The world is experiencing an unexpected sugar rush of political optimism. The internet is flooded with memes about a return of Obama-era hope and millennial enthusiasm. A Bolsonaro has been defeated in Brazil, an autocrat ousted in Belgrade, and now, as re-elected US senator and possible 2028 presidential candidate Jon Ossoff put it, a rebuke of the “depravity, corruption and incompetence” of the Trump administration has been delivered.

But you won’t find much of that optimism in the European Union right now, if various visioning exercises are anything to go by. A recent one was the strategic foresight process carried out by the EU’s independent human rights body,the Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). It looked at the trends in our economic, geopolitical, technology, science and legal domains and built five of what it calls “distinct and plausible” scenarios for what Europe could look like in 2040. Four of these can only be described as nightmarishly dystopian.

One sees the EU split in two, with one of the new blocs, which the FRA imagines being called the European Sovereignty Alliance, deep in combative authoritarianism. Another sees the instruments of the state captured by corporate interests, with algorithms and surveillance replacing human autonomy. One imagines what would happen if we continued on a path of building a Fortress Europe in an increasingly hostile world, with rights protected only for those inside its high walls.

The other imagines what would happen if Nato disintegrates and the world descends into permanent war between power........

© The Irish Times