![The Return of History to the Present with Luuk van Middelaar [PODCAST]](https://4liberty.eu/phidroav/2025/11/Liberal-Europe-Podcast-Format-1-1024x1024.jpg "The Return of History to the Present with Luuk van Middelaar [PODCAST]")
How to interpret the results of the Dutch elections? What does the return of history to European affairs really mean? Is the EU a stage or an actor in the big drama of history? And what kind of Europe is emerging from Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the American empire and the post-1945 world order? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Luuk van Middelaar, the founding Director of Brussels Institute for Geopolitics. A political theorist, historian, and the author of the prizewinning The Passage to Europe (2013), he recently published Le Réveil géopolitique de l’Europe (2022), Pandemonium (2021), and Alarums and Excursions (2019), groundbreaking accounts of the Union’s crisis politics.
Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): What is your take on the results of the recent Dutch elections? Does the fact that it was pushed to the center signify a rejection of the populist politics? Or were there other issues at play?
Luuk van Middelaar (LvM): The Dutch election had, indeed, a surprising result or a surprising winner with D66, the centrist liberal pro-European party, picking up most seats – about one sixth of the vote – and coming on top. What we could see was a turn to the center – the votes to the winning party, D66 (whose leader is Rob Jatin, who will probably be the next Dutch Prime Minister), but also to the Christian Democrats, who also like to occupy the center-ground.
However, the first important nuance to make is that the radical right has not lost, because there is not one party, which is Geert Wilders’ PVV (Party for Freedom) party, which was the biggest party in the previous elections. He lost 10 seats, because he was not able to honor the promises he made to his voters in a very chaotic two years of the previous governing coalition, of which he was a member.
Wilders’ voters were disappointed, but they did not flock to the center – instead, they went to their little sister parties. Therefore, the radical right bloc of the three parties today still has (just as in the previous election two years ago) around 40-42 out of the 150 seats in the Dutch lower house, which means close to 30% of the vote. And that part is actually pretty stable.
However, what has changed is that the remaining voters have, indeed, moved a little bit to the center, but I would rather say that they have expressed a wish for governability, for some stability, for calm, and for a return to decency – which has always been a Christian democratic value. Many voters had been fed up with the previous chaotic coalition. And they, in a way, bet it on two horses in the center to bring about some stability.
Moreover, the final notable fact here to mention is that the left fared relatively poorly. The historic Dutch Labor Party and the Greens are, actually, in the process of merging. Their hope would be that joining forces between red and green, so to say, would allow them to come out on top or rank second – which they did pull off last time, but not this time. They ended in the fourth place, which was rather disappointing. In total, the left wing has only around 20% of the vote. Historically, that is low as well.
These are the central facts and results. Of course, we could also discuss how it compares to other countries and member states within Europe and the European Union. Nevertheless, it is a part of an overall trend, indeed, of a solid radical right block and, at the same time, a desire for governability. Moreover, we can also see that the old left-right axis is partly supplanted by populism versus governability, or anti-democratic versus democratic forces, if you want to put it that way.
LJ: During their electoral campaign, the VVD party promised that it was not going to form a coalition with the Green-Left alliance. Are they going to break that promise?
LvM: That is a big question now. The initiative will be with the two largest centrist parties, D66 and the Christian Democrats. And, indeed, the question is what the other liberals (the more right-wing liberals of the VVD) will do.
It will be very hard for D66 to allow one of the radical right-wing parties to join a coalition with VVD and the Christian Democrats – not PVV, but one of the smaller, and supposedly more palatable ones. However, I do not think that it will be an option for D66 as the winner that its own electorate can swallow. There are not many options here.
Basically, the only option if you want to avoid a coalition of six or seven parties, is the four largest parties in the center and the VVD will have to swallow it at some point. It is a version of a red and green coalition, so to say. This is going to take some psychodrama – as it often happens in the coalition-building countries like the Netherlands or Belgium, or even France these days.
LJ: How do you see the year 1989 from today’s perspective, and what is to be learned from it?
LvM: That is a broad question for a broad theme. Maybe first, a little bit about the semantics, about the definitions. What could a return of history mean? Of course, I do not mean that history properly stopped in the meantime, but it is, of course, at the same time an allusion to Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ theory, and which, whatever you say about it, epitomized and expressed a certain belief (in hindsight, illusionary) about the world after 1989 and how it would evolve. It also brings us to the analysis of the dynamics of European politics, and how the return of history has been experienced by different people at different moments.
I remember your current (and former) Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, on the day when he took up his European office of the European Council President. He said that “History is back”. I was there at the handover ceremony between the two Presidents of the European Council, because I worked for his predecessor. Then, in 2014, that was a very strong reference to the invasion and annexation of Crimea by Russia, which signified a return of great power politics. That is definitely the central element there.
