The EU: The Neglected Middle Sibling in Global Politics Must Mature

European Union leaders often speak of unity, sustainability and long-term vision, yet the EU’s recent actions, from its abandonment of its already insufficient sustainability regulations to its rearmament plan, both of which bypassed democratic processes, instead prioritising corporate lobby groups, suggest it is trapped in myopic thinking, reacting to events set in motion by big capital and powers like the United States, Russia, and China rather than focusing on its own competitive advantages. By examining these strategic failures through the lens of game theory, we can see how Europe’s approach resembles a losing strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma, a situation where self-interested choices by each player leads to worse outcomes for all. Instead of proactive collaboration and long-term thinking, the EU has too often opted for reactive, short-sighted moves that weaken its own position, undermine its own long-term strategy and with it, global stability and faith in any sort of just-transition. To change course, Europe must adopt a long-term, cooperative strategy, one grounded in non-zero-sum thinking and the wisdom of managing our global commons together. This means, as EU Greens Co-President Bas Eickhout claims, using sovereignty as our true defence, rather than weapons. This means reimagining sovereignty not as domination or mere defence of borders, but the ability to sustain oneself through shocks and build resource independence, particularly in energy. To be independent and resilient in the face of shocks, and also to break free from the “imperial mode of living”, the high-consumption, extractive lifestyle only made possible by complex, extractive supply chains and the exploitation of others, and instead embracing a model of regenerative economics that addresses that the latest State of the Climate Report claims is the root cause of climate change, ecological overshoot.

Short-Term Moves in a Long Game: Europe’s Prisoner’s Dilemma

In game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma illustrates how two players acting in their immediate self-interest can both end up worse off. Each “prisoner” has an incentive to choose the selfish option and defect, because they don’t trust the other to cooperate – but if both choose this option, the outcome is suboptimal for everyone. The EU’s current foreign policy often mirrors this scenario. Rather than communicating and coordinating effectively with other major powers, the EU frequently defaults to reactive decisions aimed at short-term gain or damage control. For instance, when the U.S. introduced the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the EU hastily proposed its own Green Deal Industrial Plan to counter potential economic losses, rather than engaging in coordinated, long-term planning, or when the US blew up Nord Stream 2 (as reported by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh and essentially admitted by Trump and Biden), after in 2019 Trump signed legislation imposing sanctions on companies assisting in the pipeline’s construction, claiming that the pipeline would turn Germany into a “hostage of Russia” and Biden declaring in advance that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”.

Rather than respond with integrity and strength to what even Tucker Carlson described as “the single most profound act of environmental terrorism in history”, EU countries instead again frantically reacted to US policy and rushed to secure LNG deals with the US, paying up to four times the price of Russian gas, which led to a 40% increase in energy costs for German industries. This trend continues as China invests strategically in Asia and Africa, and BRICS nations begin planning their own futures, Europe chases shadows, trying to balance the often contradicting interests of the ruling classes of individual nation states, and finding itself increasingly excluded from critical deals and discussions, as we saw with the US-Russia-Saudi meeting to discuss the future of Ukraine.

We saw a similar reactive EU approach when Donald Trump publicly humiliated Zelensky, another event foreshadowed well in advance by a Tucker Carlson interview with Putin, to pressure European nations into boosting military spending, which they did immediately. NATO’s Mark Rutte, in a meeting with Trump, confirmed a staggering $800 billion defence package, with Germany alone considering up to half a trillion euros. This wasn’t Europe’s decision. It was a long-standing US/NATO plan to shift defence costs onto the EU while keeping it strategically dependent. Trump, who previously forced NATO nations to hit 2% GDP defence spending, is now demanding 5%, and Europe is falling in line without question. Rutte even praised NATO’s expansion under Trump’s leadership.

So in the case of the US sabotaging Nord Stream 2 or humiliating Zelensky, the US clearly had a long-term strategy of funnelling EU money into US energy or weapons companies, and with one fell-swoop, had EU leaders scrambling, underscoring the fact that without its own strategy and clear vision, the EU remains a reactive extension of US foreign policy, following directives rather than leading itself.

