The Present Is Not a Race
From overlapping pressures to field-building practices
This article addresses Europe as a historically dense site within a wider planetary predicament: layered with institutions, imperial afterlives, dependencies, and unresolved theories of itself. Under pressure, such places become revealing. They show not only what is happening, but how political imagination contracts or matures when simultaneity becomes harder to ignore.
Since 2022, 10×100 has been in dialogue with the European Forum Alpbach. Over these years, we have been exploring how people working across different roles, places, and fields might think and organise beyond the hardening lines of the present – and beyond the inherited assumption that the only serious response to pressure is alignment, acceleration, or fortification.
That is why this year’s Forum theme, How Europe Wins, deserves attention ahead of our gathering in August (EFA, 2026). The motto crystallises a wider atmosphere. More and more of the present is being narrated as a race: for compute, strategic advantage, military readiness, relevance, and control. The Forum’s own framing asks whether Europe can still “win on the decisive issues” in a world where others appear to move faster and more decisively, and even asks what game is being played anyway.
That question matters. Much of what now shapes Europe no longer resembles a bounded contest with stable rules and reliable playbooks. It is precisely here that race-thinking begins to fail. The more serious difficulty is temporal. We are no longer dealing with one sequence of problems or shocks, but with overlapping pressures that arrive together and demand response on incompatible timescales.
The present has thickened
This is the terrain 10×100 has been trying to make legible: a condition in which horizons operate as overlapping tempos (Johar, 2026). We are dedicated to a coordination approach across different rhythms of responsibility without flattening them into one pace, one language, or one logic. What once appeared distributed across time now arrives at once: in the same room, on the same budget line, under the same public mood.
As Jo Marchant suggests in In Search of Now, “the present has thickened”. It no longer feels like a thin slice of clock time through which we simply pass. It has become denser, more layered, and more demanding. It asks incompatible things at once: keep essential systems running, reorganise under pressure, sense what is emerging, prevent harm, act before certainty arrives, and remain politically and morally intelligible while doing so (Paulick-Thiel, 2026).
Race-thinking misreads that condition. It flattens plurality into a single imperative: faster. In doing so, it confuses acceleration with capacity and motion with orientation.
That framing has emotional force. It offers urgency, clarity, and the fantasy of control. It can also become a trap. When every challenge is read through the grammar of competition, speed begins to impersonate responsibility. Motion impersonates maturity. Tactical decisiveness substitutes for strategic intelligence. Institutions start confusing escalation with agency.
When simultaneity produces co-dysregulation
AI offers a particularly revealing lens on the wider condition. It does not simply introduce a new technology; it intensifies existing races at once: economic, military, informational, and social. Under such conditions, the problem is not only misuse or concentration of power. It is also cognitive and institutional overload. When systems are confronted with too many compounding risks at once, overwhelm becomes a political force. People shut down, institutions narrow their field of perception, and public discourse becomes easier to steer through fear, simplification, and urgency. What appears as acceleration often conceals a deeper loss of steering capacity (Hagens & Harris, 2026).
This pattern extends well beyond AI. Under pressure, people and institutions tend to contract around threat. They harden their boundaries, shorten their time horizons, and imitate the tempo of what feels dangerous. In that state, discourse coarsens, decisions become more brittle, and the space for interpretation, negotiation, and mutual adjustment shrinks. The issue is not simply that the stakes are high. It is that high-pressure environments reward reactive postures that make coherent response harder to sustain. Simultaneity, when poorly held, produces not coordination but cascading dysregulation.
There is a physiological analogue here that clarifies the point. Regulation, in this framing, does not mean calmness for its own sake, nor avoidance of conflict. It means enough groundedness to perceive accurately, speak clearly, and remain “in relationship” while stakes are high. Dysregulation spreads through systems; so does co-regulation. A regulated presence can widen another person’s capacity to stay engaged. A dysregulated one can trigger contraction, defensiveness, or collapse. Scaled up, the same approach applies to groups and institutions: the quality of response in one part of a system affects what becomes possible in the whole (Dana, 2026).
This offers a useful way to think about Europe’s current predicament. A society captured by fear, competition, and symbolic escalation may look strong for a while. It may even feel decisive. Yet it tends to produce the same outcomes chronic dysregulation produces elsewhere: false binaries, brittle responses, eroded trust, and the amplification of exactly the patterns it claims to resist. In that sense, “winning” can become a dysregulating frame. It rewards postures that reduce coherence in the name of strength.
The issue, then, is not whether Europe should become more capable. It should. The issue is what kind of capability the moment actually requires.
Maturity as a strategic capacity
By “maturity,” we refer to the cultivated capacity to remain coherent, relational, and responsive under pressure.
This draws on work in adaptive governance:
on maintaining coherence and response capacity under changing conditions,
on psychological flexibility as the capacity to stay present and adjust behavior in line with context and values, and
on co-regulation as the relational widening of what systems can bear under stress.
A mature system can register danger without becoming organised by it. It can hold more than one tempo at once. It can distinguish urgency from panic, adaptation from mimicry, restraint from passivity. It can preserve room for action under constraint. It can stay in relationship with reality, with consequence, and with others, even when the field is tense.
This is close to what the internal 10×100 work has been reaching for in its framing of a maturing Europe: a polity capable of staying adaptive, trustworthy, and coherent under pressure; one able to build connective capacities rather than only react to stress signals with harder edges. It is also close to the wider argument emerging in the exchange of cohort members: that Europe’s deeper question is not simply which policy to adopt, but what kind of civilisational posture to inhabit. (Thurm, 2026)
That distinction matters because a Europe under pressure may need to choose posture before policy – and posture of that kind is unlikely to emerge through inherited formats alone.
