returning is how democracies adapt in times of democratic erosion. Not in the abstract, but under very concrete economic and geopolitical pressures.

What strikes me most in current European debates is not hesitation, and not even the shock of Trumpism, autocracy or outright fascism — although by now none of that should come as a surprise. What strikes me is that Europe still reacts almost exclusively from a set of misplaced certainties.

Certainty that growth will return. Certainty that geopolitical tensions will remain manageable. Certainty that democracy, prosperity and sustainability ultimately reinforce one another, as they always supposedly have.

In that sense, Europe’s problem is not the absence of knowledge, but the persistence of assumptions that no longer have to justify themselves. Certainty has become habitual rather than earned.

The conclusion then follows almost automatically: that more competition, more markets and more growth are the appropriate responses to geopolitical tension and strategic vulnerability.

Added to this is an even deeper certainty: that we do not really have to give up anything, and that there is therefore no need for a genuine, uncomfortable debate about trade-offs.

These certainties are rarely defended explicitly. They function as background assumptions, silently shaping what is considered realistic, feasible or politically acceptable. And because they remain implicit, they are almost never tested.

This blog is an attempt to make those assumptions visible, and to question whether they still hold.

Europe after guarantees

Europe’s current predicament is often described as a crisis. In reality, it is better understood as a delayed adjustment. The world Europe was optimised for, one of stable alliances, cheap energy, expanding trade and predictable growth, is no longer the world it operates in. What has changed is not just the geopolitical environment, but the assumptions that once made Europe’s position feel natural and secure.

For decades, Europe’s political economy rested on a relatively simple division of labour. Security was largely outsourced. Energy and resources were imported. Industrial production was increasingly externalised. In return, Europe specialised in regulation, norms, market access and coordination. This arrangement worked remarkably well as long as three conditions held: abundant global growth, stable geopolitical guarantees, and a broadly cooperative international order.

None of these conditions can be taken for granted anymore.

The erosion of implicit guarantees is not only visible in security arrangements, but also in trade, energy and technology. Access is becoming conditional. Dependence is increasingly weaponised. Power is exercised less through rules than through control over critical inputs. Europe, lacking fossil reserves, critical minerals and dominant technology platforms, finds itself structurally exposed in this new landscape.

The default response has been to treat this exposure as a competitiveness problem. If Europe can grow faster, innovate harder, liberalise further and reduce regulatory “burdens”, it can supposedly regain its footing. Growth, once again, is expected to do the stabilising work: economically, geopolitically and politically.

If you spend time in Brussels, or speak with people working there, you can see how this logic translates into practice. Across multiple policy domains, legislation is now being reassessed through so-called omnibus proposals: large legislative packages that bundle together numerous, often unrelated, measures and push them through in one procedural move. There are already ten such packages under preparation, and it is telling that the first one focused on sustainability.

At the same time, the European Commission has announced its intention to loosen its own internal rulemaking procedures, arguing that it needs to respond more quickly to an “ever-changing and volatile geopolitical environment.” Speed, competitiveness and simplification have become the dominant watchwords. Dozens of civil society organisations, as well as parts of industry, have warned that this approach risks undermining democratic scrutiny by compressing deliberation and reducing transparency.

What is striking is not the existence of these pressures, but how they are justified. The underlying assumption is that regulatory density is a drag on growth, and that restoring growth will, in turn, restore strategic room for manoeuvre. Simplification is presented as pragmatism, deregulation as necessity, and democratic friction as an unfortunate but temporary cost.

This is precisely how growth functions as a substitute for politics. Rather than debating which objectives should take precedence under constraint, complexity is framed as inefficiency and conflict as delay. The promise is that, once growth returns, the deeper questions can be revisited. But postponement, once again, is mistaken for resolution.

As long as growth is expected to return through ‘simplification’ (in fact deregulation), difficult choices can be postponed. Distributional conflicts can be softened. Strategic dependencies can be tolerated. Environmental limits can be framed as temporary constraints rather than structural boundaries.

Yet the empirical case for growth as a democratic stabiliser has weakened.

