The Europe Shock: Not Us

How Europe Exonerates Itself and Insults the Intelligence of the Rest of the World

Nearly a thousand years ago, the Song dynasty scholar and statesman Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101) wrote:

“Why can one not see the true face of Mount Lu? Because one is within the mountain.”

Su Shi lived during the Northern Song (960–1127), an era of prosperity and cultural refinement, but also rising geopolitical pressure and internal fragmentation. As reform debates hardened into competing orthodoxies, he warned against a subtler danger: the inability to see beyond one’s own position.

Mount Lu was never only a mountain. It was a metaphor for immersion—when institutions, habits, and assumptions become so familiar that they are mistaken for reality itself.

A generation after his death, the Northern Song collapsed. In 1127, Kaifeng fell to the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty, abruptly ending what had long appeared stable.

Su Shi’s insight endures because it describes a recurring condition: the more deeply a society is immersed in its own assumptions, the harder it becomes to distinguish perspective from reality.

题西林壁
Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101)
横看成岭侧成峰，远近高低各不同。
不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中。

Inscribed on the Wall of West Forest Temple
Seen from the front, it stretches as a ridge; from the side, it rises as a peak.
From far and near, from high and low, its shape is never quite the same.
We cannot see the true face of Mount Lu, because we ourselves stand within the mountain.

When societies become deeply embedded in their own intellectual and institutional frameworks, interpretation can gradually begin to replace reality. Causality narrows. Context recedes. Explanations increasingly conform to internal coherence rather than external conditions. Moral language, originally a tool of judgment, begins to occupy space once reserved for analysis.

In today’s Europe—more precisely, in segments of European policy discourse—this tendency has become increasingly visible.

Across economic and geopolitical debates, a recurring pattern emerges: external actors are elevated to the primary explanatory role, while Europe’s own accumulated choices, delays, and structural trajectories recede into the background.

Trade imbalances are attributed outward rather than traced through decades of consumption, investment, industrial relocation, and demand patterns shaped in Europe itself. Industrial decline is framed primarily as the result of external competition rather than the long tail of deindustrialisation and strategic outsourcing. Strategic vulnerability appears as external shock rather than the cumulative result of political and economic choices.

For decades, this habit of self-exoneration carried few immediate costs. It developed during a period in which Europe enjoyed relative prosperity, geopolitical stability, and the capacity to shape much of the international narrative. But periods of transition are less forgiving than periods of stability.

Today, the world is undergoing a profound redistribution of economic weight, technological capacity, industrial production, and geopolitical influence. In such an environment, the ability to understand causality becomes more important, not less. Yet as these shifts accelerate, public discourse increasingly gravitates toward explanations in which responsibility lies primarily outside Europe itself.

What was once an implicit assumption is becoming increasingly explicit.

The refrain is familiar: Not Us.

Nowhere is this reflex more visible today than in Europe’s debate on China.

European discussions of industrial policy increasingly revolve around concepts such as subsidies, overcapacity, and unfair competition. Far less attention is devoted to Europe’s own structural choices: the relocation of manufacturing, regulatory frameworks, capital-allocation incentives, and the dependence on low-cost imports that emerged alongside them.

Trade imbalances are similarly treated as external distortions rather than the cumulative outcome of investment decisions, supply-chain design, and consumption patterns in which European firms, consumers, and policymakers have all played an active role over decades.

Technological competition is often reduced to narratives of intellectual property theft and unfair competition, while little attention is devoted to the scale, speed, and coherence of China’s technological development.

Yet the landscape of innovation, technology, and research has changed fundamentally. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China leads in 69 of the 74 critical technologies tracked by the institute. The shift is equally visible in academia: in the Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders ranking, nine of the world’s ten highest-ranked universities and research institutions are Chinese. China is also the global leader in international patent filings through the WIPO system. Together, these developments have enabled industrial ecosystems that tightly integrate research, production, supply chains, engineering talent, and large-scale deployment.

This is not a value judgment. It is a structural reality.

Nor did these developments emerge suddenly. China’s industrial and technological rise has unfolded in full view of the world for decades. It has been driven not only by national policy, but also by local government, entrepreneurship, investment, innovation, and an exceptional capacity to scale and deploy new technologies. Initiatives such as Made in China 2025 were announced and debated more than a decade ago. The fact that European policymakers now speak of a new “China Shock 2.0” may therefore say as much about Europe’s capacity and willingness to recognise and anticipate structural change as it does about the speed of China’s rise.