From Boundary Reflex to Planetary Practice
Perhaps Europe’s challenge is not only geopolitical, but conceptual. In a world shaped by large poles of power, expanding dependencies, and intensifying rivalry, one risk is that Europe becomes increasingly derivative: less a generator of strategic imagination than a site shaped by the gravitational fields of others. The issue would then not be subordination in the narrow sense alone, but something quieter: the gradual inheritance of assumptions about power, security, and viability that were forged elsewhere. What if Europe begins, almost by default, to treat strength mainly as scale, control, insulation, leverage over chokepoints, and the capacity to shift risk outward?
If that is part of the pressure, two responses seem easy to imagine.
One is passive definition by the poles: Europe as buffer, arena, or managed intermediary, absorbing infrastructures, standards, and strategic priorities it did not really author.
The other is reactive imitation: Europe hardening into a boundary formation of its own, seeking coherence through fortified dependencies, securitised supply, computational sovereignty, military acceleration, and managed peripheries.
Both responses are understandable. The question is whether either of them offers enough.
The first may preserve procedural function while thinning strategic agency. The second may appear stronger, yet concede something deeper: the assumption that complexity can only be met through architectures of control. Europe would then risk becoming a weaker mirror of other powers, repeating their reflexes without their historic capacities. And in doing so, it might deepen the very dynamics – induced risk, pre-emptive hardening, systemic closure – that are already making the wider condition harder to navigate.
A more interesting possibility may begin elsewhere: with Europe’s actual entanglement. Materially, financially, technologically, ecologically, politically, Europe is deeply interdependent. The question may therefore be less how to abolish dependence through control, and more whether dependence can be handled with greater intelligence. What would it mean for Europe to become more capable within entanglement rather than pretending to stand outside it?
This is where the distinction between boundary function and planetary function becomes useful. A boundary-function Europe asks how to secure Europe from the world. A planetary-function Europe asks how Europe might help secure the conditions under which a deeply entangled world remains livable, navigable, and open-ended. The first posture leans toward fortification and competitive mimicry. The second points toward institutional invention, systemic reciprocity, and the expansion of shared optionality. One tends to narrow the field of response. The other may widen it.
This, perhaps, is also where the 10×100 work becomes more accessible. Our Lab at EFA26 can be read as one small attempt to practise capacities such a posture would require: convening heterogeneous efforts, clarifying what they are trying to move, surfacing recurring bottlenecks, and strengthening the connective tissue through which propositions either gain durability or quietly fail. It offers a structured setting in which simultaneity can be worked with rather than denied. If Europe is to act under pressure, it may need more than sharper messages or better panels. It may need forms of field-building that connect actors across different rhythms, mandates, and constraints without forcing sameness.
What Strength Is For
The question before Europe is not whether it should become stronger. It should. More importantly we invite decision makers to ask what strength is for.
If strength is organised as reactive control, Europe enters the future as a diminished imitation of other poles: harder at the edges, thinner in imagination, more dependent on the very strategic grammars it did not author. If strength is organised around situational freedom, the picture changes. Then strength means preserving room for action under changing conditions. It means building capacities for comprehension, legitimacy, redundancy, learning, and coordination without collapse. It means increasing the ability of institutions and publics to remain coherent within exposure rather than fantasizing their way out of it.
This is where maturity becomes a strategic category. A mature polity does not seek invulnerability. It seeks adaptive capacity within irreducible exposure. It can take security seriously without turning security into its ontology. It can build strategic capabilities without reducing all relationships to leverage. It can understand ecological repair, civic coherence, industrial transition, food systems, computational sovereignty, and infrastructure resilience as interdependent tasks rather than separate silos or competing lobbies. Its strength shows up less in spectacle than in its ability to organise continuity across plural systems while conditions remain volatile.
That kind of strength is not soft. It is demanding. It asks for restraint where acceleration is rewarded. It asks for more serious forms of coordination than those offered by panic, branding, or bloc-thinking. It asks for institutions capable of sensing, learning, and adjusting before fragility turns terminal. And it asks for a public culture that can register danger without becoming wholly captured by it.
This is why the 10×100 Lab matters as more than a convening format. It is one attempt to build a discipline of co-regulation under compressed conditions: a place where projects, questions, and tensions can be clarified without being flattened; where heterogeneity becomes material for field-building; where the emphasis shifts from updates to offers; and where the wider Forum becomes not just a stage, but part of a deliberately designed relational ecology.
The present is not a race because the present is thicker than that. It asks more of us than speed. It asks for disciplines of perception, relation, and restraint. It asks for forms of field-building that increase coherence without coercion. It asks for capacities that keep systems livable, plural, and open while the ground shifts beneath them.
Europe may still seek to “win”. But the more consequential question is whether it can learn to hold more complexity, more consequence, and more relation without hardening into something smaller. If it can, it may yet become more than a boundary function reacting to the age. It may become one of the places where another civilisational posture is practised: serious without becoming armored, strategic without becoming extractive, and capable of helping the wider system remain open rather than terminal.
That is a higher bar than winning. It is also the more interesting one.
This piece is rooted in the 10×100 exchange connected to the European Forum Alpbach, crystallised by Ralph Thurm, Indy Johar & Caroline Paulick-Thiel; supported by Winfried Kneip since 2022
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|