Without a cohesive long-term plan, Europe is behaving like a player in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma who has failed to establish trust or a reliable strategy, doomed to keep “defecting” out of fear. The result is the worst of both worlds: the EU gets neither the full benefits of cooperation nor any decisive competitive edge. This is a dangerous place to be, considering our supposed major ´Competition´ is China, Russia and the US, three global heavyweights who dominate energy production, enjoy greater monetary, military, and agricultural sovereignty, and possess vastly superior resources. The EU should therefore be doing everything it can to avoid conflict and maintain diplomatic relationships because without relationships, what does the EU really have? What can we meaningfully compete with? In fact, has anyone stopped to ask what are we even competing over?

EU Competitiveness, for what?

The EU’s pursuit of ‘competitiveness’ in GDP growth, technological dominance, corporate profits and military spending, none of which correlate to better quality of life, misses a crucial question: What should a society truly compete for? The EU’s real competitive advantages lie in sustainability, social welfare, workers rights and resilience, all made possible through collaboration. In an era of climate breakdown and geopolitical instability, true competitiveness will not be measured by growth, but by the ability to build a resilient, equitable, and regenerative society that can withstand future shocks, by delivering the social necessities while staying within planetary boundaries. The EU’s vision should not be to outgrow, or fight its “competitors”, but to collaborate with, and if that fails, outlast them, by proving that a sustainable and just economy is not only possible, but preferable. What the EU is now trying to compete in, the pursuit of further mindless economic growth and elite accumulation, as outlined by the recent Draghi report will ironically lead to greater competition over increasingly scarce resources, resources which the EU, when compared to our supposed rivals, simply don´t have.

Perhaps, as Yanis Varoufakis suggests, Europe’s ‘military Keynesianism’isn’t just about growth or military posturing but could be a sneaky excuse to take the foot off the self-created ‘debt-brake’ and prop up Germany’s struggling auto industry , with a seemingly rational excuse, without threatening private capital in the way that public spending on wellbeing would, as public spending threatens private provisions of transport, healthcare, housing and energy.

The EU’s private sector, now being outcompeted on all fronts by the US and China, is propping up its own industrial base in response to the US, the self-proclaimed home of the free market, slapping tariffs and bans on Chinese companies, from cars to TikTok, the moment they threatened Wall Street’s golden geese like Tesla, Apple, and Meta. So, is Europe’s move to rearm just a clever way to repurpose shuttered car factories into tank manufacturers, funded by EU taxpayers? As Jack Black famously said in School of Rock, “Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” In this case, perhaps it’s: Those who can’t sell cars, make tanks.”

Many have warned that Europe sits in a dangerous “sandwich position” between the US, China and Russia, at risk of being squashed as the middle-child in a great-power rivalry. This position could be both a blessing and a curse, depending on our strategy, if we collaborate, our position in the middle works in our favour, if we compete, it most certainly doesn´t. What is clear, however, is that Europe’s economy is losing ground in future industries like artificial intelligence and clean tech, partly because of strategic myopia – an obvious strategy deficit where policy is made on the fly, reacting to crises and foreign policy decisions rather than shaping outcomes, and also because of restrictive, German led monetary policy that didn´t allow for the same levels of spending as our supposed ´rivals´, however, this restrictive approach to spending is now conveniently being lifted for weapons. In the metaphorical game, Europe has been acting like a prisoner who doesn’t coordinate with his partner or think beyond the next move, and thus keeps ending up with the worst possible sentence.

Breaking out of this losing pattern requires recognizing that the game is not zero-sum – Europe doesn’t have to lose for others to win, and vice versa. In fact, given that we are experiencing unprecedented environmental breakdown, it is the exact opposite. Europe requires everyone else to ´win´ to survive itself. We should be trying to overcome scarcity, rather than making desperate attempts to fight it out for what will be left.

