BH
Europe is not called to lead
because of its values, but because
it cannot afford to abandon them.
Reading time: ± 10:00 min
When Mark Carney said in Yerevan that "the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe," he wasn't offering a compliment. He was identifying a mechanism—and issuing a warning.
To read his statement as an endorsement of European virtue is to miss its force entirely. What Carney was pointing to was not superiority, but exposure: Europe is one of the few arenas where multiple forms of legitimacy are still forced to coexist—democratic accountability, supranational governance, market integration, regulatory ambition. It cannot escape the tension between what it claims and what it does. That tension, rightly managed, is the precondition for rebuilding coherence. Wrongly managed, it is the first casualty.
This distinction matters because Europe has spent decades believing its role in the international order flows from its values. It does not. Or rather: not primarily. It flows from a structural condition that makes the gap between claim and action impossible to hide for long. The world can see it. Other states measure themselves against it. And when Europe fails to close that gap, it does not merely damage its reputation. It corrodes the architecture that makes a rules-based order possible at all.
The next international order will not be built where power is strongest, but where contradictions are forced into coherence.
To understand what is at stake, it is worth returning to an insight Carney invoked in Davos, drawn from a very different context. Václav Havel, writing from inside a regime sustained by ritualized lies, argued that systems lose legitimacy not when they become overtly tyrannical, but when they force people to comply with what is visibly untrue. Participation in those lies stabilizes the system. Withdrawal from them destabilizes it. The mechanism is not revolution. It is the slow accumulation of moments in which the gap between what the system claims and what it does becomes undeniable.
Carney's diagnosis of the current international order is precisely this, scaled upward. The rules-based system is not collapsing because its rules have been abolished. The agreements are still there. The institutions are still there. What is gone is the will to act as though they are real. Allies invoke international law when it serves them and discard it when it does not. The "as-if" consensus that sustained the system—the shared performance of a world governed by principle rather than pure power—is eroding. And once that erosion becomes visible, the system does not gradually weaken. It tips.
This is where Europe's moral record cannot be set aside. Not because moral failure disqualifies a claimant to leadership—politics is rarely that clean—but because in this particular argument, it is directly load-bearing. If the crisis of the international order is a crisis of alignment between claim and action, then Europe's pattern of selective presence is not incidental to the problem. It is a local instantiation of it.
In Gaza, international law is invoked but does not guide action. In dealings with Iran and Israel, principles are weighed openly against interests. In the face of American unilateralism—troop withdrawals, conditional support for Ukraine, interference in European democratic processes—Europe has remained conspicuously silent. At the same time, the order it claims to represent is visibly undermined. These are not isolated failures of nerve. They are a pattern. And patterns, unlike individual lapses, erode the credibility of a position.
A moral position that is not upheld does not merely weaken. It transforms. It becomes an instrument—deployable when convenient, replaceable when not. And an instrument, however fine its design, cannot anchor an order. It can only serve one.
Once a moral position is taken,
the standard by which it is judged
is no longer internal.
Others adopt it. Others depend on it.
To acknowledge this is not to condemn Europe. It is to take seriously the demand that Havel placed on individuals, extended now to an institution: you do not rebuild legitimacy by announcing your values. You rebuild it by acting in accordance with them when the cost is real. Europe has spoken when speaking cost nothing. It has remained silent when speaking had consequences. That pattern is visible to every middle power watching to see whether a rules-based order is genuinely available to them, or whether it is a privilege extended selectively by those already inside it.
You do not rebuild legitimacy by announcing your values.
You rebuild it by acting on them when the cost is real.
But here is where the harder question must be asked—harder than whether Europe has the will to act, harder even than whether it has the moral credibility to lead. The question is whether the institutional architecture that makes coherence possible is itself still intact.
Carney's claim rests on a paradox: the region least able to impose order may be best positioned to recompose it. The reasoning is that Europe's lack of unified hard power forces negotiation, alignment, and institutional design—precisely the capacities a new order requires. Where a hegemon can impose, Europe must persuade. Where a great power can dictate terms, Europe must build consensus. That structural constraint, the argument goes, is also a structural advantage.
The argument is compelling. It is also fragile. Europe's pluralism can produce paralysis as readily as synthesis. Its decision-making is slow, often reactive, and vulnerable to internal fracture on the questions that matter most: energy, defense, migration, fiscal solidarity. The internal divergence on rule of law within EU member states is not a peripheral concern—it is a direct challenge to the claim that Europe is a place where competing legitimacies are forced into coherence rather than into deadlock. And Europe's external dependence—on NATO, on the American security umbrella, on supply chains that run through powers with no interest in a rules-based order—means that its structural freedom to act is more constrained than the theory implies.
So the question is not only whether Europe will close the gap between its values and its actions. It is whether the institutions through which it might do so are still capable of generating the direction that closing that gap requires. If they are not—if the architecture has quietly degraded while the rhetoric remained intact—then Europe faces something more serious than a crisis of will. It faces a crisis of capacity disguised as a crisis of courage.
These two problems are related but distinct, and conflating them leads to the wrong remedies.
A failure of will produces silence.
A failure of capacity produces incoherence.
A crisis of will calls for political leadership—for figures willing to absorb the costs of consistency, to speak when silence is easier, to be present where presence creates tension. A crisis of institutional capacity calls for something less dramatic and more difficult: the patient reconstruction of the mechanisms through which shared direction becomes possible at all. Neither problem can substitute for the other. Courageous rhetoric delivered through degraded institutions produces words without consequence. Institutional reform in the absence of political will produces machinery without purpose.
Europe needs both. It needs leaders willing to pay the price of its stated position—in relationships, in trade, in political stability. And it needs institutions capable of translating that willingness into coordinated action, rather than dissipating it in the friction of twenty-seven competing national interests.
The stakes of failing on either front are not abstract. Without that presence, no order remains—only a world of power blocs, where behavior is constrained not by rules but by other power. Europe is not one of those power blocs. It cannot afford to pretend otherwise. And the middle powers watching Europe for a signal—states that have no other viable anchor for a rules-based order—will draw their own conclusions from its silence.
Carney is not claiming Europe will dominate. He is identifying where the work of rebuilding coherence is still being attempted—imperfectly, inconsistently, but structurally inescapably. Europe cannot stop being what it is: a place where democratic accountability, supranational governance, and regulatory ambition are forced to negotiate with one another. That negotiation is exhausting and slow. It is also, right now, close to irreplaceable.
Wanting allows delay.
Carrying requires presence.
What Europe can choose is whether to take that structural condition seriously—to treat it not as a burden but as a responsibility, not as an inheritance but as an obligation that must be earned in action. Havel's insight was that legitimacy is not proclaimed. It is demonstrated in the small and large moments when acting in accordance with what you claim is costly, and you act anyway.
The price is concrete. Being present where it strains. Speaking where silence is easier. Acting even when the consequences are immediate. That comes at a cost—in relationships, in trade, in political stability. But Havel understood something else too: the cost of complicity is greater. Participating in the performance of a system that no longer corresponds to reality does not preserve that system. It accelerates its collapse.
If Europe continues to treat its values as inheritance, they remain words—and the architecture those words were meant to sustain quietly fails. If it carries them as obligation—visible in action, tested by cost, answerable to consequence—it may yet be the place where the next order is assembled, not because it is the strongest, but because it is the one that could not afford to stop trying.
That is the choice.
And unlike many political choices, this one has a deadline that Europe does not set
2026 — © Bart Heideman
BH
An organisation is not defined by what it says it values. It is defined by what its decisions consistently uphold.