The EU as the world’s last serious guardian of rules-based Order

Dr. Christian Cardona | Former President, European Union Council | Former Minister for the Economy, Investment and Small Business, Malta |

There is a sentence that has been said in various forms in various capitals over the past decade, and that is now closer to being tested than at any point since 1945. The sentence is this : if not the rules-based international order, then what?

The United States, under its current administration, has provided an answer of sorts. Bilateral deals. Transactional relationships. Tariffs as instruments of political pressure. The withdrawal from multilateral frameworks that took generations to construct. The answer is not chaos, exactly. It is something more deliberate than chaos, and in some ways more corrosive. The explicit proposition that power, not principle, should govern the relations between states.

Into the space that this proposition creates, the European Union has stepped, sometimes confidently, sometimes hesitatingly, but always with the same underlying claim. That claim is that the rule of law, applied consistently within borders and advocated firmly beyond them, is the only durable foundation for a world that works for states of all sizes.

For a small state like Malta, a nation of half a million people sitting at the intersection of Europe and Africa in the middle of the Mediterranean, this is not an abstract proposition. It is the practical condition of our survival as a sovereign country. Without the rules-based framework of the European Union, without the single market, without the European Court of Justice, without the treaties and the conventions and the standards that the EU enforces on its members and advocates to its partners, Malta would be subject to the unmediated power of its larger neighbours. The EU does not simply benefit small states. For small states, the EU is the architecture that makes independence meaningful.

This experience, specific to Malta but recognisable to every small and medium-sized state that has watched the post-war multilateral order fracture under the weight of great power competition, is the first argument for taking the EU’s role seriously as a global governance anchor. The EU demonstrates, within its own borders, that rules-based integration between states of vastly different sizes and power levels is possible, sustainable, and productive. It demonstrates this not as a theory but as a daily operational reality across 27 member states, 450 million citizens, and the world’s largest single market. Whatever its imperfections, and they are real and numerous, the EU is the only governance project at scale that has turned the aspiration of rules-based cooperation into something a citizen can actually live inside.

The second argument is regulatory. The EU has, over the past two decades, become the world’s de facto standard setter in domain after domain. Data protection, through the General Data Protection Regulation. Carbon pricing, through the Emissions Trading System and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Digital markets, through the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. Artificial intelligence governance, through the AI Act. In each of these areas, the EU has moved first, moved with ambition, and produced frameworks that the rest of the world has been forced to engage with whether or not it has chosen to adopt them. This is what scholars of European governance call the Brussels Effect: the capacity of the EU’s regulatory system to become a global standard by virtue of its market size and the cost of maintaining separate compliance regimes.

For India, the Brussels Effect is a mixed experience. Indian exporters face EU standards on product safety, environmental certification, labour conditions and data handling that can be more demanding than domestic requirements and more expensive to meet. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which imposes a carbon price on imports from countries without equivalent carbon pricing, is a particular concern for Indian industry. The EU’s trade conditionality on human rights and governance standards has at times been received in New Delhi as a form of paternalism that sits uncomfortably with India’s non-aligned tradition and its insistence on the primacy of national sovereignty in domestic affairs.

These are legitimate concerns and I do not dismiss them. But I would ask Indian readers to consider them alongside a different question. If the EU does not set global standards on data, on carbon, on digital markets and on artificial intelligence, who will? The United States under its current administration has retreated from the multilateral governance of most of these domains. China sets standards that reflect the values of a one party state, including state access to data, state control of digital platforms, and state direction of artificial intelligence development. The choice facing the world in 2026 is not between EU standards and some neutral global consensus. It is between EU standards and the absence of any commonly agreed standard, or the adoption of standards that reflect values most Indian citizens and most Indian policymakers would not choose for themselves.

The third argument is geopolitical, and it is the one most directly relevant to India’s own strategic position. India is, in the language of contemporary international relations, a swing state. It is the world’s most populous democracy. It is the fifth largest economy. It has deepened its strategic partnership with the United States while maintaining its historic ties with Russia and building its economic relationship with China. It has consistently declined to be defined by any single alignment. This non-alignment is a strength, and India has managed it with considerable sophistication.

But non-alignment in a world without rules is a different proposition from non-alignment in a world with them. In a rules-based world, a state can decline to join a bloc while still being protected by the frameworks that govern trade, investment, intellectual property, maritime navigation and the resolution of disputes. In a post-rules world, the protection available to a non-aligned state is precisely the protection it can extract by virtue of its own power. India is large enough and capable enough to protect many of its interests on that basis. But even India would find the world less navigable, less predictable, and less safe if the multilateral frameworks that underpin its export markets, its diaspora’s rights abroad, and its maritime trade routes were to weaken further.

The EU, for all its internal contradictions and its sometimes infuriating slowness, is the institutional actor most consistently committed to preserving those frameworks. It is doing so not out of altruism but out of the same self interest that drives every serious state. The recognition that a rules-based order benefits the EU’s own citizens, its own businesses, and its own long term security far more than a world in which power alone determines outcomes. But the alignment between the EU’s self interest and the interests of every other state that depends on rules rather than power to protect itself is, at this moment in history, one of the most important geopolitical facts in the world.

India and the EU have been negotiating a free trade agreement for longer than either side would care to admit. The negotiations have stalled repeatedly, on both sides, over exactly the questions this article has raised. The standards, conditionality, carbon pricing, intellectual property, and the scope of each side’s right to regulate in its own interest. These are real disagreements and they will not be resolved by pretending they do not exist.

But the strategic logic for closing the gap has never been stronger than it is now. A world in which the EU and India are close economic and institutional partners is a world with a larger space for the rules-based order to survive. A world in which that partnership stalls indefinitely, while the United States retreats from multilateralism and China advances its own standards, is a world with a smaller such space. The rules that protect Malta’s sovereignty as a small state are, in a different register, the same rules that protect India’s capacity to navigate a complex world on its own terms.

That is the case for the EU as a global governance anchor. It is not a sentimental case. It is not a case that asks the world to admire European values for their own sake. It is a case grounded in the practical interest of every state, large and small, that has more to gain from a world governed by rules than from a world governed by the unchecked power of the strongest actors.

The question for India, and for every country watching the current moment with concern, is not whether the EU is a perfect institution. It is not. The question is whether the world is better with it playing this role than without it. On that question, I believe the answer is clear, and I believe India knows it too.