In 1793, the British diplomat Lord Macartney arrived at the court of Emperor Qianlong carrying telescopes, clocks, and a letter from George III requesting trade relations. The Emperor was not interested. The Celestial Empire, in his view, possessed everything. It required nothing from outside, especially from Europe. The reply sent back to London. China had no use for foreign goods or foreign diplomacy. Fifty years later, British warships were anchored in Chinese ports. The Qing signed the Treaty of Nanking, ceded Hong Kong, and paid reparations for a war fought over opium. What followed was a century of unequal treaties, foreign concessions, and colonial extraction so complete that China still organises its national identity around the memory of it. The European Union in 2026 is not the Qing Dynasty in its wealth nor greatness. But it has reproduced, with uncomfortable precision, the Emperor’s mistake. 

Since 1991, Europe has governed itself according to a theology: that history had reorganized itself around liberal democracy and international law. Hard power was obsolete. Strategic autonomy was unnecessary. War between great powers was structurally almost impossible. The American umbrella was permanent.

Not a lie, it was something worse. It was a story that had become impossible to question without seeming to go against what we had learned in the 20th century. The EU is more than just a political agreement. It’s a statement about what is right and wrong. Moral statements do not change just because new evidence comes to light. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe’s first instinct was not strategic but juridical: condemnation, sanctions, references to the UN Charter. When China positioned itself as Moscow’s economic lifeline, Europe expressed concern. When Trump returned to the White House and began openly questioning NATO’s purpose, European leaders called for dialogue.  Europe was left alone in its diplomacy room, isolated by superpowers. Trying to do diplomacy with ghosts. 

The Qing court, in its final decades, attempted reform. The Self-Strengthening Movement of the 1860s tried to absorb Western technology while preserving the existing old political order.  It failed because genuine modernisation and institutional preservation were incompatible, and the court chose preservation. The technology arrived. The structures that would have allowed it to matter did not. The clocks arrived. Europe did not build them. Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on European competitiveness was, in this sense, Europe’s Self-Strengthening Movement.  The diagnosis was precise: Europe is deindustrializing, falling behind on semiconductors, dependent on foreign energy, destroying his nuclear plants, structurally incapable of coordinating the investment required to close the gap. The report was received the way all serious European documents are received. In European style. Gravity, endorsements, advertisement and with no consequential action. The defense industry is now being asked to rearm a continent as fast as possible. Energy dependence on Russia was replaced not with independence but with dependence on American LNG. Digital infrastructure remains dominated by American platforms and, increasingly, Chinese hardware. Europe is irrelevant.  

French sociologist Baudrillard would have recognized this instantly. This is not a strategic failure. Europe is not a power in decay. It is a power that has become entirely symbolic: a continent governing through bureaucracy, statements, useless treaties, and frameworks that refer only to one another, sealed against the real. The European project held that history had ended, norms had triumphed, power had been sublimated into law. Europe confused the structure for the building.

What followed was hyperreality: summits producing communiqués about security that substitute for security; sanctions producing the appearance of consequence without consequence.  Russia’s war with Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 was almost immediately converted into a norm violation, a solidarity test, an occasion to demonstrate values. The European values of right and wrong. Every crisis produces a process. Every process produces a document. Every document produces a summit. The circle repeat itself every time. The deepest parallel with the Qing is psychological. The Qianlong Emperor couldn’t admit the world had changed while he didn’t. He was behind. Europe stands at the same threshold. Its dependence on Washington is called the Atlantic alliance. Its subordination to American sanctions is called burden-sharing. Its defense of the criminal actions of Israel actions is justified by the Judeo-Christian values of Europe. Baudrillard would say the ships were never coming, in a world of pure simulation, ships are announced. But today the ships are here. While the main international actors decided how to divide the world in 2, Europe chose to divide itself in 27.