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Introduction: European politics nowadays | 27
social media, and digital news platforms enables people to be information
producers, critics, and consumers in parallel. In the future, filtering will be
performed and perceptions be determined more and more by digital systems.
As “we only experience a tiny fraction of the world, which fraction we are
presented with will make a big difference. It will determine what we know,
what we feel, what we want, and therefore what we do. To control these is the
essence of politics” (Susskind 2018, 146, emphasis in the original).
THE GLOBAL CONTEXT
Finally, we cannot ignore that European politics are embedded in global
political dynamics, shaping the external relations of the EU and its Member
States with the rest of the world. Today, as Youngs rightly points out, these
relations are increasingly squeezed between domestic European crises and
a reshaped global order in the making (Youngs 2014, 2). As a result, “the
narrative switched from one of the EU gradually taking the shape of an
emergent superpower to one of minimising the fall-out from these twin
challenges” (Youngs 2021, 12).
The changing place of Europe in the world and the nature of the European
Union as an international actor have been extensively discussed in the relevant
literature, which I have no intention to repeat here. A point of scholarly
consensus is that one cornerstone of the EU’s international influence is its
power of attraction - though some commentators raise doubts as to whether
the EU model is really replicable in other parts of the world, or the Union is
facing its “Galapagos Syndrome moment’, meaning that “Europe's postmodern
order has become so advanced and particular to its environment that it is
impossible for others to follow” (Krastev 2017, 9). In any case, this power of
attraction has suffered a heavy blow as a result of the European poly-crisis
in the past decade.
The Unions behaviour as an international actor is also rooted in its internal
dilemmas regarding its raison détre and self-perception. While European
integration was born from the desire for sustainable peace, the challenge
of rebuilding Western Europe, and of reintegrating (West) Germany into
the European and international order, a key reason for the EU’s existence in
the globalised world today - beyond the domestication of European power
relations, economic development, and the welfare of European citizens ¬
is its size, which makes it comparable to such global powers as the United
States, China, Russia, or India.
However, this size only matters if the Union is able to speak with a single
voice in the world when needed. Achieving this is no easy task against the
backdrop of centrifugal forces among its Member States, external policies,
institutions, political families, and citizens themselves. But even if the single
voice was achieved, there is the unsolved strategic dilemma: should the