Geopolitical Enlightenment

What does it mean to be free when the conditions of freedom are not your own? Europe taught the world to think of Enlightenment as universal. Yet the order it universalized was written by some, while others had no part in it. Today, Europe is confronting the cost of that contradiction: its security, technology, knowledge and prosperity have depended on powers beyond its control. In Geopolitical Enlightenment, Lu Xiaoyu turns this disillusionment into a constructive question: what does collective autonomy actually require, for Europe as for the rest of the world? The answer is not only security, epistemic self-determination, institutional control, or economic capacity – but the ability to transform one’s own institutions from within. In order to reach autonomy, we don’t need more sovereignty. We need more institutions.

Lu Xiaoyu is a writer and international relations scholar. He works as Assistant Professor of International Relations at Peking University. His last book in English is: Norms, Storytelling and International Institutions in China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).