Luuk van Middelaar Leads Brussels Geopolitics Institute, Urging Europe Toward Great-Power Strategy
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Jun 9
Luuk van Middelaar Leads Brussels Geopolitics Institute, Urging Europe Toward Great-Power Strategy
2 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jun 9
Summary
Brussels-based thinker Luuk van Middelaar now heads the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, positioning it to push Europe’s elites toward a harder-edged strategic outlook.
The institute’s mission reflects his long-running argument that Europe cannot treat the post-Cold War era as a permanent escape from power politics and must prepare for great-power competition.
Van Middelaar first gained prominence as a historian of European integration and later served as speechwriter to the European Council’s first president, moving from political theory into policymaking.
His intellectual turn drew on Machiavelli’s stress on contingency and day-to-day political action, rejecting end-of-history thinking he linked to Alexandre Kojève and Europe’s earlier strategic complacency.
The profile casts his rise as a sign of a broader European shift: defense and geopolitics are moving closer to the center of the bloc’s strategic identity.