Volt’s Vision: the EU’s Role in the New World Order

Our generation is confronting geopolitical challenges unlike any we have seen in recent decades. The contradictions of the old system are pushing us to build a new one. Europe stands at a historic cross-roads: The time is now for transforming the multilateral crisis into positive change. We reject the false choices that have paralysed political debate for too long: values or interests, idealism or realism, openness or sovereignty. Europe’s greatest strength in the emerging world order lies in its ability to unite democratic values with strategic power.

As Volt Europa we see nine interconnected challenges define the crisis for the EU: the break with the United States; the weaponisation of trade and economic interdependences; Russia’s return to expansionism; China’s rise and the competition of models; the erosion of multilateralism and international law; the digital and tech sovereignty deficit and platform monopolies; the shifting alignments and economic power of the Global South; planetary crises without borders; the collapse of US soft power leaving a power vacuum.

The EU faces a choice: adapt with ambition or become an object of others’ strategies rather than a subject of its own.

This paper rests on two foundational claims. First, the EU must prioritise strategic autonomy and independence in key fields as a precondition for meaningful internal and external action and any strategic intervention on the international stage. Second, strengthening global stability and sustainable development is not only a moral imperative but directly in Europe’s interest. These two claims are not in tension. A more sovereign EU is also a more credible and generous partner. Throughout, we take the UN 2030 Agenda’s three pillars – economic sustainability (equitable growth), environmental sustainability (resource preservation), and social sustainability (justice and inclusivity) – as the minimum consensus framework for what constitutes progress.

Our Vision for a stronger EU position in the New World Order

1. From dependency to diversification

Trade relations of the EU need to be diversified actively. The EU must map its strategic dependencies systematically and introduce maximum dependency ceilings in critical sectors: energy, digital, defence, and raw materials. We call for a standing dependency warning system and an annual EU dependency summit. Trade agreements must be redesigned around concrete strategic interests rather than abstract liberalisation: more specialised, more sectoral, more targeted. This is not protectionism, it is precision. Accelerating the build-out of renewable energy is an essential part of this strategy: dependence on fossil fuels from unstable or hostile suppliers is a strategic vulnerability as much as an environmental one.

2. Non-Eurocentric partnerships

China outperforms the EU in partner countries not because its values are better but because its offer is better targeted. The EU must deliver what Global Gateway still too often fails to achieve: locally guided, sustainable investment informed by civil society and local actors. But the EU’s unique asset is what China cannot offer: human capital, mobility, and genuine two-way conditionality. We call for a decisive break with the conditionality-as-coercion model that has characterised EU partnerships for decades, and its replacement with genuine interest-based partnerships in which conditionality flows in both directions. This means flipping the migration conditionality logic entirely: offering visa facilitation, Erasmus, Talentpool partnerships, and technology transfer as proactive instruments of engagement, in exchange for the EU’s strategic needs.

Trade Partnerships

3. A three-gears approach to multilateralism

Abandoning multilateralism hands the field to great-power unilateralism. But one-size-fits-all multilateralism no longer works. The EU’s answer is a three-gears approach: plurilateralism for speed when the UN is blocked; regionalism for depth with ASEAN, the African Union, and MERCOSUR; and a middle powers coalition for bargaining weight where China or the US is setting the terms. The EU’s distinctive role is that of the world’s most credible convener and broker: carrying legitimacy without dominance. The red thread across all three gears is international law. Without accountability, norms are worthless: we call for an International Centre for the Prosecution of Core International Crimes and a complete EU legislative framework to pursue violations effectively.

4. One voice, one seat

The three-gears approach only works if the EU speaks with a single voice. We call for the transfer of France’s permanent UNSC seat to an EU seat, a standing EU representation across all UN agencies, and in the long term a European Union Ministry of Foreign Affairs leading a genuinely Common European Foreign Policy. On UN reform, we call for broader regional representation, an end to permanent seats in favour of elected regional groupings, majority voting in the UNSC for cases of genocide and crimes against humanity, and the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly.

