By now it has become a joke – or, as they say nowadays, a meme.

As soon as events heat somewhere in the world, the reaction of European politicians is to ‘carefully monitor the situation’, expressing ‘concern’, ‘increasing concern’ or ‘deep concern’.

Repression in Iran? Civil war in the Congo? Trump’s tariffs? Rockets on Suez? Capture of Maduro? Hijacked planes in Belarus?
At least one EU body will invariably come up with the same press release (‘We are carefully monitoring the situation with increasing concern’), often imitated by the presidents of the member states.

The tradition is so well-established that by now, even when the real press release does not arrive, the social media go wild anyway, publishing satirical pictures of Von der Leyen and the others uttering the famous phrase.
Or publishing the EU flag that, instead of the circle of stars, has the ‘page loading…’ circle.
Or the heroes from Lord of the Rings calling for reinforcements against the orcs and being told ‘We are closely monitoring the situation’.

There is even a dedicated account on Twitter: it is named “Is Europe concerned?” and collects such statements in real time, exposing them to the jeers of its followers.

A raw nerve

As always, when satire is funny – and in this case, it is funny – it plays on myths, expectations and clichés that are firmly rooted in the collective consciousness.

If a European politician merely ‘carefully monitors’ instead of bursting out in vibrant condemnations of the world’s ills, or better, taking the initiative to stop them, the general public believes that he is weak, coward, insecure, accomplice, opportunistic, or simply powerless.

Either it can solve the problem but does not want to, and then it is part of the problem. Or he wants to solve the problem but cannot, and then he is just a charlatan.

In the collective imagery, authorities in Brussels and the member states swing between these two poles.
Either they appear as vassals of the forces of evil (alternatively identifiable in Trump, Netanyahu, Islam or ‘globalist finance’) or they appear as schoolteachers filling their mouths with pretty talk without having the power to change anything.

China, on the other hand…

Now, it is interesting to compare this perception to the one we have, for example, of China when it does exactly the same things.
Even China, in the face of the global crises of recent times, has often limited itself to silence or cautious press releases.

But that’s China, what the heck.

And so our media come up with pearls like: ‘China thinks in centuries while the West thinks in tweets‘, ‘China’s proverbial patience‘, ‘China stays in the shadows working on diplomacy‘, ‘The real winner is China’.

If a Chinese official announces that his country will do nothing in the immediate future and take time to reflect, he is hailed as a new Sun Tzu, an unparalleled master of strategy.
If he puts forward just a few vague complaints about human rights, here is a revived Lao Tze with the Taoist wisdom of backing down.
If he invites the parties to moderate themselves, Confucius is back to advise balance in all things.

In the military sphere, moreover, the difference in treatment becomes almost grotesque.
With every new cruiser shipped to Taiwan, ‘the Dragon grows stronger’. At every new missile tested by the Russians, ‘the Bear roars from the steppes’.
However, when similar initiatives are taken by Macron, we instantly ridicule him as ‘ a cockerel’ or ‘a Napoleon’, and if by chance Merz tries, we immediately associate him with the Sturmtruppen comic book.

The question, therefore, arises: why is it that our collective unconscious is automatically inclined to see European leaders as weak and ridiculous, while Eastern despots appear to it shrouded in an aura of power and solemnity?

At the origins of a myth

It would not be difficult to trace the history of this stereotypical division of roles between East and West, which is as old as the wars between Greeks and Persians.

Let us leaf through Herodotus or Xenophon: in the East, we will find an orderly, obedient, opulent and serene society, whose ruler feels like a god and can afford to display both the patience and magnanimity of the gods and their inexorable wrath.
In the West, in the Greek city-states, we find instead a society of equals, which as such is prey to quarrels, petty interests, constant agitation and exhausting second thoughts.

Characteristics that today we would brand as petty bourgeois and unsexy. It is no coincidence that the Orientalist myth came back into vogue during the Age of Enlightenment: from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters to Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary to the stage where Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio was performed, it was all about citing shahs, Turkish sultans and Chinese emperors as models of wisdom and clemency, in contrast to the alleged miseries of European kingdoms that were increasingly prospering precisely thanks to the hated bourgeois mediocrity.

On the other hand, between antiquity and modern age there had been an underground strand of alchemical and esoteric practices, omnipresent in European courts (first and foremost the papal one!), which pointed to the East as the seat of all arcane wisdom and the future regeneration of the world.

Well, when a stereotype is so deeply rooted in a civilisation, getting rid of it is exhausting.

Let’s face it: today, no African, Latin American or Oceanian president can even remotely boast an aura of power and wisdom by default like the one we attribute (for no objective reason) to Xi Jinping or Putin.

Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi

And so, if in the face of an international crisis a politician dares to allow himself the luxury of thinking before acting, he is praised when he is Asian and mocked when he is European.

Especially since in Europe we are victims of another great classic of our collective unconscious: guilt.
“Cowards! What are you waiting for to disassociate yourselves from Trump’s imperialist aggression?” cries colonial guilt.
“Cowards! What are you waiting for to join the virile Israelis in overthrowing the ayatollahs?” cries (to far fewer people) the chivalrous guilt.

And so, unfortunately, after the attack on Iran on 28 February, European leaders did not ‘monitor the situation carefully and with concern’ at all , despite it being by far the most sensible and right thing to do.

A sudden attack, outside international law, which, however, is waged against a bloodthirsty regime, but still is not necessarily enough to overthrow it, and which in any case we do not have the forces to stop, all this while the price of oil soars and Putin is resurrected for the third time in three years: for Europe it is such a contradictory and dangerous situation that it would have made sense to sit back and watch for at least a week, perhaps even a month, before deciding on its moves.

But in the age of social media, and with the stigma of weak leaders to be dodged at any cost, it was not possible.

And so the crazy mayonnaise started: Sánchez not giving bases but giving frigates, Meloni giving anti-aircraft systems but not bases, Starmer giving nothing, Macron going to protect Lebanon, Merz trying to meet Trump but only being made to speak for three minutes, Orbán taking the opportunity to rob an Austrian armoured car on its way to Ukraine, the EU presidents only condemning the Iranian attack on the Gulf oil companies…

How we miss the good old days of ‘growing concern’.

After all, when Von der Leyen convened the Commission on Saturday 28 February for Monday 2 March, the comment on the web was: ‘World War III may break out, but woe betide the Europeans at the weekend’.

The Chinese ‘think in centuries’, we cannot even think for a weekend.