Introduction: The European Union in an Illiberal World
This is the introduction to a forthcoming e-book by the Global Governance Research Group of the UNA Europa network, entitled ‘The European Union in an Illiberal World’. All chapter can be read here.
If there were any lingering doubts, January 2026 confirmed that the liberal international order (LIO) led by the United States (US) is over. On 3 January 2026, in response to widespread, violent demonstrations, President Donald Trump set the scene for pursuing regime change in Iran, warning the Iranian authorities that “[i]f they start killing people like they have in the past, […] I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States” (Cvorak and Varghese). Also, on 3 January, US forces successfully kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela. A week later, President Trump insisted that Greenland become part of the US, against the will of its inhabitants and Denmark (a NATO ally and the country to which Greenland formally belongs), although he subsequently ruled out forcible annexation at the World Economic Forum's Davos meeting in late January.
These events mark further major steps in the reconfiguration of global politics since this book project began. The Una Europa Global Governance Research Group’s call for papers went out in February 2025, shortly after President Trump returned to the White House, and an online conference took place in June 2025. The written contributions to this volume were completed in the second half of 2025. By then, the direction of the Trump administration was clear, with its “shock and awe” of executive orders transforming the US domestically in the first half of 2025, and “Liberation Day” tariffs (2 April 2025) overturning the multilateral trading system. In the autumn of 2025, the US began using hard power with attacks on small boats in the Caribbean, allegedly smuggling drugs from Venezuela. These attacks were in breach of both US and international law. Following Maduro’s capture, the US President also announced plans to increase the budget for his “Department of War” by 50%, to $1.5 trillion.
The rule of law is one of the historical pillars of liberalism, going back in the Western world to major Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Montesquieu, who provided its philosophical underpinnings, respectively, the notion of individual rights and the separation of powers – both founding principles of the politico-legal system of the US. Yet 250 years after its creation, the American Republic appears seriously vulnerable, with considerable speculation about how Donald Trump may attempt to manipulate future elections and remain in office beyond 2028. The Enlightenment also gave birth to political economy and the view that “commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices”, as Montesquieu argued; just as Ricardo stated that free trade binds together the “universal society of nations”. It was to promote these values following the disasters of the two World Wars that the US played a major role in creating the institutions and policies of democracy and liberalism after 1945, albeit with self-interest. These values were enshrined notably in Article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations (UN) “[t]o maintain international peace and security” and “[t]o develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” (United Nations). This world now looks largely gone. By the time this book was completed, the latest developments were the announcement of the US’s withdrawal from 66 international organisations and treaties (including 31 UN entities) and the unveiling at Davos of a “Peace Board” that has the potential to rival the UN.
Trade has also been a basis for the “ever-closer union” of the European Union (EU or Union) since the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Today’s EU was not designed as a political bloc capable of defending itself militarily, let alone projecting hard power. Later, by reinvesting the “peace dividend” (military savings after the Cold War), the EU was able to support economic transition in Eastern Europe and fund more extensive welfare systems than elsewhere in the world. The EU is thus challenged not only in practical, economic, and military terms, but also in its historical values: a challenge that is also playing out online, where information channels are dominated by US corporations that now have close links to Trump’s White House.
It is important, however, not to be romantic about a “lost world”. The post-1945 world was good… for white, Western men. But hardly had the fighting stopped in Europe, than Britain, France and others were engaged in brutal colonial wars as the “Third World” struggled for independence. Decades of wars and regime change were later waged by the US and its allies in Indochina and across continents, from Latin America to the Middle East, against the threat of communism, socialist movements and nationalist governments. While the West experienced a long consumer boom – the Trente Glorieuses for French-speakers – renowned poverty expert Branko Milanovic has pointed out that the years from 1950 to 2000 were the age of peak global income inequality (Milanovic).
