Europe the Colonizer Becomes the Colony

A continent that knows it is being administered — and convinces itself that administration is stability.

Preface

This essay follows directly from yesterday’s “Europe Is Already Inside the Crosshairs — and Still Pretending It Isn’t.”

The first piece argued that Europe is no longer merely at risk of marginalisation in a Trumpian world of spheres of influence — it is already being repositioned as terrain: selectively protected, selectively pressured, and structurally subordinate.

This second essay goes further, into more uncomfortable territory.

If Europe is no longer a strategic subject but a managed object, then the familiar language of alliance, partnership, and rules-based order is no longer sufficient. What emerges instead is something Europe knows all too well from its own history: hierarchical dependency administered without formal conquest.

To name that condition is not rhetorical excess. It is diagnosis.

What follows is not a call to rebellion, nor a manifesto for autonomy. It is an attempt to describe, with as little sentimentality as possible, what European subordination looks like while it is still being normalised — and why recognising it may be the last moment in which Europe still has a choice.

Read together, these essays are not predictions.
They are an anatomy of a condition already taking shape.

Europe the Coloniser Becomes the Colony

There is a bitter irony Europeans are only beginning to grasp — and still resist naming.

The continent that once perfected colonial governance is now experiencing it from the inside.

Not through invasion.
Not through annexation.
But through hierarchy, dependency, and administered obedience.

When Macron called the emerging order “new colonialism,” many dismissed it as rhetorical excess. It was not. It was an uncharacteristically late moment of clarity. Europe is not merely vulnerable. It is structurally subordinate — and increasingly managed as such.

The shock is not that this is happening.
The shock is that Europe recognises the pattern — because it invented it.

Colonialism without occupation

Europe’s condition today mirrors the late administrative phase of classical empire:

• security is provided externally,
• local elites manage compliance,
• legal norms are applied asymmetrically,
• dissent is framed as irresponsibility,
• sovereignty exists in form, not in outcome.

There are no governors’ mansions, no colonial flags, no occupation forces. Those belong to earlier, cruder stages of domination. Modern dependency is cleaner. More polite. More stable.

Europe remains administratively sovereign — but strategically obedient.

That is not partnership.
That is colonial logic refined.

Why the liberation analogy is so uncomfortable

Once the colonial frame is accepted, a disturbing question follows naturally:

If Europe is becoming a colony — does it need a liberation struggle?

The answer reveals why Europe is paralysed.

Colonised societies fought to expel an external ruler.
Europe would have to confront itself.

There is no foreign governor to overthrow.
No singular occupying army to resist.
No clear “moment of independence” to declare.

Europe’s dependency is embedded in:

• treaties,
• procurement chains,
• military command structures,
• elite incentives,
• and decades of psychological habituation.

This is colonialism without an enemy that can be easily named — which makes resistance feel irrational, even taboo.

The three locks that hold Europe in place

Europe’s predicament is not accidental. It is secured by three interlocking constraints.

1. Disunity as a control mechanism

Every successful decolonisation movement had a unifying identity and shared threat. Europe has neither.

Fear of Russia drives the east.
Aversion to force paralyses Germany.
France speaks sovereignty but lacks followers.
Southern Europe is exhausted.
Northern Europe hedges quietly.

These are not policy disagreements. They are strategic incompatibilities.

Disunity is not Europe’s weakness.
It is the system that keeps Europe manageable.

2. NATO as hierarchy, not shield

NATO is treated as a neutral security guarantee. It is not.

It is an American-led deterrence architecture in which European dependence is not a flaw — it is the organising principle.

A structure designed to extend U.S. power cannot be the vehicle of European emancipation. No colony has ever been liberated by the army of its patron.

As long as Europe outsources ultimate security, sovereignty remains performative.

3. Bureaucracy as anti-sovereignty

The EU’s institutions excel at regulation, coordination, and consensus. They are structurally incapable of power assertion.

Bureaucracy is excellent at:

• managing decline,
• diffusing responsibility,
• avoiding confrontation.

It is disastrous at resisting domination.

The EU was built to prevent European wars — not to withstand external hierarchy. That design now traps it.

The deeper problem: Europe has moralised powerlessness

Colonised peoples often believed freedom justified sacrifice. Europeans have been trained to believe risk itself is immoral.

Decades of peace under American protection have produced:

• a moral allergy to power,
• a belief that law substitutes for force,
• and a conviction that dependence equals responsibility.

This is why even discussing autonomy is framed as reckless, destabilising, or dangerous.

Yet dependency does not dissolve because it is comfortable.
It hardens.

What “freedom” would actually require — and why it may never come

A European liberation would not look like revolution. It would begin quietly — and dangerously.

• a fracture among elites willing to accept risk,
• parallel defence and command structures outside NATO,
• procurement and doctrine independent of Washington,
• a cultural re-education that accepts power as necessary, not immoral.

None of this can happen at EU-27 scale.
It would begin with a few states — and be denounced by the rest.

And this is the most likely outcome:

Europe understands its condition — and chooses not to resist it.

Not because resistance is impossible.
But because autonomy would demand sacrifice, confrontation, and the abandonment of comforting illusions.

The final inversion

Europe may become the first civilisation to fully recognise its colonial condition — and rationalise it as realism.

Formally sovereign.
Strategically subordinate.
Morally indignant.
Politically compliant.

A continent that knows it is being administered — and convinces itself that administration is stability.

That is not defeat by force.
It is defeat by preference.

And history will not record it as conquest —
but as surrender by design.

https://leonvermeulen.substack.com/p/europe-the-coloniser-becomes-the