Europe’s Ideological Fracture

The more Europe debates its relationship with the new U.S. administration, the more the fractures in European public opinion come into view. Beneath disputes about defense spending, Ukraine, or migration lies a deeper conflict. It is a battle between two visions of international order: on one side, a universalist progressive ideology that still imagines a borderless cosmopolitan world; on the other, a model that accepts limits, regional differences, and political conditionality.

This second model - still emerging, still contested - may define the next phase of both the European Union and the broader international system. It is what I call cosmopolitan regionalism.

The False Promise

The European Union’s expansion rested on a dangerous assumption: that institutional convergence would produce cultural convergence. Three decades later, the continent knows better.

Brussels imposed roughly twenty thousand laws and regulations - “none of which were really debated in their parliaments,” as Ivan Krastev once observed - expecting gratitude and instead harvesting resentment. Membership increasingly required surrendering not only tariff autonomy but also the ability to regulate labor markets, define family policy, and control borders.

The cosmopolitan experiment reached its limits when governments realized that European integration did not simply coordinate policy. It reshaped national life. I came to understand this tension through personal experience. Born in Italy in the 1980s, I grew up expecting a planet without boundaries. I lived in Latin America, the United States, and the Middle East; worked alongside Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and atheists; and learned that people pursue remarkably similar interests wherever they happen to be.

Yet the past five years revealed a different reality. Public intellectuals and political actors increasingly interpret geopolitical challenges through ideological lenses, presenting them as something other than what they are. A new model is emerging in response: cosmopolitan regionalism, in which global cooperation is built through regional convergence rather than top-down universal imposition.

This model requires a strict distinction between genuinely cosmopolitan interests and those that remain properly regional. It requires barriers to entry for principles claiming universal status. And it recognizes that sustainable governance must account not only for popular sentiment but also for industrial capacity and labor-market realities.

The Architecture of Selective Cooperation

The most concrete institutional embodiment of this framework is Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, established in January 2026. Originally conceived to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, the Board quickly evolved into a selective coalition operating outside traditional multilateral structures. Membership is explicitly conditional. Permanent participation requires a one-billion-dollar financial commitment; otherwise, states serve renewable three-year terms at the chairman’s discretion.

More importantly, participation requires alignment with the Abraham Accords framework: recognition of Israel’s legitimacy and commitment to regional security cooperation. This is not the United Nations’ hollow universalism, where human-rights violators sit on human-rights councils while denying the very rights they claim to protect. Instead, it represents conditional regionalism: states must demonstrate compatibility with core procedural principles in order to participate.

The coalition includes Muslim-majority countries - Kazakhstan, Indonesia, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco - alongside Israel. The arrangement demonstrates that regional peace does not require cultural homogeneity. What it requires is agreement on procedural norms: rejection of violence as policy, acceptance of territorial integrity, and commitment to economic interdependence.

The Board’s structure reflects three layers of cosmopolitan regionalist governance. Universal norms form the floor: diplomatic reciprocity, the prohibition of aggression, and Kantian hospitality - the minimal procedural framework of legitimate international engagement. Regional industrial policy occupies the middle: economic reconstruction, security coordination, and resource sharing. Local cultural autonomy forms the ceiling: member states retain authority over family law, education, religious practice, and the cultural content of self-determination.

Europe’s Strategic Fragmentation

This framework faces persistent resistance from ideological globalists who remain committed to the older cosmopolitan project.

In Brussels, the European Commission continues to advance migration compacts imposing relocation quotas while failing to secure external borders, handing Moscow valuable propaganda material. In international forums, defenders of universalism argue that human rights require cultural convergence, that procedural cooperation must evolve into political integration, and that regional differentiation equals fragmentation.

The Trump administration’s approach represents a sharp break from this logic. The April 2025 minerals agreement with Ukraine illustrates the shift. The deal establishes a joint investment fund giving Washington preferential access to critical minerals while Kyiv retains ownership. Future American military assistance counts as investment, linking security commitments directly to economic interests and bypassing traditional alliance structures. When Trump declared that he would not make security guarantees “beyond very much” and expected Europe to do the “heavy lifting,” he was not abandoning international order. He was operationalizing cosmopolitan regionalism: American participation conditional on commercial interest, regional actors bearing primary responsibility, and barriers to entry replacing automatic entitlement.

NATO’s commitment to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP by 2035, agreed in The Hague in June 2025, reveals how deep Europe’s geographic fractures run. Spain received an exemption. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the target “unreasonable and counterproductive” for a country whose principal threat is not Russian troops crossing the Pyrenees. Meanwhile Poland already spends nearly five percent of GDP on defense, with the Baltic states approaching similar levels. This divergence is not merely free-riding. It reflects regionally differentiated threat perceptions. Cosmopolitan frameworks must accommodate such differences or risk collapse.

Toward a Post-Globalist International Order

Across Europe, governments are experimenting - sometimes deliberately, sometimes instinctively - with forms of cosmopolitan regionalism.

The Czech Republic’s National Semiconductor Strategy aims to increase production by 300 percent by 2029 while maintaining national control over implementation. Germany illustrates the contradictions of late cosmopolitanism: despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende rhetoric, Berlin continues to resist serious economic de-risking from China. In the first half of 2024, German foreign direct investment accounted for 57 percent of total EU investment in China. Corporate interests, wrapped in cosmopolitan rhetoric, still override regional resilience.

Italy under Giorgia Meloni offers another trajectory. Her creation of the Ministry of Made in Italy rejects the assumption that economic policy should be culturally neutral. Her “gastronationalism” links agricultural policy to national identity while negotiating energy diversification with Algeria, Egypt, Azerbaijan, and Qatar. When Meloni insisted on renaming “ReArm Europe” as “Readiness 2030,” she was making a deeper point: security cannot be reduced to military procurement alone. It must also include industrial policy, economic resilience, and political legitimacy. The ideological globalists resisted precisely because the change implies selectivity and conditionality. “ReArm Europe” signals automatic solidarity; “Readiness 2030” implies differentiated contributions and regionally grounded security strategies.

The Board of Peace model resolves this tension through explicit conditionality. Its democratic deficit is evident, authoritarian states participate and executive authority remains concentrated, but it represents the first serious attempt to reconcile cosmopolitan aspirations with geopolitical reality. The failure of post-Cold War globalism was its attempt to universalize cultural content rather than procedural norms. “Global citizens” were expected to adopt cosmopolitan lifestyles and progressive social values that often lacked roots in local societies. The backlash now visible across Europe is the predictable result.

But the alternative cannot be simple populism. Reducing regional policy to the immediate preferences of “the people” ignores the material foundations of stability: industrial capacity, labor-market health, and strategic resource security. The future international order will not emerge from resurrecting universal institutions. It will arise from overlapping regional frameworks with clear barriers to entry and explicit conditions of participation. The Board of Peace, NATO’s differentiated commitments, and America’s increasingly transactional alliances are early expressions of this shift.

Their critics call it isolationism. In reality, it is something else: a post-globalist architecture of selective cooperation. The central task now is to determine precisely where cosmopolitan hospitality ends and regional self-determination begins. Where that boundary is drawn, the future international order will follow.