In the iterated prisoner’s dilemma (a game played repeatedly), the optimal strategy is often Tit-for-Tat with forgiveness: cooperate first, respond to defection firmly, but return to cooperation when possible. Translated to geopolitics, that means Europe should lead with offers of cooperation, have its own strategy for sustainable development, and only resort to punitive measures when absolutely needed, all while signalling that it’s ready to return to dialogue. Right now, the EU’s tendency to act in isolation or to simply react to every move by Washington, Moscow, or Beijing, all of whom have a clear headstart by the time the EU realises what´s happening, is completely ineffective, and, without a long-term vision for Europe, it seems we have become part, or perhaps worse, are left out, of everyone else´s.  Without any belief in what was its own vision outlined in the Green Deal, as witnessed by the abandonment of sustainability regulations, and without any diplomacy, as evidenced by the EU´s embarrassing, ineffective and contradicting responses to the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israeli genocide, Europe is now frequently left out of high-level negotiations about global security or trade frameworks. (US-Saudi-Russia, Middle-East, AUKUS security pact by the US, UK, and Australia). Such exclusions show that if Europe doesn´t have its own long-term plans, it becomes an afterthought in power games played by others. To avoid this fate, the EU must learn to change the game itself through cooperation and long-range thinking.

The Non-Zero-Sum Imperative: Collaboration for the Global Commons

Global challenges like climate change, pandemics, and financial stability are not winner-takes-all contests – they are the very definition of non-zero-sum games, where either everyone wins together or everyone loses together. In a non-zero-sum scenario, it’s possible for all participants to benefit at once, or suffer at once. If the EU continues to treat international relations as a competition for short-term advantage, it will miss the larger truth that today’s threats do not respect borders. A carbon molecule emitted in Europe contributes just as much to global warming as one emitted in China or the U.S.; financial crises and conflicts send shockwaves through global markets that inevitably reach European shores. In this context, the only rational strategy, and the one called for by environmental scientists, is robust collaboration,  forging agreements where all sides work toward mutual gains.

Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering analysis of the commons provides a powerful framework for this approach. The “tragedy of the commons” is an economic theory, like a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma: if every player overuses a shared resource (whether a fishery or the atmosphere), the resource collapses and all are worse off. Traditional thinking claimed such tragedies were inevitable without either privatization or top-down control. But Elinor Ostrom showed that communities can and do successfully manage commons, much better than governments or companies do, through trust, communication, and agreed-upon rules. As she observed, cooperative outcomes can be sustained if stakeholders trust each other and enforce norms against those who violate them. In case studies around the world, from irrigation systems to forests, her research found that commons “need not turn into tragedies” when users develop shared protocols and a sense of collective responsibility.

The EU should internalize this lesson at the global scale. Instead of assuming other powers will always defect (cheat or exploit) – a mindset that leads to everyone grabbing what they can – Europe can spearhead efforts to build trust and set fair rules for managing our global commons, starting internally. This means doubling down on diplomacy and multilateral institutions. For instance, rather than viewing climate accords or trade agreements as arenas where one bloc must “win” concessions from another (something admittedly difficult to do with Trump and his ´deals´approach to diplomacy), the EU should treat them as cooperative ventures to solve common dilemmas. The Paris Climate Agreement, imperfect as it is, represents exactly the kind of non-zero-sum cooperation needed: every nation commits to actions that, collectively, improve the outlook for all. Similarly, on issues of global health or cyber security, Europe’s best bet is to champion transparency, communication channels, and joint initiatives – a sort of Ostrom-style management at the international level, and an approach the EU regulations, although far from sufficient, were making a first-step to achieving.

Right now, however, Europe’s behaviour often sends a different signal. When every energy crisis or refugee influx is met with beggar-thy-neighbour policies (like export bans or border closures), Europe undermines the spirit of cooperation it professes to uphold. The more it mimics the unilateralism of big powers, the more it feeds a cycle of distrust. To escape the prisoner’s dilemma on the world stage, the EU must become the player that deliberately strives for cooperation as it’s in our shared self-interest.” By adopting a non-zero-sum perspective, Europe can reframe global problems not as contests to be won, but as collective-action challenges to be managed together. This shift in mindset is the first step toward true global stability and sustainability.

