Europe’s lost reason of state

Konrad Adenauer is not a figure usually associated with the Suez Crisis. Unlike his British and French counterparts, his legacy was not defined by the diplomatic fiasco unleashed by President Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal in late July 1956. The West German chancellor was, nonetheless, an enthusiastic supporter of the Franco-British-Israeli military intervention to seize the canal zone and deal the Egyptian regime a fatal blow.

This was not because Adenauer was a warmonger – far from it. A Catholic Rhinelander, he had been a principled opponent of Nazism, suffering for his dissent. Rather, his support for military intervention came from his broader sense of Europe as a commonwealth with its own distinctive strategic and economic interests. In high-level meetings held between western European governments in response to the crisis in Egypt, he described French and British intervention as an ‘act of European raison d’état’, or ‘reason of state’.

Reason of state was forged as an idea in the debates launched by the 16th-century Florentine politician and philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli. In his Discourses (Book III, Chapter 41), Machiavelli asserted the primacy of the state’s interests and survival over the strict demands of Christian morality: ‘where the ultimate decision concerning the safety of one’s country is to be taken, no consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or shameful should be permitted’. In order to fulfil his duty to the political community, Machiavelli urged, a truly virtuous statesman could not afford to act always with saintly scruples; under the right circumstances, the course of action dictated by political necessity should trump moral laws.

Machiavelli’s critics from the 16th century onward baulked at this apparent prescription for a ruthless, amoral statecraft. Still, they could not ignore the fundamental tensions that he identified between abstract ethical principles and the pragmatic interests of the city-state, between what was just according to the principles of Christian charity and the practicalities of survival in a fallen world.

In appealing to Europe as an entity with its own clearly defined interests – the defence of which sometimes required ruthless action – Adenauer showed a clarity of thought that has eluded many of the continent’s statesmen since. In 1956, Europe was disproportionately affected by Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Not only was it far more dependent on oil and trade flowing through the canal zone than was the United States, it was also far more exposed geopolitically to events on the other side of the Mediterranean.

To Adenauer, the solution was clear: European nations should undertake military action to uphold their interests in Egypt, the pieties of international law be damned. The good of the political community demanded it, and to defend the political community is the very reason why states exist.

The current Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, elucidated something similar during a panel at the 2025 Munich Security Conference. In a striking moment, she suggested that European countries can often be too enamoured with process, as if a fixation with means itself would somehow resolve the continent’s security challenges. Instead, they need to get better at identifying the strategic ends that they want to pursue, and then willing the means required to achieve them.

European countries, and the European community as a whole, are still struggling to recapture a clear-eyed conception of what the strategic ends pursued by the state should be. The continent’s statesmen have become so used to deferring to legal process, so accustomed to having strategic decisions made elsewhere, that they have struggled to respond to an age of geopolitical instability. The lawfare state has for too long triumphed over the warfare state.

The result has been a dangerous, not to mention self-defeating, imbalance between individual rights and the common good, and a sorry neglect of the reason of state. At home, illegal immigration tests the continent’s borders, but efforts to implement a sensible policy for deportations are often bound up by legal challenges on spurious human-rights grounds. Of all Europe’s institutions, the European Court of Human Rights embodies the reification of an abstract conception of legal right over the wellbeing of the political community. The idea of natural rights has a long and rich history in the Latin West, stretching back to the jurists and philosophers of the medieval universities; human rights are a vital part of the continent’s civilisational heritage. In the hands of activist judges, however, they have come to be seen as a supreme good in and of themselves, and as an organising principle that must always transcend the common good or the prerogatives of the state.

Yet how can the rights of millions of Europeans to live in security be upheld if those who endanger the political community cannot be deported in good order? And how can civic integration succeed if Europeans are unable to regulate who and how many can seek entry into their societies?

Beyond the continent’s borders, European statesmen show a similar indecision in defending the interests of their commonwealth. Europe’s capitals have fumbled their way towards supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, but still lack a clear vision of what victory would look like, still less any notion of how it could be achieved without continued American support. In the Middle East, European countries are most exposed to the economic fallout from rising energy prices, but also least able to decisively shape the region and its conflicts.

This is a problem of culture and incentives as much as it is about political imagination and philosophy. In democratic states, western leaders often respond to the apathy of their voters. The Polish premier, Donald Tusk, was onto something when he spoke last year of a ‘paradox’ at the heart of Europe’s defence debates, whereby ‘500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians’. He might have gone one step further: why is it that so few Europeans seem to care?