For Europe, this primarily means the return of Russia and its direct territorial aggression, which was, one could say, experienced with some delay by the rest of Europe. Just take Germany, and the famous ‘Zeitenwende’ speech by Olaf Scholz just a few days after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That was Germany’s way of saying that ‘history is back’. We experience a turn of the tide or even of the time, as the word Zeitenwende indicates. We are changing eras, we are changing historic epochs.
Let us briefly zoom out to the rest of the world, which is not about Russia so much. It is more about China and the great power dynamics between the United States and China. China, like Russia, does not content itself with playing the more submissive part in the great play of the world history, which was assigned to it after 1989, which was to become part of all the international organizations (like the WTO in 2001).
China becoming just like us. That is something we have experienced for over a decade now. China was not satisfied (and had no reason to be satisfied) in terms of its potential and with a more modest political, strategic, and economic role. As a result, what the rest of the world is experiencing is a return of great power politics, but in particular between the United States and China. In a way, it coincides.
Somewhere between 2014 (or even 2008, if we go back to the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008) and 2022, all Europeans were realizing that the post-Cold War era is over. That the period that started in 1989, is no longer there. That is the period when our generation studied, grew up, and started working. Our parents were more in the Cold War era for a greater part of their professional life. We are post-Cold War people, but the next generation will be post-Cold War in a way – and even though we do not have a name for it yet, we do know that something new has happened.
Now, when it comes to Europe, for the Europeans, this is a rougher awakening – more than for many other nations in the rest of the world, because many of them also see opportunities. But for Europeans, for us, the end of history, the post-1989 world served us so well. It offered the prosperity of globalization and the system for which the EU itself was very well equipped as a market-making machine. It offered us the regional and even global stability with the US still as our protector.
What happened is that we went through a collective military disarmament – we no longer invested in our militaries, which is very clear in Western Europe, but to some extent also in Central and Eastern Europe. That is a very well-documented fact and people have woken up to it – which is a good thing, obviously.
However, after 1989, something else happened as well. We were disarmed also intellectually, conceptually. We lost the means to speak, talk, and debate about our place in the world in terms of history, power, strategy, and geography. Because we preferred the language of the law, of rules and norms – which is a nice language – it also meant that we neglected the old historical language of strategy, power, geography, diplomacy, et cetera. That is for the likes of us – for historians, philosophers, commentators, journalists, and intellectuals – also an important part.
The role we play is to bring that kind of language, understanding of the world, and perspective on the current events and affairs back – thinking in terms of risks, threats, opportunities, and also, again, to have a long-term view.
Maybe let me stop on that. For now, when you look at the amazing flow of events this year, 2025, ever since Donald Trump came back to power in the White House and everything that happened, one overall sentiment you can have is that the Europeans have shown signs of resilience and action. True, they have improvised some things, but overall, they were really in a reactive mode. They were not part of the action. They were not driving the action. They were, sometimes, bystanders.
That reactive mode is a reflection of the lack of historic awareness, historic in the sense of history in the present. When you have incapacity to really look back and know where you are coming from, then it also becomes very difficult to look ahead – to project yourself in the future and to give yourself some direction.
A wider time horizon offers direction without the catalyst of imminent danger, which the Europeans each time need. If you look at China, the Chinese leadership has a long-term direction. They think about 1949, the Mao’s revolution, and they think about 2049, the centennial of that revolution. That is their trajectory. At the same time, they also look back at China as a civilization.
Xi Jinping, who is very well aware of this interplay between the past, the present, and the future, has brought Confucius back as part of the mainstream Chinese thinking. A generation or two ago, for instance in the Mao generation, that was absolutely taboo, because it was ‘old China’, it was old religion. Nonetheless, Xi Jinping is mobilizing that – just as Putin is also using the Orthodox Church.
The same approach is true even for Donald Trump and the MAGA world. Of course, maybe they improvise sometimes, but they clearly also have a long-term view. They just want to do away with the order as it was built after 1945. And, maybe, from our point of view (or from my point of view), it looks like they are basically destroying things – which they are. However, from their point of view, they are also building a new order.
They want to fundamentally change the course of history. And they want to put an end to the post-1945 order, where, of course, the U.S. was underpinning the whole international system. And that worked quite well for Americans for those 80 years. Nevertheless, the U.S. electorate no longer is convinced of that, which drives much of this dynamic.
The United States want to put in place a new order for the next 100 years. That is something I picked up from people around Washington. They really have a view, ‘OK, we are changing epoch as well, and we are accelerating that change of epoch’. Meanwhile, in Europe, we find it very hard to think in those terms. On top of that, as I said, we are reactive. There are some apathy and fear as well, paired with astonishment (even some naivete as well, quite often) at the speed of action of the Chinese and the Americans.