Redefining Sovereignty: Economic Independence Over Dominance

A core reason the EU falls into reactive, short-term decision-making is lack of sovereignty and security over resources, but traditionally, sovereignty has been conceived too narrowly – often reduced to military might or the abstract principle of national control. In the 21st century, Europe needs to redefine sovereignty in terms of resilience and independence in essential economic and resource domains. In practice, this means the ability to feed its population, power its industries, and manage its finances without being at the mercy of external powers or volatile global markets. If Europe had greater economic self-sufficiency, it would not feel so threatened by every move from Washington, Moscow, or Beijing, and could approach the world with a calmer long-term vision.

Recent events have made this clear. In 2022, the EU imported 40% of its gas from Russia, and when supplies were cut off, energy prices surged by over 300%, forcing emergency measures like reopening coal plants

Even today, energy independence remains a glaring weakness: on a recent index measuring the EU’s progress, the bloc scored only 4.0 out of 10, barely improved despite wake-up calls. Similarly, European countries learned during the COVID-19 pandemic that relying on far-flung supply chains for medical gear can be a strategic liability when each country is scrambling for the same masks or vaccines. And in the financial realm, the EU has seen how the U.S. dollar’s dominance and American-controlled payment systems (like SWIFT) constrain its autonomy. U.S. sanctions on third countries effectively become European sanctions too, because so many global transactions flow through U.S. banks and dollars. For example, when the United States reimposed sanctions on Iran, European companies like Total and Siemens were forced to withdraw despite the EU’s wishes and attempts to maintain trade relations, underlining how the gulf between the EU’s ambition of sovereignty and the economic reality can be enormous.

True sovereignty for Europe would mean not having to make the false choice between its own principles and economic survival when another superpower makes a decision. To get there, the EU should invest heavily in local capacity and diversification. Key pillars of this redefined sovereignty include:

1. Energy and Resource Sovereignty

Accelerate Renewable Energy Transition: Rapidly expand solar, wind, and other renewables, focusing on decentralized, community-owned systems to reduce reliance on foreign fossil fuels. Invest in energy storage and smart grids for resilience.

Localize Food and Resource Systems: Promote regenerative agriculture, local food networks, and strategic reserves of food and critical materials to reduce dependence on global supply chains.

Prepare for Disruptions: Build contingency plans for energy and food shortages, including microgrids, emergency stockpiles, and community resilience programs.

2. Technological and Industrial Self-Sufficiency

*Build European Tech Ecosystems: Invest in critical sectors like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and green technologies to reduce reliance on external suppliers, particularly from the US and China.

*Public Investment in Sustainable Infrastructure: Prioritize public transport, insulation, and climate-resilient urban planning. Support local manufacturing of essential goods through cooperative business models.

*Strengthen Cybersecurity and Data Sovereignty: Develop European digital infrastructure, protect data privacy, and promote open-source technologies and digital commons to reduce dependence on foreign tech giants.

3. Democratic and Climate-Aligned Economic Policies

*Democratize Monetary Policy: Ensure the European Central Bank prioritizes public interest, rather than military Keynesianism we’re seeing now or the unprecedented corporate bond buying we saw during the pandemic, particularly stable jobs, just-transition, and social welfare, rather than just corporate profits.

*Redirect Financial Flows: Use green quantitative easing and public deficit spending to fund renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and climate-resilient infrastructure. Reduce dependence on the US dollar by expanding the euro’s role in international trade.

*Insulate from Global Financial Shocks: Strengthen the Eurozone’s financial systems with stricter regulations on speculative activities and support for public banking.

4. Social and Community Resilience

*Foster Local Resilience Networks: Develop community-based mutual aid, disaster preparedness, and support systems to help populations cope with climate-induced disruptions.

*Public Awareness and Support: Educate the public on the truth of our reality while providing tools and resources for resilience. Prioritize vulnerable communities in resilience planning.

*Promote Equity and Justice: Ensure policies address historical injustices and prioritize marginalized groups in resource distribution and adaptation efforts.

5. Global Solidarity and Ethical Leadership

*Support Global Adaptation: Provide financial and technological aid to the Global South, recognizing Europe’s historical responsibility for emissions and ecological overshoot, and acknowledge that every delay in action means more climate refugees further down the line.

