The most useful line in European policy over the last year did not come from a Commission slogan but from Mario Draghi. In the opening pages of his competitiveness report, he wrote that Europe had built its prosperity on assumptions that no longer hold: cheap energy, open trade, and the luxury of separating economics from security. The elegance of the post-Cold War arrangement has collapsed into invoices.
That is the beginning of the matter. Not the end. Europe’s officials still speak as if their main problem were narrative hygiene: the right values language, the right signal to Washington, the right denunciation to whichever camera is running. Worse, Brussels still defaults to procedural management where strategic judgment is required. But a political order that imports most of its energy and outsources too much of its hard security cannot afford ornamental geopolitics. It must think structurally or become a decorative peninsula.
EU import dependency is still brutal
Source: Eurostat, Energy statistics – an overview (2023) and Energy production and imports (preliminary 2024 data).
Those percentages are not a side note. They are the thesis. The Ukraine war, the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, LNG competition with Asia, defence-industrial strain, inflationary fragility — these are not separate files stacked on a Brussels desk. They are one system. Europe’s problem is that it still treats them as departmental inconveniences.
Norway will help Europe live with this contradiction, but not abolish it. Oslo awarded 57 new production licences to 19 companies in January 2026 under APA 2025, explicitly to slow the decline in output and support Europe’s energy security; and this week it widened APA 2026 by another 70 blocks. That may steady medium-term regional supply and squeeze a few more profitable tie-backs through existing infrastructure. It does not turn Europe into an energy-sovereign continent. It merely shows that even one of the clean West’s most decorous states still understands that hydrocarbons, alas, pay the heating bill.
Emmanuel Macron, in his Sorbonne speech last year, put the civilizational stakes more plainly than most EU paperwork ever dares. “We must be clear on the fact that our Europe, today, is mortal. It can die. It can die, and that depends entirely on our choices.” Quite right. But Europe will not die first from a shortage of declarations. It will die from strategic infantilism: from pretending that energy can be moralized away, that war can be quarantined forever at the edge of the map, and that continental economics can remain permanently detached from continental peace.
The deeper problem: Europe still runs on hydrocarbons
Source: Eurostat, gross available energy in the EU, 2023.
Here lies the vulgar fact behind so much elegant nonsense: Europe may be making real progress in electricity, but the continental metabolism still runs heavily on oil and gas. In 2023, oil alone accounted for 37.6% of gross available energy. Gas added another 20.4%. That means the political class cannot simply chant “transition” and imagine the material problem solved. A continent can decarbonise its aspirations much faster than it decarbonises its tractors, ammonia, freight, military mobility, district heat, chemicals, and heavy industry.
Note the word: irreversibly. Not emotionally. Not symbolically. Materially. Europe can of course arm against Moscow and harden its eastern flank. Some of that is necessary. But it cannot abolish geography, nor should it build its whole future on rehearsed hostility to the eastern half of its own landmass. A permanent war frontier from the Baltic to the Black Sea, combined with near-total oil dependence and expensive LNG competition, is not a grand strategy. It is a bridge loan from history.
To argue for a Eurasian settlement is therefore not to argue for surrender, nor for sentimental reconciliation with the Kremlin, nor for becoming a branch office of Beijing. It is to argue that Europe must stop behaving like a protected moral enclave and start behaving like a continental power. As Bruno Maçães puts it, Europe is not linked to Asia but is an extension of it, a large peninsula rather than a sealed-off world of its own. Continental powers do not merely ask what arrangement reduces exposure. They also ask which rail corridors, port links, energy routes, data cables, industrial bargains, and intellectual freedoms increase their room for action across the whole continent.
Electricity is improving, but electricity is not the whole energy system
Source: Eurostat, preliminary EU electricity generation data for 2024.
This is the awkward contrast Europe refuses to think through. On electricity, the direction is encouraging. On total energy, dependence remains severe. On foreign policy, the Commission still behaves as though the first chart can be dissolved by the third. It cannot. Wind turbines do not by themselves resolve the eastern front, LNG pricing, oil chokepoints, fertiliser, shipping insurance, or missile stocks.
What a Serious Eurasian Policy Would Actually Mean
The phrase peaceful Eurasia becomes foolish only when it is made soft. A serious Eurasian policy would be hard, suspicious, and specific. It would include the following moves.
- Push for a ceasefire in Ukraine if it can be enforced, monitored, and armed behind. A frozen line is not justice. It may still be preferable to a permanently open furnace that drains Europe’s munitions, finances, and political coherence.
- Rearm Europe while talking peace. A ceasefire without rearmament is an invitation to the next war. A ceasefire with industrial mobilisation is strategic time purchased at a discount.
- Treat energy security as statecraft, not climate theatre. More nuclear, more grids, more storage, more North Sea seriousness, more domestic resilience, and less adolescent disgust toward ugly but necessary transition infrastructure.
