JCMS/CES Annual Lecture: "Europe Adrift: The Future of the EU, the Global Economy, and World Order in an Era of Great Power Uncertainty"
- Mark Copelovitch
- Jul 30, 2025
- 2 min read
Last month, I had the honor of delivering the Journal of Common Market Studies Annual Lecture at the Council for European Studies Conference in Philadelphia. The theme of the conference was “Legacies and Ruptures: Making Sense of Europe.” It was a fitting theme to discuss the topics that I covered in the lecture.
I discussed the challenges Europe faces in this moment of deep uncertainty about the future of world order, the global economy, and the United States’ role in it. Scholars, policy experts, and pundits have spilled an enormous amount of ink heralding the “return of geopolitical uncertainty” and the certain end of American hegemony and what is frequently referred to as the “liberal international order” – the international institutions, created and led by the US and its allies – that have shaped and governed world politics since WWII.
Amidst this uncertainty, Europe finds itself adrift. The world as Europeans (and Americans) have known it since the end of World War II may indeed be gone forever. This is the “Rupture” we are facing today. But what will replace it - and what Europe's role in it will be - remains unclear, just as which parts of the old order – the “Legacies” – might survive in the years ahead.
In the lecture, I made two main points. First this new era of “rising geopolitical uncertainty”is really three distinct challenges arising from the behavior of the world’s three other “great powers” (I don’t like this term for lots of reasons, but I'll use it as a shorthand for now). It is a Russian challenge, a Chinese challenge, and an American challenge. All three of these “great powers” are acting in ways that threaten to fundamentally transform their relationships with Europe. Whether these changes are permanent “ruptures,” and what the “legacies” of each will be, are not yet fully known. But we need to unpack each and treat each as a distinct economic and geopolitical challenge.
Second, I spoke about how this "geopolitical uncertainty" poses three distinct crises for Europe: an economic crisis, a security crisis, and a governance crisis. My main conclusion was that Europe can and must respond to each of these, but that doing so will require a lot more European integration, and it will require Europe to act in global governance with a unified voice that it has been unable or unwilling to find for decades. If the world really does face increasing geopolitical uncertainty and a leadership vacuum because of the end of American hegemony, then the only serious option is for Europe to step up and do what it can to fill that void itself.
I covered this in a lot more detail and an updated version of the lecture will appear later this year as an article in the JCMS. In the meantime, you can watch the lecture and find the slides below.
Link to video:
Slides: