In the optimistic and triumphant twilight of the twentieth century, when the Western world was basking in the self-satisfied glow of the Berlin Wall’s collapse and the apparent victory of liberal democracy, a young Dutch intellectual named Luuk van Middelaar embarked on a daring intellectual crusade. His target was Alexandre Kojève, the brilliant, Russian-born French philosopher whose mid-century seminars on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had cast a hypnotic spell over post-war French thought. In a groundbreaking and fiercely debated doctoral thesis that was later published under the arresting title Politicide, van Middelaar accused Kojève of committing nothing less than the intellectual murder of authentic politics. By popularizing the seductive notion that human history possessed an intrinsic, inevitable direction traveling toward a universal, homogenous global state, Kojève had helped convince an entire generation of European thinkers that the hard work of political contestation was essentially over. This deterministic worldview was not merely an academic indulgence; van Middelaar argued that it fostered a dangerous, almost romantic infatuation with brutal totalitarian regimes—most notably Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union—under the guise of bowing to the majestic, unstoppable mandate of historical progress. More practically, this philosophical posture left European leaders utterly unprepared for the messy, unscripted world of day-to-day governance, providing them with grand, sweeping theories about the destination of humanity but offering absolutely no practical guidebooks, tools, or vocabulary for navigating real-time crises and exercising genuine political agency.
This sharp critique of historical inevitability was far from a dry academic exercise; it carried an urgent, prescient warning for a post-Cold War Europe that seemed entirely too eager to take a permanent vacation from the harsh realities of global power. While his contemporaries celebrated the dawn of a frictionless, globalized era where commerce and international treaties would replace conflict, van Middelaar urged Europeans to reject the comforting, all-encompassing illusions of historical progress and turn instead to a much more grounded, clear-eyed philosopher: the Renaissance statesman Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli famously understood that the political arena is never a predictable, orderly laboratory governed by universal laws, but rather a wild, untamed landscape defined by radical contingency, where the chaotic, unpredictable whims of fortuna rule supreme and history behaves like a violent, unpredictable river. Van Middelaar warned that the peaceful, post-historical bubble that Europeans had constructed for themselves was a fragile, historical anomaly that would inevitably burst, forcing them to confront their own “Machiavellian moment.” This concept, representing the exact point in time when a self-governing republic realizes its own mortality and must actively fight for its survival in a hostile world, served as a stark reminder that Europe could not remain a geopolitical bystander forever, shielded from the raw, competitive struggles that have always defined human civilization.
Rather than remaining comfortably ensconced in the ivory towers of academia, van Middelaar chose to test his philosophical convictions in the ultimate laboratory of practical governance, stepping directly into the chaotic cockpit of the European Union during the defining crises of the twenty-first century. As a key counselor and speechwriter to Herman Van Rompuy, the first permanent president of the European Council, he spent the high, sleepless years of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis witnessing firsthand how the abstract theories of European integration collided with the messy, urgent realities of political survival. In the high-pressure environment of late-night emergency summits, where the future of the single currency hung by a thread, he saw that the European Union’s dense networks of treaties, regulations, and legalistic compromises were wholly inadequate for managing sudden, fast-moving emergencies. This experience inspired him to write deeply influential histories of the union’s inner workings, pleading with European leaders to find their political voice, shed their excessive technocratic timidity, and embrace a more confident, rapid, and decisive style of leadership. Yet, despite his warnings and the systemic shocks of the economic crises, he watched with growing frustration as the broader European establishment continued to drift in a state of comfortable, regulatory sleepwalking, still clinging to the naive belief that the world could be managed through administrative consensus and legal compliance alone.
It took a pair of profound, external geopolitical earthquakes to finally shatter Europe’s lingering daydreams and violently pull the continent back into the turbulent current of actual history. The first and most devastating wake-up call arrived in February 2022, when Russia launched its brutal, unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bringing the terrifying, industrial-scale violence of territorial warfare directly to the borders of the European Union. This sudden return of bareknuckle imperial aggression was compounded by the political rise of Donald Trump in the United States, whose transactional approach to foreign policy and open threats to abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization sent waves of panic through European capitals. For decades, Europe had happily outsourced its physical security to the American military-industrial complex, enjoying a sheltered, highly civilized existence while ignoring the hard, uncomfortable realities of territorial defense and military deterrence. Van Middelaar observed that because of this prolonged state of strategic dependence and insular peace, the sudden unraveling of the global security order felt like a much more profound, existential shock to Europeans than to any other geopolitical players on Earth. The realization that their safety, sovereignty, and way of life were suddenly vulnerable exposed the devastating cost of their historical complacency and forced them to look at the world through a lens of survival rather than legalistic procedure.
In response to this hostile, unpredictable global landscape, van Middelaar has issued a stern, uncompromising call for a structural and psychological revolution in Brussels, arguing that the European Union must urgently transition from its traditional “politics of rules” to a dynamic “politics of events.” Since its inception, the EU has functioned as a highly sophisticated regulatory power, a slow-moving, lawyerly institution that excels at harmonizing standards, negotiating elaborate treaties, and managing administrative processes over the span of years. While this rule-bound approach was highly effective for building a peaceful internal market, van Middelaar argues it is dangerously obsolete and actively perilous in a world characterized by sudden crises, shifting alliances, and raw power politics. In this new era, the unpredictability of history can no longer be dismissed as a temporary, unfortunate interruption to a peaceful norm; rather, chaotic and disruptive events must be accepted as the default state of global affairs. Survival in this fractured world demands that European leaders move past endless committee meetings and consensus-driven gridlock, developing instead the capacity for swift, executive decision-making and rapid mobilization of resources. Nowhere is this transition more desperately needed than in the realm of defense, where Europe’s historical reliance on slow-moving bureaucratic processes has left its military capacities hollowed out, fragmented, and dangerously dependent on external powers.
To translate these urgent philosophical arguments into concrete, actionable policy, van Middelaar and his colleagues at the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics have put forward a series of highly ambitious proposals aimed at building true European strategic autonomy, including a radical blueprint to completely rethink the European Defense Agency. Established in 2004, the agency has historically operated on the margins of European security, but van Middelaar envisions it graduating into a powerful, executive hub designed to spearhead and coordinate the massive rearmament of the continent. To bypass the notorious treaty and bureaucratic obstacles that tend to paralyze European defense initiatives, he draws creative inspiration from the informal, agile model of the Eurogroup, a body where eurozone finance ministers bypass rigid procedural constraints to make rapid, decisive consensus-driven choices on national budgets. By replicating this lean, results-oriented executive style, the revamped defense agency would serve a vital, historic purpose: preparing Europe for a necessary, eventual military-industrial decoupling from the United States. Van Middelaar’s journey from a young scholar attacking deterministic philosophy to a practical strategist charting Europe’s military future underscores a profound, humane truth—that true security and sovereignty cannot be found in rigid rules or outsourced to foreign allies, but must be bravely claimed by a self-reliant continent willing to face the unpredictable storms of history on its own feet.
