Europe, once the crucible of high politics and grand visions, now stumbles through history as a relic of its former self. The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency for a second term has not merely underscored the European Union’s vulnerabilities—it has illuminated the profound structural decay at its core. This is not a crisis born of external shocks but of internal abdication. The political class, in its retreat from responsibility, has reduced itself to a gallery of functionaries presiding over an ossified bureaucracy. Power is no longer wielded by statesmen but by technocrats, unelected commissioners, and administrative mandarins who govern in the absence of will.
Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), argued that civilizations do not collapse due to sudden catastrophe but rather through the gradual exhaustion of their inner force. He described how cultures transition from an era of vitality and creativity (Kultur) into a phase of rigid, managerial civilization (Zivilisation), where the spirit that once animated a people hardens into sterile formalism. Europe today exemplifies this exhaustion. Once an arena of contest and ambition, it has become a bureaucratic project where governance is no longer about direction but about preservation. Politics has been replaced by administration, decision-making outsourced to committees, and responsibility fragmented into unaccountable layers of governance. This is a continent that no longer makes history; it merely negotiates its own stagnation.
Trump’s return is an affront to this inertia. His brand of politics—erratic, disruptive, and indifferent to diplomatic courtesies—exposes the EU’s inability to act decisively in its own defense. The response from Brussels has been predictably anemic: expressions of “concern,” appeals to multilateralism, and an insistence on “stability,” as if the world can be governed by platitudes. Stability is the virtue of the dying. Spengler described Zivilisation as the endpoint of a culture’s development, when the dynamism that once defined it is replaced by proceduralism and rule-following.
If Spengler diagnosed the decline, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the psychology behind it. In Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung), he warns, “Almost two thousand years and not a single new god!” lamenting the sterility of a civilization that has lost its creative impulse. Europe clings to its institutions as if bureaucracy were a sufficient substitute for will. Its political leaders, having relinquished the task of governance, have reduced themselves to advisors of the machine. A chasm has opened between power and legitimacy, between authority and responsibility.
This surrender is most evident in foreign policy. As Trump redraws the global order with tariffs and unilateral pronouncements, the EU watches as a bystander, unable to shape events, condemned to react. It cannot contain the crises at its own doorstep—whether in Ukraine, the Middle East, or the Balkans—yet it preaches stability to the world. When Trump questioned NATO commitments, EU leaders spoke of strategic autonomy, but words did not translate into action. When he imposed tariffs on European industries, the response was not countermeasures but consultations.
Europe does not lack resources or talent; it lacks sovereignty in the Nietzschean sense—the will to power, the ability to impose its vision rather than be shaped by external forces. The West once ruled through imperatives; today, it pleads through communiqués. The EU’s decay is not economic, nor even military—it is spiritual. It has lost belief in itself, the confidence to govern without seeking validation from its own bureaucracy or from Washington.
A civilization does not die in a single event. It withers when those entrusted with its future choose passivity over action, procedure over purpose. Spengler saw this as an inevitability, but perhaps it is merely a choice. Europe stands at twilight—not yet night, but far from dawn. Whether it awakens or resigns itself to the longue nuit of history remains to be seen.