The former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, rejects fatalism about the future of Europe and warns of the risks faced by the community project in an international context marked by war, technological rivalry and political fragmentation. The diplomat defends that the European Union still has tools to strengthen its autonomy, such as will, and warns of the impact of algorithms and large digital platforms on democratic quality.
Europe in a world without rules
Asked about the idea that “Europe is committing suicide”, González Laya maintains that the expression reflects the difficulty of the European Union to function in an international scenario in which the rules that supported the order that emerged after the Second World War are being questioned.
As he explains, Europe is “a creature of a rules-based system” and faces the challenge of making interests and values compatible in a world where the certainties of the past no longer exist. Even so, he rejects any deterministic view of European decline.
“There is nothing irreversible,” he says. In his opinion, the main threat is to assume that the future is already written and to resign ourselves to the advance of powers like China or Russia: “Let’s not fall into the trap of inevitability.”
Political will as the main weapon
The former head of Spanish diplomacy considers that the greatest weapon that Europe has continues to be the political will of its citizens and leaders. He remembers that the construction of Europe was born from the shared decision to assume costs to gain collective strength and assures that surveys show a growing social demand for more integration because “we know that by building it together we will be stronger.”
“When I look at the opinion polls in Spain and Europe, I see that there are more and more citizens who are asking their political leaders to build more of the European Union, to put more in common, to connect their energy systems more, to invest more jointly in defense to build European deterrence, to improve the integration of the single market because that is going to give us competitiveness, to improve social protection and solidarity systems at the European level, because that is going to give us cohesion,” he explains.
For example, the former minister believes that the European response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that the European Union is capable of acting together in the face of threats that are “existential.” Compared to those who predicted a rapid erosion of support for kyiv, he highlights that the Europeans have maintained their support because they understand that the security of the continent is directly linked to the outcome of the conflict.
Russia, a threat that Europe was slow to understand
The diplomat maintains that for decades Europe built “a political project anchored on the notion of peace through interdependence”, that is, “the more we united, the more peaceful our space was and we thought that because this worked for us, it would work for the rest of the world”, but the war in Ukraine has shown the limits of that vision.
“We have woken up in a world” in which Russia questions basic principles of the international order, such as the inviolability of borders. And we face a reality for which “we also have to be playful” because “we live next to a country with which we want to have good neighborly relations, but which physically attacks us (Ukraine) and the rest of Europe through attacks on energy infrastructures, cyber attacks and making efforts to interfere in the democratic space.”
Algorithms and the erosion of democracy
This interference occurs in part through social networks and their farms of thousands of bots, with the collaboration of some technofeudals like Elon Musk. And in fact, the former minister dedicates one of the central chapters of her book to this: to the impact of algorithms on democratic life. González Laya warns that digital platforms are contributing to fragmenting societies and destroying the minimum consensus on which democratic systems are based.
For her, algorithms encourage the creation of increasingly polarized and confrontational communities, to the point that different groups end up living in incompatible realities. In his opinion, democracy needs a “common ground” of shared facts to function, something that social networks are weakening by favoring dynamics of permanent confrontation.
“We must open the black box of algorithms”
Faced with the growing power of the great technological magnates, González Laya proposes a double response: regulation and reinforcement of civic spaces for debate.
The former minister rejects the argument that any regulation harms innovation and demands greater transparency about the operation of digital platforms: “We must open that black box that is algorithms. We must know how they are working because they do not work to bring us closer, but to viralize pain, anger and anxiety.”
Along with regulation, he defends the need to recover spaces for public conversation where it is possible to listen to dissidents, debate calmly and rebuild a democratic culture based on mutual respect: “Hasn’t it been interesting to see how the arrival of the Pope to Spain has allowed us to have a lot of calm debates and listen to messages that are quite easy to understand? The idea of the common good, of working for everyone, of respecting the opposite, of being able to dialogue and debate with those who have different opinions. It is almost revolutionary and therein lies the problem.”
The 2008 crisis, the origin of current fragmentation
González Laya places the origin of many of the current problems in the 2008 financial crisis, which he considers the beginning of a “lost decade” for Europe.
In his opinion, the European Union made the mistake of interpreting that crisis in moral terms, distinguishing between “virtuous” and “sinful” countries, instead of understanding the continent as “a single market” in which “if one did badly, everyone did badly.”
That response, he maintains, prolonged the effects of the crisis and fueled profound political consequences: the rise of populism, the fragmentation of public space and a growing difficulty in reaching consensus.
According to the former minister, this political fracture continues to condition Europe’s ability to respond in a united manner to the geopolitical, economic and technological challenges that lie ahead.
