Power in the Twenty-First Century: Superpowers or Coalitions of Middle Powers?
Géopolitique & relations internationales
The 21st century order is often described as a contest between the U.S. and China. However, countries that are neither superpowers nor small states have the capacity to organize enough collective power to avoid becoming merely the terrain on which that rivalry plays out. The question is whether they will.
The collective action problem of middle powers
“Middle powers” is an imprecise term. It can mean advanced democracies and pivotal regional powers alike. They share little beyond a desire not to be forced into permanent dependence on Washington or Beijing. That heterogeneity makes collective action hard. Even where countries share an interest in autonomy, they do not always trust one another enough to pool resources, accept common rules, or subordinate short-term priorities to long-term collective interests.
Existing structures illustrate the problem. The BRICS is ambition without cohesion: aversion to the U.S.-led order is not a shared strategic project, and the group lacks governance, binding decisions, or real capacity to pool resources. The EU is almost the opposite cohesion, institutions, and governance without sufficient strategic power. It has built a single market, a common currency for many members, and the most advanced experiment in pooled sovereignty in modern history. Yet it struggles to finance at scale, rarely decides quickly, and repeatedly diagnoses its weaknesses without acting on them.
Dependency with national symbols: AI and finance
Nowhere is this clearer than in Artificial Intelligence, where capital, compute, talent, infrastructure, and speed matter more than communiques. The U.S. and China are moving at extraordinary speed. Even Mistral, often treated as Europe’s great hope, is far smaller than the leading American and Chinese firms. Regulatory ambition cannot substitute for industrial and financial capacity. Europe’s copyright rules, GDPR constraints, energy costs, and fragmented markets have helped create an environment in which many firms find it easier to train, scale, or deploy outside Europe. If the United States and China build the models, own the platforms, and set the pace, middle powers will keep their flags, parliaments, and constitutions while losing practical control over the infrastructure of growth. That is not sovereignty. It is dependency with national symbols.
The financial dimension compounds this. Countries that cannot finance their own defense, energy security, technology, and industrial capacity will be dependent on those that can. Europe has a large economy, a credible central bank, deep savings, and a unique structure for pooling sovereignty. A more integrated Europe could mobilize its savings, deepen its capital markets, and finance common public goods. Yet fears of permanent transfers, of underwriting others’ debts, of disturbing national banking relationships and fiscal orthodoxies are expressions of identity and political distrust, not merely technical objections.
The price of autonomy: deciding, financing, reforming
That is why Europe, and middle powers more broadly, want strategic autonomy without paying its price. As Lampedusa’s Leopard suggests, if they want things to remain the same, some things will have to change. They may need to sacrifice some discretion now to retain meaningful sovereignty later. This is also where Trump’s preferred “divide and conquer” approach bites: bilateral pressure gives Washington more leverage than negotiating with a cohesive bloc, and middle powers that cannot act collectively will face that leverage in full.
The future will be built through networks, minilateral coalitions, and issue-specific arrangements, but for these to matter, they must be able to make binding decisions. A coalition in which everyone holds a veto moves at the speed of its least ambitious member. Middle powers need rules that prioritize action qualified majority voting, opt-ins, variable geometry and incentives that reward participation and impose costs on free-riding.
The role of middle powers is not to become a third superpower. It is to ensure the order is not defined entirely by two. It will happen only if they acknowledge how fast the world is moving, how far behind they risk falling, and how much collective capacity they must build in financing, in technology, and in governance. The question is not whether middle powers want autonomy. It is whether they are willing to pay for it, organize for it, and reform themselves to make it possible.