The question is not whether European concerns are misplaced. Many are real and substantial. The question is why explanation so often remains selective: external factors are amplified while internal policy and structural vulnerabilities receive comparatively little scrutiny.

Europe’s ambitions in green transition illustrate the point. Not long ago, the challenge was defined by the need to expand renewable energy generation, battery storage, electrification, and affordability. China’s industrial development in these sectors contributed significantly to reducing costs, accelerating innovation, and enabling large-scale deployment. Yet the same developments are now increasingly described almost exclusively through the language of subsidies and overcapacity, while the broader objectives of the energy transition—and the interdependence that helped make it possible—have become less prominent in the debate.

At the same time, major European firms continue to invest substantially in China. Not only because of market access, but because of integrated industrial ecosystems, deeply embedded supply chains, engineering talent, and the capacity to apply innovation at scale. For many multinational firms, China has become far more than a market; it is a critical node in the future of global industrial development.

These are not contradictions. They are the logical outcomes of a reality more complex than the explanations often offered for it.

Nor is this pattern confined to economics and industry. In geopolitical crises and international conflicts, responsibility is frequently located outside Europe: external actors occupy the center of explanation while Europe’s own role in shaping surrounding conditions recedes into the background. Domestic political and governance challenges are likewise increasingly delegated to external experts, consultants, and procedural frameworks, creating greater distance between decision-making and actual political responsibility.

What remains is a coherent “Not Us” narrative, defined as much by what it omits as by what it explains.

This explanatory framework does not remain confined to internal European debate. It increasingly shapes how Europe is perceived beyond its own borders.

Outside Europe, the debate is usually not about a difference in facts, but about their interpretation. The restructuring of industrial capacity, the energy transition, technological competition, and shifting trade patterns are widely recognised. Geopolitical tensions and conflicts across different regions are also experienced and assessed globally. The fundamental difference lies in where causes are located—and therefore where responsibility is assigned.

As a result, European policy discourse is increasingly perceived by many outside Europe as reducing complex developments into explanations in which responsibility is placed primarily elsewhere, while Europe’s own choices and vulnerabilities receive comparatively limited scrutiny. This tension becomes particularly visible when policy responses appear difficult to reconcile with Europe’s stated objectives of resilience, competitiveness, and strategic autonomy.

This is where the criticism expressed in the subtitle becomes relevant: that by consistently placing itself outside the analysis of causes, Europe risks creating a selective understanding of reality—and, in doing so, challenges the intelligence of others.

The formulation in the subtitle is derived from a remark by Singaporean diplomat and political scientist Kishore Mahbubani. In an interview, he referred to the repeated use of the term “unprovoked” in European discourse on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While most countries have condemned the invasion, Mahbubani argued that the persistent emphasis on “unprovoked” is perceived in large parts of the world as an attempt to narrow causality by excluding broader historical and geopolitical circumstances—and therefore certain responsibilities—from consideration. In his words, it is “an insult to the intelligence of the rest of the world.”

This does not remove Russia’s responsibility for the invasion, nor does it justify the attack. Rather, it concerns a different distinction: the difference between moral judgment and causal explanation.

More broadly, this explanatory pattern increasingly appears in European debates. Trade disputes, technological competition, industrial rivalry, and geopolitical tensions are often approached through frameworks focused primarily on assigning external responsibility rather than fully understanding underlying causes. From the perspective of many outside Europe, this creates the impression that causality itself is applied selectively, resulting in policies whose broader strategic consequences—both domestic and geopolitical—are insufficiently considered.

That perception matters. Not because others are necessarily correct, but because effective strategy depends on understanding how one’s own actions, policies, and narratives are interpreted beyond one’s own political and intellectual environment.

While Europe increasingly describes China’s industrial and economic rise as the “China Shock 2.0,” many outside Europe do not view this development as a sudden disruption. China’s transformation has been a long-term process that has formed part of their own economic and industrial development, policymaking, and strategic planning over many years.

The real shock lies elsewhere: in the “Europe Shock”—the growing dominance of simplified causal explanations and externalised responsibility in European policy-making, with unintended and sometimes undesirable consequences that undermine economic and industrial resilience, stability, and security, primarily within Europe but also beyond.

Su Shi’s warning was never about mountains.