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seemed for a brief period that the world was moving towards a globalised liberal system, based on market economics and liberal democracy. In the words of Francis Fukuyama, it was The End of History (Fukuyama 1989), yet the "holiday from history" in the 1990s was still marked by a number of horrors, most notably the Rwandan genocide and the resulting Great War of Africa, the terrible breakup of Yugoslavia and the Algerian Civil War. For its part, Russia experienced traumatic economic dislocation and frustration as NATO expanded eastwards – despite assurances given to the contrary when Germany was allowed to reunify in 1990. Yet the international liberal order was still deepened, for example, with the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995, the adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998, and the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Moreover, the number of people living in “extreme poverty” (as defined by the World Bank) fell significantly from 2.3 billion in 1990 to 831 million in 2025: respectively 43% and 10% of the global population (Our World in Data).
However, the 21st century has seen this edifice crumble, especially when: the US and its “coalition of the willing” went to war illegally with Iraq in 2003 (after the 9/11 terror attacks on the US in 2001); when Russia formally annexed Crimea (2014), and later invading Ukraine in 2022, thus ending the “Great Peace” in Europe since 1945; and when the Israeli government launched its full-scale war of destruction on Gaza, while deepening the colonisation of the West Bank, after the harrowing Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. Furthermore, Israeli actions to eliminate Palestinians and their societies have been supported not just by the US, but also by some EU governments and the United Kingdom (UK), either through arms sales and intelligence support or, by and large, through silence. For much of the Global South, the EU’s credibility as a soft power has been significantly tarnished.
The LIO has also been weakened economically, particularly by the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which exposed the limits of free-market “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism and financial deregulation. Originating in the US and spreading to Europe and other continents, the GFC significantly diminished the attractiveness of American neoliberalism in Southeast Asia and China. In the US and the UK, the GFC also contributed to sluggish income growth for large segments of society, and found political expression in the election of Donald Trump in 2016 (a few months after Britain’s Brexit referendum to leave the EU). The GFC also revealed fundamental weaknesses in Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), expressed most dramatically in Greece's economic collapse.
China also experienced a policy shift during the 2010s under President Xi Jinping’s leadership. On the one hand, Xi has revitalised the Communist Party’s power, including by reasserting Marxism-Leninism in the management of Chinese society, and by redefining the “principal contradiction” of Chinese society at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 as “the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life” (Rudd p 99). On the other hand, China under Xi has become more assertive internationally, seeking to take a lead in global governance, drawing on Xi’s concept of a “community of common destiny for all humankind”, and, if necessary, “to plan for a long-term struggle for the international order” (Rudd p 245).
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The contributions to this book examine how these shifts towards illiberalism and the end of the ILO are affecting the EU. The book is structured into four Parts, the first three of which relate to external relations: i) international cooperation and the changing international order, ii) economic challenges and opportunities in a turbulent world, and iii) the EU and the challenge of upholding human rights. The fourth Part of the book looks at the political challenges within the Union.
The three first Parts of the book examine a host of issues, like: the crumbling of solidarity commitments, such as the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the limited support for developing countries during the Covid-19 pandemic; the weakening of international institutions such as the UN and WTO; the visible geopolitical polarisation around conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, contributing to structural and ideological fractures in global politics; alternative modes of global governance favoured by authoritarian regimes like China, Russia and Turkey, as well as and the consolidation of an anti-Western bloc involving Russia, Iran, and North Korea; the erosion of liberal values related to human rights and accountability as well as the rejection of international legal norms, and the EU’s own failings to uphold its principles and values, in its migration policy, and its weak support for a two-state solution in Palestine and Israel. The final part of the book examines the political challenges within the Union. Here, several chapters note how democratic processes within the EU are being undermined by policies that de facto exclude minorities, as well as the changing nature of global media, including social media.
Part 1 of the book, International Cooperation and the Changing International Order, opens with Jan Wouters posing the question: Can the European Union Save the International Legal Order? Drawing on the EU’s responses to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, its engagement with international courts, and its reactions to US unilateralism, the author examines the consistency and effectiveness of the Union’s commitment to multilateralism and international law. The analysis concludes that although the EU has shown cohesion in some areas – particularly in sanctioning Russia and supporting legal accountability mechanisms – its overall impact remains limited.
In her chapter, The European Union and the erosion of liberal peace: navigating peace efforts in an illiberal world, Elena Conde examines how alternative peacebuilding models advanced by China, Russia, the Gulf States, Türkiye, and the Trump administration undermine the liberal foundations of post-Cold War peace processes, and how these shifts affect the EU’s ability to act as a normative and multilateral peace provider. The chapter concludes that the EU’s traditional liberal peace model is undergoing a profound transformation. Consequently, the EU has begun to adopt a hybrid peacebuilding approach that blends principled commitments with growing strategic pragmatism.