*Ethical Trade and Diplomacy: Align trade and diplomatic policies with sustainability, equity, and justice, avoiding exploitative relationships and contributing to global stability.

*By focusing on these areas, the EU can achieve a form of sovereignty that is proactive: the freedom to make long-term choices because basic needs and systems are secure. This is very different from the militaristic or nationalistic notion of sovereignty; it’s about resilience rather than dominance. A Europe that can provide for itself is one that can confidently pursue cooperation, because it negotiates from a position of strength and independence, not desperation. It would no longer need to panic in each crisis or bow to a competitive ally’s demands out of economic fear. Economic and resource independence gives Europe the breathing room to practice the diplomacy and multilateral problem-solving it espouses. In game theory terms, shoring up these internal strengths is like improving your payoff matrix: it makes the cooperative strategy more attractive and viable, because the cost of defection ( being cut off by others) is lower when you’re self-reliant.

Contradictions Exposed: Sustainability Rhetoric vs. Competitive Reality

The European Union often portrays itself as a leader in sustainable development, peace, and global cooperation. The EU touts its Green Deal as a landmark effort to combat climate change, and its officials frequently speak of a rules-based international order. However, there is a growing gap between this rhetoric and Europe’s actions, especially in moments of crisis. When push comes to shove, the EU’s response has frequently been to double down on the very patterns it claims to want to change increasing militarization, engaging in economic tug-of-war, and implicitly upholding an extractive lifestyle that is anything but sustainable. These contradictions not only undermine Europe’s moral authority on the world stage but also reinforce what scholars call the “imperial mode of living.”

The imperial mode of living is a concept describing how affluent societies (like Europe) sustain their high consumption and comfort through the disproportionate appropriation of resources and labour from elsewhere. The EU’s ecological footprint is 3 times larger than what its own ecosystems can sustain, and it’s high energy consumption, endless consumer goods, SUVs, fast-fashion, technological devices, imported food, especially soy from the Amazon to feed livestock is largely achieved through the exploitation of resources and labour in the Global South. This mode of living is backed, directly or indirectly, by military power and unequal economic relationships forged over centuries. It’s the modern continuation of colonial-era patterns, now ingrained in trade & monetary systems and transnational supply chains. The EU recognizes that this status quo is environmentally unsustainable and ethically fraught; hence the official commitment to sustainability and global partnership. Yet, when faced with emergencies or “competition”, European policies frequently fall back into old habits, revealing an internal inconsistency.

Consider the aftermath of Russia’s war on Ukraine. While investing in green energy remained a goal, many EU countries responded by securing new fossil fuel deals (for example, importing liquefied natural gas from the US, often at 4x the price, and even reopening coal plants) to make up for lost Russian gas. In the security realm, the war spurred a surge in military spending across Europe, again, with US companies providing the vast majority of weapons. From a certain perspective, this is understandable – deterrence can be necessary. But the scale and mindset of this militarization raises questions. Europe set up new funds to send arms, urged members to hit defence spending targets, while climate pledges languish, sustainability regulations are ripped up, and diplomatic initiatives to end conflicts are met with claims of ´Putinist´, ´Assadist´ or being on China´s payroll. The implicit message is that military solutions are being prioritized over preventative diplomacy. This approach not only risks fuelling arms races, but it diverts immense resources and political capital away from sustainable development.

These choices are not just moral dilemmas; they are strategic failures. By reinforcing the imperial mode of living, Europe remains dependent on exploitation and scarcity, which are inherently unstable foundations. This mode of living is a main driver of ecological crisis and global instability. In clinging to it, Europe undermines its stated goals of sustainability and justice. You cannot effectively lead a global shift to sustainability if your own house is in order only until the next shortage or geopolitical shock, at which point you revert to scrambling for oil, weapons, and resources. The EU’s credibility suffers when others see a “do as I say, not as I do” approach. For instance, how can the EU convince emerging economies to leave fossil fuels in the ground while European states are pouring money into new gas terminals and coal subsidies during a crunch? How can it promote the rule of law while selling arms to Israel as it commits genocide, how can it champion peace and human rights whilst fortifying its borders to keep out refugees (many of whom flee conflicts and climate disasters exacerbated by the EU)?