Growth allowed conflicts to be postponed rather than resolved, a pattern that worked remarkably well in a world of abundance, extraction, commodification and unequal trade, and far less so in a world of constraint.

Across advanced democracies, growth has become more volatile, less inclusive and more weakly connected to political legitimacy. At the same time, democratic institutions themselves are showing signs of strain (figure below), not through sudden collapse, but through gradual erosion of trust, accountability and institutional restraint. This erosion is uneven and contested, but it increasingly overlaps with high inequality, concentrated power and declining expectations of shared progress.

Large cross-country analyses increasingly suggest that democratic erosion is not random. It follows identifiable patterns, and one of the most consistent correlates is high income inequality, including in wealthy, long-established democracies. Recent work shows that inequality is among the strongest predictors of democratic backsliding, and that this relationship is unlikely to be explained by reverse causality alone. Growth, in other words, does not reliably neutralise the political risks associated with unequal distributions of income and power. This pattern persists across different model specifications and country samples.

This matters because Europe has long relied on growth to postpone political choices. As long as aggregate expansion continues, distributional conflicts can be softened, institutional tensions managed, and ecological constraints pushed outward. When growth slows (or when its environmental costs become impossible to externalise) these tensions surface simultaneously.

The growth–democracy relationship itself turns out to be more fragile than often assumed. The historical coincidence of industrial growth and the expansion of liberal democracy appears to have been exceptional rather than structural. Modern democracies emerged under conditions of abundant energy, rapid productivity gains, and expanding material frontiers, conditions that are unlikely to persist throughout the twenty-first century. Slower growth does not automatically undermine democracy, but it does remove an important buffer that once absorbed social and political stress.

Europe is not immune to this pattern. What makes its situation distinct is that democratic erosion, geopolitical vulnerability and ecological constraint are converging rather than occurring separately. Each amplifies the others. Strategic dependence limits political room for manoeuvre. Ecological limits constrain growth-based compensation. Institutional fragility reduces the capacity to manage distributional conflict.

This convergence exposes a blind spot at the heart of the European project: it was never designed for a world of persistent scarcity and strategic rivalry. It was designed for a world in which integration, markets and growth gradually dissolved political tensions instead of sharpening them.

Scarcity changes that logic. Scarcity forces prioritisation. It makes trade-offs explicit. It reveals which commitments are real and which are rhetorical. In such a context, sufficiency, reducing material demand rather than merely greening supply, stops being a moral preference and becomes a strategic consideration. Less dependence means less exposure. Less throughput means fewer points of vulnerability. Scarcity, in this sense, is not merely an economic condition. It is a test of political adulthood. It forces societies to distinguish between what they want and what they are willing to defend.

However, what recent research reveals is that most economists see sufficiency (or demand-side reduction policies) not as a viable policy option, unlike other researchers.

None of this implies that democracy, prosperity and sustainability are fundamentally incompatible. But it does mean that their relationship is no longer automatic. Democracies that assume perpetual growth to maintain legitimacy become fragile when growth slows. Systems that refuse to articulate limits invite political backlash when limits assert themselves anyway.

This is ultimately a question of maturity: deciding what can no longer be postponed. Europe’s difficulty is not a lack of values or resources. It is a reluctance to accept that the age of implicit guarantees is over, and that autonomy now requires choice, restraint and direction.

Political maturity is not the ability to promise continuity, but the capacity to govern discontinuity. Europe’s difficulty is not that guarantees are disappearing, but that its political imagination is still organised around their return.

The uncomfortable possibility is that Europe cannot regain stability by restoring the old model. It can only adapt by redefining what stability means in a world where growth, consensus and security can no longer be assumed.

That is the conversation Europe is not yet having. But it is the only conversation that takes its stated commitments seriously. In a world without guarantees, autonomy does not come from reassurance. It comes from the willingness to govern limits openly, to act with coherence even when certainty is no longer available, and to name what can no longer be defended.

I will go more into depth on what follows from this in my Substack. If you are interested, you can read it here.

Take care,

Hans