The following two chapters analyse factors and contexts which undermine the ILO, but may also transform it. In Hybrid Governance Beyond the Liberal-Illiberal Dichotomy: EU–BRICS in Global Power Shifts, Francesco Petrone argues that enhancing the EU’s strategic room for manoeuvre requires diversifying partnerships beyond the US. One opportunity is building hybrid governance with actors such as the BRICS. The chapter’s core findings indicate that global governance is no longer driven by a single normative model but is instead evolving toward hybrid arrangements grounded in co-constructed norms, shared institutional reforms, and pragmatic cooperation. The author further argues that such hybrid governance not only reflects empirical realities but also provides a framework for addressing contemporary collective action challenges, particularly in climate governance and global institutional reform.
Jing-Syuan Wong, in Deciphering Contestation of the Liberal International Order,examines four structural dimensions contesting the LIO: i) liberal ambiguity, ii) hierarchical power relations, iii) legitimacy dilemmas, and iv) the rise of alternative governance platforms such as the BRICS. She seeks to explain not merely why the LIO is contested, but how contestation itself forms a dialectical component of order-making. The chapter concludes that the LIO’s credibility ultimately hinges on its ability to address the representational deficits perceived by non-Western actors, many of whom regard the current order as both normatively inconsistent and exclusionist.
In the last chapter of this Part, Resurrection, Reckoning, Reasoning and the Rise of the EU and India in the New Geo-Political Setting, Shreya Pandey and Dhiraj Mani Pathak investigate the structural, regulatory and political determinants shaping the prospects of the long-negotiated EU–India Free Trade Agreement (finally sealed on 27 January 2026), treating the agreement as both an economic instrument and a normative platform for cooperation between two democratic, diversity-based political entities. Through a detailed assessment of trade volumes, sectoral asymmetries, regulatory frictions, and bargaining positions, the chapter shows that EU-India cooperation remains constrained by incompatible regulatory standards, competing interpretations of sovereignty, and a tendency for rhetoric to outpace substantive policy convergence.
Part 2 of the book, titled Economic Challenges and Opportunities in a Turbulent World, outlines the prospects for the European economy to compete and innovate amid global economic reshaping. In the opening chapter, The EU’s Open Strategic Autonomy and the Challenge of Competitiveness in the Era of Geo-Politicised Interdependence, Eugenia Baroncelli examines how Open Strategic Autonomy has been reshaped by the EU’s growing emphasis on competitiveness, economic security, and technological sovereignty. She argues that Open Strategic Autonomy remains largely reactive and constrained, reflecting compromises among Member States, institutional actors, and private-sector stakeholders, rather than being a fully autonomous strategic doctrine.
Qingxiu Bu, in Industrial Policy in the Global Climate-Trade Nexus, examines the climate-trade nexus through a comparative assessment of China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies, Western reactions (such as the US Inflation Reduction Act and the EU’s Green Deal Industrial Plan), and the emerging tensions these policies generate within the multilateral trading system. The analysis focuses on identifying the conditions under which national industrial strategies can foster competitiveness and resilient supply chains without undermining global emissions-reduction efforts. The author argues that only comprehensive multilateral reforms – such as modernising the WTO’s subsidy and environmental exceptions regime, revitalising the Environmental Goods Agreement, and establishing formal coordination between the UNFCCC and WTO – can reconcile industrial competitiveness with global climate commitments.