To align means with ends, Europe must confront these contradictions head-on. That means demilitarizing its approach to security in favour of conflict prevention, domestic sovereignty and sufficiency, and mediation wherever possible, and de-emphasizing economic growth, corporate profitability and elite accumulation as the sole measures of success when considering the narrow idea of ´competitiveness ‘and instead prioritise the social indicators that make life worth living, and the ecological indicators which make life possible in the first place. It requires candidly addressing the legacy of colonialism and how it continues to shape economic relations – moving towards reparative policies rather than exploitative ones. In essence, Europe needs to practice what it preaches: fostering stability not through domination, but through justice, cooperation, and moderation. Only by doing so can it transform its “extractive, imperial” mode of operation into a regenerative one.

Degrowth and Cooperation: A Path to Shared Stability

If there is one lesson the prisoner’s dilemma and the tragedy of the commons both teach, it’s that endless competition over finite resources leads to lose-lose outcomes. The only viable path forward for Europe, and indeed for the world, is to break from the logic of artificial scarcity and embrace a paradigm of shared prosperity within planetary boundaries. This means scaling down our economic activity to a point where we can provide everyone with the means to live a dignified life without exploiting others or further reducing our planet’s ability to sustain life on Earth. This idea, the only scientifically aligned approach to our predicament is most commonly referred to as “degrowth”. Far from implying economic regression or austerity, degrowth is about redefining progress and wealth away from mindless growth and towards deliberate design of our economies so life on Earth can thrive once more.

It is a call to shift away from the capitalist imperative of incessant growth (which artificially creates scarcity as a tool to keep profits and consumption high) towards an economy of abundance, meeting everyone’s needs with what we have, rather than creating needs for the sake of producing and consuming more, destroying the planet and society to serve what has become the purpose of industrial-consumer society – accumulation.

Jason Hickel points out that the engine of capitalist expansion has always been the creation of artificial scarcity through enclosing and commodifying the commons, making basic goods costly, and forcing people into wage labour to survive. In other words, plenty for a few is achieved by maintaining deprivation for many. Degrowth turns this logic on its head by seeking to abolish artificial scarcity through fair and careful distribution and regenerative design, while respecting real ecological limits. For Europe, adopting a degrowth approach would mean intentionally scaling down ecologically harmful and less necessary production, for example, reducing the manufacture of SUVs, throwaway fast fashion, or weapons – and investing instead in public goods and low-impact, life-sustaining sectors like renewable energy, public transit, healthcare, education, sustainable agriculture, and housing for all.

Such a transformation sounds ambitious, even utopian, but it is increasingly recognized by environmental scientists as the only rational course if we aim for long-term survival and fairness. Degrowth does not mean “making Europeans poorer” in terms of well-being. In fact, it aims to make people richer in things that truly matter time, health, community, meaningful work, a clean environment. By cutting the excesses of overproduction and overconsumption (which chiefly benefit corporations and the wealthy), degrowth frees up resources and reduces pressure on the commons. Imagine European cities with far less air pollution and traffic because policies prioritize clean mobility over luxury cars, workers having much shorter workweeks because productivity gains are shared as time off rather than funnelled into endless output, everyone having access to affordable housing, because housing is treated as a right, and not a speculative asset. These are the kinds of outcomes degrowth advocates.

With degrowth, the onus is on affluent regions like Europe (and North America etc) with most historical responsibility for ecological overshoot to reduce their footprint dramatically, given that they consume far more than their fair share of resources. The Global South, by contrast, may still need growth in some areas to meet basic needs – but it should be the right kind of growth (clean, equitable, and oriented toward well-being). Europe, if it truly wants to lead, should champion a global bargain: the global North (including the EU) will contract its material consumption and pay its ecological debts, while supporting the global South in a sustainable development that does not repeat the destructive patterns of the past. This could involve technology transfer, climate financing, and cancellation of burdensome debts, amounting to a form of ecological reparations. In practical terms, if Europe takes less from the global commons (be it oil, minerals, or atmospheric space for CO2 emissions), that leaves more for others or for the earth to regenerate.