In light of all this, it is important that we do not finish again just on re-equipping ourselves militarily (in terms of hardware), but that we do it also mentally, conceptually, and intellectually, so that we are better equipped to deal with the world of tremendous change and forces – quite a number of which either want to destroy us or just make us into a playing field for themselves.
LJ: I really like the way that you try to re-dramatize the way we think about politics in Europe. In drama, you clearly need protagonists. Meanwhile, it seems that one of the problems with Europe is that it is not very clear whether it is a stage or if it is an actor. Who do you see responding to the current of events? Who do you ask to listen to Machiavelli? Is it European leaders or, maybe, the European community as a whole? Can we treat Europe as a protagonist at all?
LvM: I am easily drawn to the theatrical metaphor as a way to describe interaction in politics between the actors, but there is also the stage, the audience, and in the case of the politics we are talking about now, it is not the national domestic stage, but the world stage. And the part Europe plays there has shrunk.
Europe is a smaller actor than it used to be, and it is finding ways and means to deal with that fact. One interesting element here is the question of who speaks on behalf of Europe: is it going to be just one person, or is it a number? And that one person, should it be an EU person, or is it a national leader?
French presidents like to say and think ‘l’Europe, c’est moi’. And they can, to some extent, embody some of Europe. Or is it France and Germany together? For instance, during the Eurozone crisis, when France and Germany acted together, you could say it was a European decision. But today, in the era of Trump, Putin, and Xi, it is clear that not a single or even duo of European leaders cuts it. I am referring here also, of course, to the famous visit to Donald Trump in the White House of no less than eight European leaders, if I remember correctly, when the whole of Europe was, again very worried after the Alaska meeting between President Trump and Putin that Ukraine would be sold out.
From top of my head, we had Macron, Merz, and Starmer going there for the ‘Big Three’, but Meloni was there as well, representing Italy. Finnish President Stubb was there bringing the voice of a neighbor of Russia. There were also two institutional actors, with European Commission President von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Rutte. President Zelensky was there as well. In a way, they needed to be eight or maybe seven (if I could give Zelensky a special status there) to collectively have the weight of swaying Trump, of working on the mind of Trump, and of outdoing Putin’s more one-on-one conversations with Trump.
The Europeans, they need to be four or five. They also had phone calls. I find it interesting. It is too easy to be ironic about it, or to just say, ‘Well, let just a new president go, or let just Macron and Merz, France and Germany go, or maybe with Tusk’. No, you need Europe today. Clearly, it feels its unity of territorial and political entity more strongly, partly embodied by the EU – but not only, because PM Starmer and the NATO were there too.
Therefore, Europe does exist, and it is trying to find a voice – but it is a plural voice. Nevertheless, it was listened to, because that meeting did work. Still, it is hard work. And it looks a bit particular sometimes. Both the Europeans and the European leaders collectively are realizing this.
One of the interesting things that happened this year is the return of Merz to the scene. He has become more vocal in foreign affairs than his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. At the same time, the UK is back more as part of Europe with Starmer, but also because the Brits, for their part, also feel (whatever their ambiguities, and they are endless) a sense of belonging to Europe as a continent, as a territory, and they know that they share some strategic and security interests with the rest of us on the other side of the channel.
As a result of this war, as a result of this return of history, there is that kind of awareness of Europe, not just in the EU sense but really in a territorial, historic, dare I say civilizational sense, getting formed again.
LJ: One of the lessons from your books is that the real politics of Europe is shaped by events and responses. What kind of Europe do you see emerging from responding both to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also perhaps most profoundly to do not run dismantling American empire also within Europe.
LvM: The challenge of Trump is even bigger, to some extent, than the challenge of Putin. Also, in historic terms, Putin, together with Xi Jinping, put an end to the world which started in 1989. But what Trump is doing, as we discussed, is putting an end to the world which started in 1945 – and, especially for Western Europe, that is perhaps a clearer experience, but this can also be said for the world at large.
Europeans did not want to get their head around this challenge when Donald Trump won. They spent four years waiting for a Democrat to win the election. This time, I think we are more serious about it as Europeans, but not serious enough.
Clearly, what is lacking in this kind of reactiveness, in politics driven by events, is more strategic foresight – not just in the sense of planning, because you cannot plan everything, but just thinking ahead, increasing resilience, seeing long-term trends in the areas of demographics, energy, economy, seeing the rise of China, and thinking also beyond the US-China dynamic and trying to identify our role in it. That is something we, collectively, those of us who think and talk about these issues, have to make the case for: more strategic foresight.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.