In Reviving Trade Alliances: The Geopolitical and Economic Significance of the EU-Mercosur Agreement, Maria C. Latorre and David Suárez-Cuesta pursue two research objectives: first, to determine the economic, sectoral and environmental consequences of the EU-Mercosur Agreement using a Computable General Equilibrium Model; and second, to reassess widespread assumptions about the agreement, particularly threats to European agriculture, risks of environmental degradation and the imbalance of benefits in favour of Mercosur. Their simulations show that both blocs, and especially Mercosur, experience measurable gains in GDP, trade volumes, employment and private consumption. Crucially, the environmental impact appears modest and efficiency-enhancing, with emissions rising proportionally less than output and concentrated primarily in transport and electricity rather than agriculture. These results, therefore, contradict dominant narratives that the agreement would trigger a flood of agricultural products into the EU, endanger the Amazon, or disproportionately harm European farmers. Instead, the most dynamic effects are in manufacturing and services. In January 2026, following strong farmers’ demonstrations across the EU, the European Parliament voted to postpone ratification of the agreement, referring it to the European Court of Justice for a legal review that could take up to two years. The European Commission criticised the delay as geopolitically misguided and has indicated it may still provisionally apply the deal's trade provisions in the interim (Bounds).
The next two chapters examine how, since his first presidential term, Donald Trump's policy imperatives have shaped the Union’s economic policies and its exercise of soft power. The central aim of The Promotion of the Green Agenda in the Trump Era: Perspectives on Europe’s Role in Agenda Setting with Brazil, by Ana Paula Tostes and Yasmin Renne, is to assess whether and how the EU has promoted its green agenda and normative commitments during periods of disruption – especially those associated with the Trump presidencies, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. The authors conclude that EU climate diplomacy has demonstrated adaptive capacity rather than linear decline. By integrating environmental objectives into trade and investment frameworks, the EU has partially offset the erosion of multilateral cooperation and maintained influence in a fragmented global order. In this context, Brazil has emerged as a pivotal partner due to its ecological significance and regional leadership.
In The Economic Challenges to the European Union of “Trumpism”, Nicholas Sowels studies the impact on the EU of the second Trump administration, focusing on its radical break with the multilateral trading system through aggressive, unilateral tariffs (especially following "Liberation Day" in April 2025), and the ensuing weakening of the dollar. The author argues that the US is seeking to compel its allies, particularly the EU, to share the financial burden of providing global “public goods” such as US military protection and the dollar's international use. This strategy, coupled with erratic policymaking and a disdain for international law, has greatly undermined the ILO and ushered in significant monetary uncertainty and financial volatility. Yet, the EU, weakened by internal divisions, economic underperformance, and dependence on US support regarding Ukraine, finds itself in a difficult position, capable at best of damage limitation in an increasingly unstable global economy dominated by US unpredictability and great-power rivalry.
The third Part of the book, titled The European Union and the Challenge of Upholding Human Rights, provides analyses of the EU’s credibility in promoting its values of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. By examining the EU’s attempts to foster long-standing normative priorities – such as gender equality, the rights of sexual and gender minorities, and the protection of human rights defenders – Hanna Tuominen in her contribution, The European Union's Challenges in Human Rights Promotion in an Illiberal World, demonstrates how authoritarian and populist states use institutional membership, discursive counter-strategies, and coalition-building to dilute, reframe, or obstruct liberal human-rights norms. The chapter concludes that sustained illiberal contestation within and beyond the UN Human Rights Council is undermining human rights promotion. This makes it imperative for the EU to reinforce its internal unity and remain firmly committed to multilateralism to prevent authoritarian actors from reshaping the global human rights regime.
In Upholding the Rights of Refugees: Can the EU Align Security with its Core Values?Nuria Hernández-García examines the evolution of the Common European Asylum System, the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, and the persistent “implementation gap” between legal commitments and practice. She assesses the extent to which restrictive asylum measures undermine both the normative coherence of the EU’s internal legal order and its external legitimacy as a promoter of universal rights. The chapter shows that merging asylum policy with general migration control, combined with far-reaching externalisation measures and persistent non-compliance by Member States, has generated a constitutional crisis that undermines mutual trust, limits the effective protection of fundamental rights, and threatens the Union’s capacity to meet its international obligations, especially the principle of non-refoulement.
The central research objective of Bruno Jäntti’s Designed to fail: EU Foreign Policy vis-à-vis Israel’s Encroachment on the Occupied Palestinian Territories is to evaluate whether the European Union’s long-standing policy towards Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories contained genuine conflict-resolution potential – prior to 7 October 2023. Drawing on extensive empirical and legal analysis, the author investigates the internal contradictions between the EU’s declared objectives – support for Palestinian self-determination and non-recognition of Israeli settlements – and the Union’s actual policy instruments, including trade practices, arms exports, as well as political rhetoric that mischaracterises Israel as a consolidated democracy.