Such cooperation in degrowth is essentially an extension of Ostrom’s commons management to the entire planet: all regions agreeing on limits and helping each other stay within them, rather than racing to exploit what’s left. It is the ultimate non-zero-sum game, because the payoff – a liveable planet and social stability – is shared by all, and the failure would be the end of us all. In a degrowth paradigm, sovereignty takes on a new meaning: not the sovereignty of wielding power over others, but the sovereignty of a community secure enough to decide its fate democratically and sustainably. A Europe practicing degrowth would invest in local, resilient economies, which by design bolster its autonomy (since less dependent on trading partners and less is shipped across oceans or tied up in complex supply chains). It would also deepen democratic control as people collectively decide how to allocate resources away from pointless growth toward public well-being.

In many ways, this is a return to collaboration at every level: within societies, within the EU, and globally. Rather than each nation (or each bloc) trying to outdo the others, degrowth-oriented cooperation means working together to downscale harmful activitieswhile uplifting quality of life. It allows the EU to address the root cause of climate change, ecological overshoot, whilst developing partnerships with the global majority that prevent the need for war over resources. This flips the script of the prisoner’s dilemma, instead of each player fearing the other’s gain, all players recognize that the only way to “win” is by ensuring everyone is taken care of and the commons are preserved, thus overcoming the issue of scarcity.

Conclusion: From Competition to Collaboration

The European Union stands at a crossroads. It can continue on its current path, one marked by reactive policies, insecure dependencies, unnecessary scarcity and precarity, and the latent fear of others gaining at its expense and watch its supposed ideals of peace and sustainability slip further out of reach. Or it can consciously choose a different strategy, one informed by rational insight, ecological thinking, humanitarian values and international law.  This revised approach means breaking out of the prisoner’s dilemma mindset by building communication and trust, both within Europe and with global partners. It means recognizing that in the grand game of global survival, we either win together or lose together.

For the EU, this translates to concrete shifts in behaviour. It should be the first to extend a hand in diplomacy, the loudest voice for collective agreements on climate action, and the staunchest advocate for international institutions that ensure everyone plays by agreed rules. It should also put its own house in order by investing in the resilience of its people, guaranteeing that basic needs are met from within so that no external pressure can easily force its hand. And perhaps most boldly, Europe should champion a new narrative of prosperity, one that measures success not by excess consumption or military might, but by well-being, equality, and harmony with nature, like Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Model. This approach will challenge deeply entrenched conventional logic and political & economic power, but as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures.

By reimagining sovereignty as the freedom that comes from economic independence and by rejecting the artificial scarcities imposed by the capitalist system, Europe can help steer the world onto a sustainable path. While under the current political system this seems a naive dream, if we´ve learned anything over the past five years, is that dramatic and seemingly impossible changes can happen almost overnight, and while this change will take a lot of grassroots organising and a reclaiming of democracy, through mechanisms like citizens assemblies, unions, cooperative business models and community organising, it is possible, and for most, desirable, especially in the face of war and environmental breakdown.

In a future defined by climate constraints and interdependence, collaboration is the optimal strategy. Just as players in a well-designed game can find equilibrium through cooperation, we must find peace and stability by working together and ditching these ideas of growth and competitiveness being shoved down our throats. The EU, not without precedent in turning a war-torn continent in crisis into a union of cooperation, knows this truth in its very foundation. Now it must live up to what it supposedly exists to do and move from a reactive, defensive stance to a proactive, visionary one.

Europe’s next moves will not only decide its own fate but also influence the course of life on Earth. The choice is clear: collaborate, decolonise and live in a way that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all life, or cling to competition and growth, and watch our common future go up in flames. Or, simply, degrowth by design, or degrowth by collapse. Europe’s strategic destiny, and moral responsibility, is to choose collaboration to create win-wins, and reduce its consumption within what can be sustainably supported by its own environment, thus regaining sovereignty as the ultimate form of defence and resilience, and in doing so, allowing other regions to do the same.