- Replace Atlantic reflex with continental judgment. Europe’s interest is not automatic distance from America, nor obedient alignment with it. It is the ability to decide when Washington’s timetable serves Europe and when it does not.
- Build eastward and south-eastward corridors on purpose. A serious Europe would think in rail, ports, customs, energy routes, and logistics: better freight links toward Central Asia and China where viable, and a calmer commercial architecture with the Middle East, which is also part of the wider Asian story.
- Keep industrial ties open to Asia wherever security logic does not clearly forbid them. Europe cannot deindustrialise itself into virtue. Trade with Asia should be managed, screened, and strategically filtered — not theatrically severed.
- Double down on freedom of opinion as a strategic asset. If Europe wants to attract Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and other serious talent, it should make visa, residency, research, and company-building pathways materially easier for people who can strengthen the continent. Freedom matters here not as self-congratulation but as competitive advantage.
- Build a post-war eastern security architecture before the war ends. The continent needs an answer to the question everyone avoids: what stable military, economic, and transport order could exist between Germany and the Urals that is not merely a waiting room for renewed violence?
None of this requires loving Russia. It requires refusing to build Europe’s future on the assumption that permanent Russian hostility, permanent Middle Eastern volatility, permanent American protection, and expensive imported energy can all be absorbed at once without major internal cost. That assumption is already rotting. Real stability with Russia will not come from sentiment, but neither will it come from ritual enmity alone. It means stronger European defence, yes, but also the colder work of constructing a military, transport, and energy order on the continent that is less crisis-prone than the one now failing.
The current Commission’s tragedy is not wickedness. It is smallness. It governs as if Europe’s crisis were mainly administrative: streamline this, harmonise that, subsidise the bruises, issue another compass. Maçães is cruelly useful here: “The European Union is not meant to make political decisions.” That is too absolute to be literally true, but it catches the pathology. Europe’s crisis is now geopolitical, energetic, demographic, and military-industrial at once, while Brussels still reaches too often for procedural management where strategic judgment is required. A peaceful Eurasian order, however imperfect, is not a poetic extra. It is one of the conditions for European survival.
Europe should therefore say something frank at last. We will defend ourselves. We will rearm. We will harden our infrastructure. We will reduce dangerous dependencies. We will not let Moscow dictate our future. But we will also pursue the continental conditions of strategic room: better eastward freight links, more serious commercial arrangements with the Middle East and Asia, and a durable settlement on the landmass we actually inhabit. The goal is not a nervous truce at Europe’s edge, but a continent that is harder to blackmail on energy, harder to split militarily, and less trapped between American timetable and Asian supply.
The alternative to this is not moral purity. It is prolonged dependence with a better slogan.
Sources
Eurostat, Energy statistics – an overview — EU energy import dependency, gross available energy mix, and 2023 energy-system structure.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Energy_statistics_-_an_overview
Eurostat, Energy production and imports — preliminary 2024 data on gas imports and electricity generation in the EU.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Energy_production_and_imports
Mario Draghi, The Future of European Competitiveness, Part A: A Competitiveness Strategy for Europe — Europe’s lost energy assumptions, high energy-price burden, dependencies, and security argument.
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c-f152a8232961_en?filename=The%20future%20of%20European%20competitiveness_%20A%20competitiveness%20strategy%20for%20Europe.pdf
Bruno Maçães, The Dawn of Eurasia (Penguin, 2017) — especially the argument that Europe is an extension of Asia, that the old border is partly fictive, and that Europe must learn to act as a Eurasian power rather than a rule-bound spectator.
Norwegian Ministry of Energy, 57 new production licenses awarded — APA 2025 awards: 57 licences to 19 companies, framed explicitly as support for continued activity and Europe’s energy security.
https://www.regjeringen.no/en/whats-new/57-new-production-licenses-awarded/id3145952/
Norwegian Ministry of Energy, Announcement of APA 2025 — official rationale for continued exploration, larger acreage, and the effort to limit post-2030 production decline on the Norwegian continental shelf.
https://www.regjeringen.no/en/whats-new/announcement-of-apa-2025/id3099709/
Norwegianpetroleum / Norwegian Offshore Directorate, Licensing position for the Norwegian continental shelf — recent APA awards and basin distribution across the North Sea, Norwegian Sea, and Barents Sea.
https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/exploration/licensing-position-for-the-norwegian-continental-shelf/
Offshore Energy, 70 more offshore exploration blocks widen Norway’s new oil & gas licensing round — reporting on the announced APA 2026 expansion by 70 additional blocks.
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/70-more-offshore-exploration-blocks-widen-norways-new-oil-gas-licensing-round/
Emmanuel Macron, Europe speech, Sorbonne, 24 April 2024 — “our Europe, today, is mortal” and the case for sovereignty, continental scale, and ending strategic dependencies.
https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2024/04/24/europe-speech