5. A European Defence Union in three steps

We cannot spend our way into security. The debate must shift from hitting a spending percentage to building a single market for defence: integration, interoperability, joint procurement, European preference over foreign suppliers, and European debt at low interest rates – saving up to 100 billion euros per year. We propose three mutually reinforcing pathways: first, a Europeanised NATO with European command structures and digital backbone; second, deeper integration among core groups of willing member states; third, a full European Defence Union with a European Army at its centre. Defence must also be reimagined as an innovation engine: green defence is not a contradiction. In the long term, a future United States of Europe should place a permanent peacekeeping force at the disposal of a reformed United Nations.

Multilateralism UN Reform Defence

6. European digital sovereignty

The EU is dangerously dependent on a handful of Silicon Valley corporations whose political alignments are increasingly incompatible with European values. Digital independence is now a matter of the highest geopolitical stakes. We call for a Tech Sovereignty Eurogroup, composed of digital experts and elected officeholders, to coordinate EU strategy on technology, AI, and cybersecurity. European alternatives must be built on four principles: open-source transparency, environmental sustainability, democratic governance, and a distinctly European vision of AI – targeted, efficient, and purposeful rather than energy-intensive and extractive. Concrete measures include data localisation rules, a Digital Services Tax, a sovereign cloud definition, and a European Democracy Act to protect electoral processes from foreign interference.

7. Global commons guarantor

Some threats – climate breakdown, pandemic risk, food insecurity – cannot be addressed by any bilateral deal or regional bloc. With the US having retreated from the WHO, the Paris Agreement, and the SDGs, the EU must become their active guarantor. We call for a Climate Loss and Damage register, modelled on the Ukraine register, to make climate harm legible, countable, and legally actionable. On global health, the EU is already the largest contributor to the Pandemic Preparedness Fund. With the upcoming ratification of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, the EU must now go further: we call for the establishment of a strengthened global health warning and data sharing system built on European tech infrastructure, reducing the dangerous dependency on US or Chinese platforms whose data governance standards are incompatible with European values, and ensuring that the next pandemic is met with coordinated European capacity rather than fragmented national responses.

On food security, reciprocal food security benchmarks must be embedded in agricultural trade agreements, alongside Strategic Mutual Reserves and knowledge-sharing on sustainable agriculture.

Digital Climate, Food and Health

8. Fixing the global financial system

The EU must use the euro more deliberately to reduce coercion in the global financial system – not to recreate US hegemony but to build a genuinely multipolar financial architecture. This means promoting euro-denominated contracts in strategic sectors, developing a digital euro with strong privacy protections, and completing the Capital Markets Union. On taxation, the EU should champion a global common corporate tax base among UN member states, with revenues channelled to fund multilateral institutions independently of the political will of any single contributor. On debt, the current system is structurally biased against developing countries: we call for IMF and World Bank voting reform. Beyond governance, we call for a comprehensive multilateral debt restructuring framework built on two concrete pillars: first, the structured renegotiation of the debt of the countries currently in debt distress; and second, the institutionalisation of the Debt Pause Clause Alliance – the thus far informal commitment by international banks and countries since 2025 to automatically suspend loan repayments in the event of natural disasters or severe economic shocks – through ratification by the EU and its member states with a single unified voice.

9. Europe as a great attractor

Society’s culture, its values, and its conduct on the international scene, enables the informal consensus-building and diplomatic goodwill that make collective action possible before crises harden into conflicts. The United States understood this for decades; that strategic commitment has now collapsed, leaving a cultural power vacuum the EU should fill – not by dominating, but as a convener. We call for a Common European International Cultural Relations Policy, strategic cultural investment modelled on South Korea’s Korean Wave, and active deployment of cultural relations as a distinct strand of enlargement, neighbourhood, and rapprochement strategies. Values and culture are not separate categories but mutually constitutive: European culture, in all its diversity, is the living expression of pluralism, creative freedom, and the coexistence of difference. Enlargement must be understood through this lens: not as a technocratic accession process but as the expansion of a sphere of shared values, cultural convergence, and people-to-people exchange. It is the EU’s most powerful soft power instrument, and the clearest proof that the European project works: the only political project in the world with more than a dozen countries voluntarily lining up to become part of it.