A Northeastern professor’s ambitious vision for the EU — and humanity’s future
Mai’a Cross lays out a long-term vision for how the EU can help protect humanity’s future while navigating the numerous and evolving existential threats.
When Northeastern University Professor Mai’a Cross embarked on her latest book about the European Union (EU) and its future, the continent was in the midst of tumult and transformation. Russia had invaded Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin had set about reshaping the European security architecture.
“I realized that this was going to present a bit of a challenge in terms of how I pin this down, with the situation on the ground being so fluid,” Cross, dean’s professor of political science, international affairs and diplomacy, told Northeastern Global News.
But the changing circumstances did little to deter the visionary professor, who has written extensively about international cooperation and diplomacy through the European lens. If anything, they further underscored the thesis that would emerge in her book: that the EU’s long-term commitments in the domains of environmental protection, scientific research and democracy could help secure humanity’s survival and flourishing for generations to come.
In her latest ambitious, interdisciplinary work “The European Union’s Grand Strategy: A Planetary-Scale Approach for Safeguarding the Future,” published this month by Oxford University Press, Cross lays out a long-term vision for how the EU can help protect humanity’s future while navigating the numerous and evolving existential threats — from nuclear annihilation and runaway artificial intelligence systems, to climate catastrophe and the erosion of democracy.
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The book was always going to be a moving target, Cross said, noting that the international stage is hardly ever static. It comes as Russia’s war in Ukraine, now into its fifth year, continues to devastate Eastern Europe, with battlefield casualties reaching into the millions. It also unfolds amid a historic rupture between the Trump administration and its traditional commitments to its European allies, forcing the continent to reckon with a more uncertain future.
In keeping with her work on ultrasocial cooperation, Cross tries to reconceptualize the way Europe’s supranational union, which came into being in 1993 and is now composed of 27 member states, works together to exercise a grand strategy. In international relations parlance, a “grand strategy” offers a unified military, diplomatic and economic approach for advancing shared interests on the global stage.
As part of that effort, the book is meant as both a proposed framework for how the EU should approach its future in light of such developments and an accounting of the strategies already at work across its policies and institutions, Cross said.
“If you zoom out and see the big picture, there is a lot going on here that should be recognized and needs to be continued,” she said.
The book is organized around three essential pillars, she said. The first is “frontier science and technology,” which takes a look at how Europe’s existing scientific networks help shape global innovation and technological development. The EU actively supports and shapes global scientific collaboration through initiatives such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and the European Space Agency.
The second is “blue and green planetary protection,” which examines how the EU’s environmental policies and networks protect oceans, biodiversity and the climate while providing models for other countries to follow. In this chapter, Cross looks at how EU states pursue environmental protection through initiatives such as Natura 2000, the world’s largest coordinated network of protected areas, and the European Marine Board, a think tank and advisory panel that convenes national marine research institutes and networks.
The final pillar is “security through democracy.” which examines how the EU advances security by strengthening democratic institutions, norms and cooperation. Here, Cross points to the ways the EU shapes democratic security through initiatives such as election observation and its Common Security and Defence Policy, the collective framework through which EU member states coordinate their security and defense policies and operations.
“It became clear that we need to look at what is helpful for the good of humanity, which players are actually setting the stage for all of us to possess the tools and institutions and structures to flourish,” she said.
Ultimately, Cross argues that securing the EU’s future will require looking beyond short-term crises and investing in what she calls transnational institutions and networks that can outlast them. Without downplaying the threats, Cross has previously argued that politicians, world leaders and the media often portray global affairs as more dire than they are, leading to a myopic view of the prospects for international cooperation.
Marianne Riddervold, a research professor at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo, noted that much of the literature on the EU today focuses on conflict, crisis and geopolitical rivalry.
She told NGN that Cross “dares to take a broader perspective,” starting from the view that human beings have agency, and that states and political actors “can still shape international developments, even when the geopolitical context makes that difficult.”
“This book takes that perspective further than almost anything else I have read in EU studies,” Riddervold said. “Rather than starting from the crisis of the day, Mai’a asks us to think fifty or even a hundred years ahead.”
