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Just past the quarter-mark of the century, Europe appears to be at a turning point. For decades its share of global GDP has been shrinking and its geopolitical influence eroding. At a certain point, relative decline can turn into absolute decline. That moment may be approaching.
The US, Russia and China are openly engaged in a “scramble for Europe”. Moscow seeks to reassert hegemony in the east. Beijing wants Europe’s industry; Washington demands obedience – and Greenland. Germans have grown anxious about the future. A disoriented France can’t fix its budget. Desperate for growth, Brussels dismantles climate legislation it passed only a few years ago while bending over backwards to appease Donald Trump. Little remains of European dignity – a sense of déclassement is beginning to take hold.
Perhaps this is why the recent Netflix adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 masterpiece Il Gattopardo, The Leopard, is resonating with audiences across the continent. Lampedusa’s epic novel chronicles the decline of a Sicilian aristocratic family in the 19th century – and, more enduringly, the mindset of elites who sense their world is ending yet are willing to compromise and who will do almost anything to extend their power a little longer.
Europe’s political class, suspended between pain and complacency, has come to resemble that aristocracy and is resigned to a strategy of managed decline. Yet “as long as there is death, there is hope,” Lampedusa writes, and Europe is not necessarily lost – if its leaders draw the right lessons from The Leopard.
To read The Leopard is a feast; to watch Luchino Visconti’s 1963 adaptation a must; to linger with the refreshingly slow-paced Netflix series time well spent. For the pressed reader, here is the brief: set during Italian unification, The Leopard follows the Prince of Salina, an ageing Sicilian aristocrat living comfortably off his vast estates. Around him, however, the world is changing. Villagers aspire to become more than labourers on the prince’s land. Aristocratic power gives way to a stabby bourgeoisie.
Clear-eyed, the prince very much understands that his way of life is dying. His wealth and privileges ebb away. “Everything needs to change for everything to remain the same,” the prince’s nephew Tancredi famously declares, urging his uncle to align himself with the new economic and political order. But if remaining on top requires renouncing one’s values and traditions, is that really winning?
The proud prince is drawn to the dignity of resistance yet cannot escape the logic of pragmatic surrender in the hope of delaying his family’s decline. Reading The Leopard today, it is hard not to see Europe in the melancholic Prince of Salina.
Like the prince, many Europeans have led relatively prosperous lives. And like aristocrats of a bygone age, most Europeans are convinced of the superiority of their model – a democratic order, a tamed capitalism, a refined culture – while ignoring the fact that this wealth also rests on the exploitation of others.
Europeans also sense that history is moving against them. At home, politics has become a contest of nostalgias. The rising populist right dreams of an imagined nationalist past, while Europe’s political mainstream behaves like the Prince of Salina himself – trying to prolong the present through tactical adaptation: more debt here, welfare cuts there, deregulation and, above all, yielding to King Trump, who trolls EU leaders on social media and openly insults them as “weak”.
Sure, this politics of muddling through has its virtues. Managed decline beats hubris followed by collapse. But there is an alternative to both denial and accommodation.
The crucial question behind Tancredi’s aphorism is this: if you adapt so that “everything can remain the same”, what exactly are you trying to preserve?
The prince has no convincing answer. He seeks to uphold an order that benefits only himself. Europeans, by contrast, have plenty of allies – if they choose to defend principles such as democracy, the rule of law, a state apparatus we don’t need to live in fear of and the principle of territorial sovereignty. As we saw last week, standing up to Trump on the tariffs he threatened over Greenland paid off. United, Europe is anything but weak.
And Europe can retain this sense of purpose if it can focus on the ambition to build an economy that both is successful and allows people to lead meaningful lives. Trying to advance an order that emphasises human needs over the interests of capital is not decadent. Unlike the prince’s world, Europe’s way of life is not doomed – not least because Europeans don’t want to see the continent becoming what Sicily is to Italy in The Leopard: a periphery governed by others.
Europeans are still showing signs of resistance: 76% of European citizens rejected last summer’s humiliating trade deal with Trump, polls show, and 81% want the EU to build a common defence and security policy. At 74%, approval of the EU has never been higher. And as Russia’s war enters its fifth year, European public opinion has remained committed to Ukraine.
Yes, Europe will have to change profoundly if it wants to protect what truly matters. Preserving Europe’s ability to choose its own future requires a stronger, more democratic EU. In Davos, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called for letting go of “nostalgia” in the name of building a newly independent Europe. Each humiliation at the hands of Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin makes Europeans more receptive to this case.
The real question is thus whether our leaders are ready to drive change rather than merely passively endure it. Or whether, like the prince, they step back from the fight, hoping only to find comfort until their demise. After all, this is the most aristocratic and irresponsible saying of all: après moi, le déluge.
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Joseph de Weck is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute
