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Two conflicting thoughts about DeepSeek seem plausible right now. Forced to be resourceful, China is starting to expose the artificial intelligence sector of the US as flabby and coddled. Alternatively, don’t panic, America: the brute scale of US capital will tell in the end, as will the nation’s openness to foreign talent.
Either way, notice the absence of a third horse from all the discussion this week. You wouldn’t know that Europe accounts for a comparable share of world economic output to China and the US. Whatever the feats of such companies as Mistral, the continent’s role in AI — in fact, its place in the world — is increasingly that of an infant watching both parents squabbling overhead.
How has it come to this? Over-regulation of business, say some. Or a far from complete single market, which means that close to half a billion people (who are well-off by world standards) count for less than they should. Yet a third speculation is that Europe lacks an entrepreneurial culture. Whatever relative weight you accord these factors, notice that each one is to some extent a choice. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Europe’s “revealed preference” is to forfeit some economic dynamism for other things.
This is why, despite their best efforts, Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley moguls around Donald Trump will struggle to shape Europe. Their techno-libertarianism has much less purchase on the other side of the Atlantic, even — or especially — among the hard right. Who can imagine Marine Le Pen, supporter of free public transport for young workers, freezing government grants and loans as Trump tried to do this week? Even Giorgia Meloni, a pro-market reformer of sorts, has spent much of the time since the pandemic dispersing EU funds.
In Europe, nationalism is bound up with paternalism to a degree that is alien to the US experience. (Imperial Germany under Bismarck pioneered the welfare state.) The UK isn’t an exception. Brexit was, in part, a bet that British people are essentially Americans in their relish for capitalism, if only the dead hand of Brussels would let them go. Well, the fifth anniversary of the formal exit is this Friday. Still no UK government has felt politically safe to cut much regulation. Even the flintiest Tory must know that, if a single day were shaved off the statutory paid leave allowance, say, there would be pandemonium, much of it among Brexit voters. To be “rightwing” in Europe and America just mean different things.
Even within the Trump government, the tech bros are at philosophical odds with the pro-worker Maga base. But at least the two camps can come together over American jingoism. What is going to glue Musk to Europe’s hard right? A shared position on certain cultural issues? It doesn’t seem enough to paper over such wildly different visions of the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Granted, both sides have an interest in the paralysis or destruction of the EU: it would spare Silicon Valley a lot of regulation. But the idea that tech would get an easier ride from a fragmented, populist-led Europe could only be entertained by someone with no knowledge of, say, Le Pen’s economic platform over the years.
The attempt to build a transatlantic club of populists isn’t new. Another Trump associate, Steve Bannon, tried it in the past decade. These projects tend to fall short for a reason that shouldn’t need spelling out. If a movement’s core idea is national assertiveness, the various branches of it around the world will almost by definition come into conflict. One nation’s expansionist territorial claims affect another’s. The desire of Strongman X to push his tech companies into foreign markets rubs against Strongman Y’s security paranoia and amour propre. The Russo-Japanese war, Operation Barbarossa, the Sino-Soviet split: liberalism owes its survival in large part to the innate fissiparousness of those who hate it. Trump, Le Pen and the like aren’t monsters on anything approaching that scale. But the principle that jingoists tend to fall out, must fall out, holds. There won’t be a Nationalist International.
Not long ago, self-respecting European reactionaries almost defined themselves against the US, which they saw as both culturally imperial and culturally empty. Even in the cold war, when the alternative was communism, parts of the continental right stood aloof. At least US Republicans used to notice the snub, and mind. Now? No head of government in the EU is closer to China than Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Yet no head of government in the EU is more beloved of America’s anti-China hard right. Whether this double game says more about his wiliness or the attention span of today’s Republicans, it is a lesson in how differently a European populist can see geopolitics from an American.
This isn’t a call for liberals to relax. The US right has the resources to put more than a thumb on the scales of European politics. With a federal election close, the Alternative for Germany is being magnified through the personal attention of Musk. But these are tactics. A more lasting alliance, an American-exported revolution, assumes a harmony of worldview that isn’t there. If the European hard right succeeds, it won’t be on account of outsiders whose very foreignness might incur a backlash. Liberalism has always been able to count on its enemies turning their belligerence on each other.
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