The problem was never that those within the mountain saw nothing. It was that they saw only from within it.

Modern political systems face a recurring challenge: when structural conditions change, explanation often lags behind reality. And when causal explanation becomes difficult, moral language expands to fill the gap. It offers clarity where complexity resists simplification. It identifies villains, victims, and responsibilities. It assigns meaning.

But morality, when used as a substitute for causality, cannot resolve constraints or distortions. It can only describe them.

Recent language in European debates on China illustrates the extent of this challenge. Economic tensions are increasingly framed through the actions of the other side: It is not us. It is China that undermines the international system. It is China that subsidises. It is China that creates overcapacity. It is China that steals.

Meanwhile, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas has described China’s economic model in the language of disease, calling it a “cancer” for Europe’s economy.

And here it becomes interesting. The issue is not whether external pressures exist. They do. A diagnosis begins with the patient, not the environment. The relevant question is therefore whether internal vulnerabilities, accumulated dependencies, and long-term policy choices receive the same diagnostic scrutiny as external pressures, given that their effects are mediated through domestic structures, institutions, and policy decisions.

This is the central weakness of a paradigm of self-exoneration. Its greatest cost is not analytical error. It is the gradual erosion of diagnostic capacity. A society that consistently locates the source of its difficulties outside itself weakens its ability to distinguish external pressure from internal vulnerability, explanation from attribution, and symptoms from causes.

This matters deeply because the world is undergoing substantial change regardless of interpretation. Between 2008 and 2024, the European Union’s share of global GDP declined from roughly one-quarter to less than one-fifth of the world economy. At the same time, aggregate GDP figures do not capture other structural realities. Europe’s manufacturing output per capita remains substantially higher than China’s, complicating simplified narratives of “overcapacity” — interpretations that often overlook differences in historical industrial trajectories, contemporary production structures, and the composition of manufacturing ecosystems.

The challenge is therefore not decline, but adaptation within a more distributed global system. Yet adaptation requires diagnosis. And meaningful diagnosis requires the willingness to examine not only external developments, but foremost internal assumptions.

The consequences extend beyond economics. A framework that consistently externalises causality risks deeper currents of distrust, resentment, and strategic misunderstanding. When the other becomes primarily a source of distortion, threat, or instability, the incentive to understand its interests, motivations, and perceptions gradually diminishes in policymaking.

In this framing, even the possibility that China may prefer a stable, prosperous, and resilient Europe—not out of charity, but because such an outcome aligns with its own interests in stability, growth, and development—barely comes into consideration. More broadly, it incentivises policies of confrontation rather than understanding, from economic coercion and technological decoupling to intensifying strategic rivalry and military preparation.

Europe’s challenge today is not a shortage of political conviction. It is the extent to which statecraft can distinguish symptoms from causes. Or, in medical terms, whether there is trust in diagnostic capacity and confidence in treatment.

In Chinese political thought there is an enduring distinction between 治标 (zhì biāo), “treating symptoms”, and 治本 (zhì běn), “addressing root causes” (also a familiar base in Traditional Chinese medicine). It reflects two fundamentally different approaches to policy: a politician manages symptoms; a statesman addresses root causes.

Statecraft begins with reality as it is. Politics too often begins with reality as it is preferred to be.

The question facing Europe is therefore not whether external challenges exist. They do.

The question is whether Europe can still recognise its own place within the forces it seeks to explain.

Or, in Su Shi’s terms, whether it can see where the mountain ends and where its own reflection begins.

June 18, 2026

Gordon Dumoulin

Thore Vestby

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This essay is also available in Dutch in China21 Beschouwing.

De Europa Shock: Niet Wij

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Gordon Dumoulin is a consultant and analyst specializing in Chinese business, culture, contemporary affairs, and history. He serves as advisor at Gao Feng Advisory (Hong Kong) and representative of the International Trade & Investment Center (Netherlands). Based in Beijing, he is active in Traditional Chinese Medicine, focusing on trade of medicinal herbs and natural health ingredients (founder China21 Journal).

Thore Vestby is a former member of the Norwegian Parliament and served 12 years as mayor of Frogn municipality (Norway). He was Vice-President of Mayors for Peace (2013–2019). As a strategic consultant, he currently participates in multilateral initiatives and advises on global business developments and industrial policies in sustainability, energy, and infrastructure.

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