Europa zwischen China und den USA: 
Für eine Politik differenzierter Souveränität

This essay examines Europe’s position within the growing strategic rivalry between the United States and China. It argues that Europe should neither simply adopt an American containment logic nor fall into economic or technological dependence on China. Instead, Europe requires a policy of differentiated sovereignty: cooperation where it is possible, resilience where it is necessary, and the avoidance of a new bloc logic in which Europe merely chooses whom to follow. The essay places particular emphasis on the role of political language. Alliances, rivalries, partnerships, and dependencies are not shaped by material interests alone, but also by the concepts through which political actors interpret one another. This crisis in American alliance politics is therefore not merely military or diplomatic; rather, its transactional reductionism erodes the shared meanings on which trust, legitimacy, and long-term cooperation depend. Against this background, Europe’s distinctive strength lies in its cultural and semantic resources. Its task is to keep spaces of differentiation open in a world increasingly driven toward binary confrontation.