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To understand the issues, at the end of the ninth decade of Foreign policyparticularly for Europe, it is first important to understand lucidly the main features of the history of the international system since the birth of our journal in 1936. At that time, Europe had already lost control and, for the most enlightened minds, not only the Wilsonian dream of collective security had vanished, but the march towards a possible new world war was underway. The world that is disappearing today is that of 1945 (symbolically marked by the creation of the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions) and 1947 (symbolically: the start of the “cold war”).
In reality, this world of yesterday – we must call it that and rename it “the day before yesterday” that of Stefan Zweig – died for the first time between 1989 (symbolically: the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 1991 (the breakup of the European Union). Soviet). Most Western observers did not see this immediately, because they wanted to interpret the fall of the Russian empire as the announcement of the definitive victory of liberal democracy and the market economy, the two being thought of as an inseparable couple. In other words, out of ideological bias, they rejected any idea of political heterogeneity and peaceful coexistence in the future international system, as if the West embodied Good and had a monopoly on it. The goal was, always symbolically, “the end of History”, the error of judgment on which Francis Fukuyama based his notoriety; an end of History inseparable from technological progress that was not yet described as digital and even less so, in French, as “digital”.
Thus “liberal globalization”, for which the communist world was obviously not prepared, succeeded the “cold war”. Prepared by the reigns of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom (1979-1990) and Ronald Reagan in the United States (1981-1989), it extended over two decades, straddling the year 2000. The return of tragedy had nevertheless manifested itself in Europe since the 1990s with the war of secession in Yugoslavia, which we hardly talk about anymore, as if we wanted to believe that the Ukrainian war was the first in Europe since the Second World War. From the first decade of the new century/millennium, the return of History, with its complexities, manifested itself around events such as September 11, 2001, the stiffening of post-Soviet Russia and the reappearance of economic and political crises of a genre that we thought had disappeared (symbolically: the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008 or the failure of the poorly named “Arab Spring” of 2011).
ARTICLE OUTLINE
Where does the European Union come from?
The orphaned European Union
Fédération ou confédération ?
Thierry de Montbrialmember of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, is the founder and president of Ifri as well as the World Policy Conference.
Article published in Foreign policyvol. 91, No. 2, 2026.