Part 4 of the book, Political Challenges within the European Union, highlights some of the EU’s internal challenges to its democratic model, as well as its political and legal institutions. In Trustbreakers: How Political Discrimination Shapes Trust in Public Institutions in the European Union, Ana María Montoya, Natalia Rodríguez, Santiago Pardo and Carlos Toruño draw on original data from the EUROVOICES survey, covering 27 Member States and 110 subnational regions, to develop a systematic empirical account of the causal mechanisms linking political exclusion, affective polarisation and declining institutional trust. Through regression analyses and cross-contextual comparisons, the authors show that political discrimination has a consistently negative and statistically significant impact on citizens’ trust in national and local authorities, the judiciary and representative institutions.
The analytical objective of Carlos González-Tormo’s chapter The European Union in the Face of Conspiracy Theories as Hybrid Threats is to conceptualise conspiracy theories as a distinct category within the broader spectrum of hybrid threats and to examine their destructive effects on democratic governance within the Union. By systematising the relationship between disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, as well as the dynamics of conspiratorial narratives, the author seeks to elucidate how these informational phenomena erode institutional trust, distort public opinion, and destabilise democratic norms.
In A New Era for the Global Information Sphere: Fostering Information Integrity or Drilling Information Voids? Naja Bentzen analyses how the second Trump administration’s policies are transforming the global information sphere by undermining information integrity through the politicisation of science, pressure on independent media and alignment with illiberal narratives. The author argues that the Union is compelled to assume a more assertive role in safeguarding information integrity through regulation and in cultivating long-term cognitive resilience to defend democracy, both within Europe and internationally. Otherwise, the informational voids created by the retreat of the US risk being filled by authoritarian actors such as China and Russia, thereby weakening global democratic resilience.
The aim of Madalina Botan and Minna Aslama Horowitz’s chapter Assessing the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation: Platform Responses to Information Disordersis to evaluate the effectiveness of the Union’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, as reinforced by the Digital Services Act, in addressing contemporary information disorders and safeguarding the integrity of democratic institutions in the digital environment. Their empirical inquiry reveals persistent structural deficiencies in online platforms' accountability: limited transparency, inconsistent or superficial implementation of media literacy and user empowerment tools, insufficient access to data for researchers, and fragmented or opaque cooperation with fact-checking organisations.
In the final chapter of this Part, Domestic Illiberal Challengers within the European Parliament: the Case of EU-China Relations, Unai Gómez-Hernández examines whether radical right populist parties in the European Parliament explicitly or implicitly support China’s more illiberal approach to international relations when EU positions reflect the core tenets of the LIO. The author concludes that the empirical evidence for systematic pro-China alignment is mixed and does not confirm this expectation. Although radical right populist parties often vote alongside mainstream groups, their behaviour is driven by illiberal logics – such as economic nationalism, sovereignty-based reasoning, and scepticism towards multilateralism – rather than support for China. The chapter thus demonstrates that domestic illiberal actors contribute to the internal contestation of the LIO within the EU, even in the absence of consistent convergence with external illiberal powers.
Nicholas Sowels is a Senior Lecturer in English for economics at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where he also teaches political economy.
Jan Wouters is Full Professor of International Law and International Organizations, Jean Monnet Chair ad personam, Director, Institute for International Law and Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, Administrator, America Europe Fund, KU Leuven.
Michał Dulak is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science and International Relations at the Jagiellonian University. He is the head of an interfaculty unit at the Jagiellonian University, the Polish Research Centre, which works on Polish-British relations. His research focuses on the international cooperation of European parliaments, as well as regional and local authorities. His recent publications include, inter alia, a monograph titled “Poland’s Chairmanship in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2022: Objectives and Their Implementation in the Face of the Russian-Ukrainian War (2025)”.
Maria C. Latorre is a Full Professor of Applied Economics at Universidad Complutense. She was selected as a Seconded National Expert to the European Commission (Chief Economist Unit, DG Trade, Brussels) and has been a member of its Expert Group on International Trade since 2016.
References
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