On 17 November the Financial Times ran a column by Gideon Rachman, its chief foreign affairs columnist, titled “The scramble for Europe is just beginning”. “For centuries, Europe imposed its will on the world,” Rachman began. “Now the world is beginning to impose its will on Europe.” He went on to argue that Europe was divided and weak, and that this was increasingly allowing “outside powers” like China, Russia, Turkey and the United States to play European countries off against each other and exert influence over them. “We may be beginning to witness what the Oxford scholar Dimitar Bechev calls a ‘scramble for Europe’.”
The phrase was obviously a play on the scramble for Africa – the way in which European powers competed and cooperated to colonise almost all of the continent at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. But “the scramble for Europe” inevitably implies a kind of equivalence between historic European colonialism and the way in which, as he puts it, “outside powers” have “influence” in Europe today.
The scramble for Europe comes from the European Council on Foreign Relations, a European foreign policy think tank I used to work at. Rachman borrowed it from Bechev, a Bulgarian expert on the Balkans and Turkey, who himself took the phrase from a policy brief about Chinese investment in Europe that was published in 2011. (I edited that publication and unsuccessfully argued at the time that we should not use the phrase as its title.) Now that Rachman has used it, the phrase is likely to be used even more.
The reason the phrase is so dangerous is that plays into far-right ideas about a “reverse colonisation” of Europe that is imagined to be taking place. The European far right has appropriated the language of decolonisation and frames non-white – and especially Muslim – immigration as a kind of equivalent to the way that Europeans once colonised much of the rest of the world – or even as a kind of revenge for it. They imagine that it is leading to a “great replacement”, a phrase originally used by the French writer Renaud Camus in a book of the same name published in 2011.
The use of the phrase “scramble for Europe” is a good example of how a kind of international political equivalent of far-right tropes are increasingly creeping into European foreign policy discourse. In particular, that there is an existential threat to Europe, which is now the conventional wisdom among European foreign policy experts, mirrors far-right fears of white genocide or replacement, which are in turn part of a longer history going back to the panic about white “race suicide” at the beginning of the 20th century – that is, exactly the period in which the scramble for Africa was taking place. The way in which the whole idea of international relations began as race relations, as academics like Robert Vitalis and Vineet Thakur have shown, should make us especially alert to these connections.
Apart from being offensive, the phrase “scramble for Europe” is also revealing of a kind of victim complex that pervades European foreign policy debates. The consensus among foreign policy elites is that Europe is naive and weak and must become tougher or more assertive. For example, Rachman wrote in his column that the EU was “good at process and law” but “incapable of acting quickly and ruthlessly like the European great powers of the past, or like the US and China today”.
However, Europe remains one of the richest continents in the world and Europeans have plenty of the kind of “hard power” that Rachman thinks they need: the EU’s economy is much bigger than the Russian economy and it has much greater conventional military capabilities, though Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. It is true that if Europeans were to fully pool their collective resources, they would be more able to compete with China and the United States, but there are good reasons why they have chosen not to do this – and we don’t expect any other continent to unite in this way.
Still, no EU member state or Nato country has been invaded, let alone colonised as the idea of a “scramble for Europe” implies. All that is happening is that other powers are pursuing their own interests within Europe in the same way that Europeans have always pursued their own interests elsewhere in the world – and still do.
There is something almost hysterical about European foreign policy discussions. The reality is that Europe is not in “mortal danger”, as Macron put in in an interview with the Economist last year. It is just in relative decline (as opposed to absolute decline) as the global distribution of power gradually shifts away from the West – which is a good thing because it ultimately means a more equal world. But apparently some Europeans have a such an extraordinary sense of entitlement that this feels apocalyptic to them.
[Further reading: Tinkering with ECHR definitions will not help the government]
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