Europe’s resilience firmly tested in 2024

Europe entered 2024 with some trepidation. War was still raging on the continent for the first time since 1945. The echoes of renewed conflict in the Middle East were reaching into its major cities. The continental economy was limping. A series of elections were imminent, with an uneasy public likely to look for alternatives to mainstream parties. No one was sure who would be left standing at the end of the year.
Only the glorious backdrop of the Paris Olympics held out some promise of relief. But despite the many challenges to be faced, there were hopes that Europe would end the year better than it started it. The run of elections, for national and European parliaments, would allow the public to have their say on the direction of the continent and perhaps usher in a period of stability with which to face the future.
That has not necessarily been the outcome. We are learning that elections do not settle a democracy as they once did. The bitter polarization of politics, encouraged by a relentlessly negative social media, suggests that elections have become mere staging posts of anger in unending partisan political wars. Indeed, just four months after an emphatic win at the polls, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced a petition of nearly 3 million signatures demanding another general election.
It has been some year.
This year has confirmed that a rightward, populist move in Europe is continuing and that there is little stability in its two most powerful and significant nations. Provincial elections in Germany and the European Parliament vote in France debilitated both countries’ governments. The year ends with Germany marking time until snap federal elections in February after the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s government, while a weakened President Emmanuel Macron is perhaps a prisoner of Marine Le Pen and the far right until the next French presidential election in 2027.
Toward the end of the year, another election further disturbed the European mood. For months, there had been widespread speculation about the result of the US presidential contest. For democracies that uphold the peaceful transfer of power as sacrosanct and the best answer to the creep of authoritarianism now stalking the continent, the idea that a defeated candidate associated with an insurrection could return to office was surely inconceivable.
There was a moment, with the stepping down of an almost-certain-to-be-defeated Joe Biden, when hope sprang for European centrists that the gathering momentum of Donald Trump would be halted. Notwithstanding that the policies of Kamala Harris toward trade and conflict in the wider world were barely known, she could not be worse than the fears accumulating around the prospect of Trump 2.0.
On Nov. 5, we learned the truth. Europe was not to deal with a conflicted or disputed outcome this time, but a newly, and substantially endorsed, President-elect Trump, winner of the popular vote and the undisputed master of his own destiny.
Europe’s fears were far from fanciful or based solely on the past. In his first term, President Trump had made no secret of his disdain for NATO — the cornerstone of peace and security for Europe against external threats for some 75 years — claiming it to be an expensive insurance policy costing the US much and the rest of the alliance much less. He had threatened those states not paying their way with abandonment and, while his talk had the political effect of making European states look to their own commitments on defense, its wider impact on states close to an aggressive Russia was deeply unsettling.
On Ukraine, his boast that he could end the war within 24 hours led to not unreasonable speculation that this could only be done by some degree of sacrifice from the victim of the conflict for the benefit of the aggressor — the wrong lesson of history for a continent forever scarred by the mistakes of the 20th century.
Comments of those around him are hardly conducive to overcoming those fears. Donald Trump Jr. went on social media to mock the leader of a beleaguered country fighting for its existence to say that President Volodymyr Zelensky was “38 days from losing your allowance.”

Europe’s fears are not confined to defense and security. The economic health of the EU is also not strong.

Alistair Burt

Europe has to work with Trump and his Cabinet. The strangeness of some of his choices for office must be of no consequence to the professional diplomats and politicians who are working toward the transition of power. They are trying to ensure, as far as they are able, that Ukraine is in the best possible situation it can be for an anticipated negotiation in 2025. It will be an early test of the relationship and the future.
Europe’s fears are not confined to defense and security. The economic health of the EU is also not strong, as made clear by September’s landmark report on competitiveness from former Italian prime minister and president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi. A tariff war, as threatened by President-elect Trump, is of significant concern.
But the debate about President Trump is moving on. Whatever the views of him may be, there is an awareness that it is no use blaming an incoming US administration for all that needs to change across the European continent. Europe needs to spend more on defense, regardless of who is in the White House. And economic progress, sluggish when compared with the US and China over many years, has to deliver its own prescription for success in 2025. In one telling statistic, Draghi looked at the global investment into artificial intelligence: Of $35 billion poured into AI startups in the first half of 2024, the EU attracted just 6 percent. A tariff war will not help, but Europe has to take greater charge of its own economic destiny in 2025.
This year unsettled Europe further with two unrelated, though not entirely disconnected, phenomena.
Migration to Europe, whether those seeking to make their way without papers across the Mediterranean from the Middle East or being absorbed into workforces and family reunions, is increasingly cited as a driving force behind the resurgent political right. Mainstream politicians struggle to keep up not just with the rhetoric from the right, amplified by aggressive social media, but with their answers of fences and the turning back of boats.
The events in Gaza and Lebanon have produced civil unrest in Europe’s big cities, where the identification of large Muslim populations with those suffering devastating bombardment has heightened awareness of their presence and political influence, contrasted with the seeming indifference of European governments. The agony of the Middle East is now being accompanied by an identifiable increase in antisemitism and Islamophobia, dismaying populations unconnected with either community, who are being whispered at by often anonymous sources on social media that their countries are not what they were.
And as if politics was not enough, Europe is increasingly aware that global climate change is not only driving refugees toward them, but that it is also having an impact on their domestic populations. The shock of the violence of the floods in Valencia, Spain, which took more than 200 lives in September, was matched only by the intensity of the anger toward the government and officials, who were blamed for their lack of foresight and response. There is little confidence that such scenes will not be repeated.
But Europe is a resilient continent. Investment is flowing in from friends in the Arab world and beyond to new industries and technologies. Europe’s universities remain attractive to the world’s brightest and best. It will respond to the challenges to its security and defense. Already, a developing European Political Community includes the EU and those beyond, while Brexit has not prevented London, Paris and Berlin working closely together. Its diplomacy will reach into the conflicts of the Middle East, as a new future for the region is formed that cannot afford the catastrophe of continuing conflict.
Europe may yet use the shocks of 2024 as the springboard to a defiant 2025.

• Alistair Burt is a former UK member of Parliament who has twice held ministerial positions in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; as parliamentary undersecretary of state from 2010 to 2013 and as minister of state for the Middle East from 2017 to 2019. X: @AlistairBurtUK