The famous closing recognition that “now what is to become of us without barbarians” reveals a deeper philosophical structure. It is not fear of the other that defines the situation but reliance upon the other as a condition of internal coherence. When the anticipated arrival does not occur, the political order is confronted not with relief but with an absence of direction.

In contemporary Europe, this logic resonates with unsettling familiarity. Governance increasingly unfolds in an atmosphere of permanent anticipation. The language of crisis preparedness, strategic foresight and risk anticipation has become central to institutional discourse. Yet beneath this vocabulary lies a subtler transformation. The present is often experienced not as a space of action but as a waiting room for events that will clarify what must be done.

Europe between agency and projection

The European condition today can be understood as a tension between agency and projection. On the one hand, institutions are more sophisticated than at any previous moment in terms of regulatory capacity, data availability and policy instruments. On the other, decision-making is frequently structured around external referents: geopolitical instability, technological disruption and systemic risk.

This produces a form of suspended agency. Action is neither absent nor fully present. It is deferred into scenarios, impact assessments and anticipatory frameworks. The political imagination becomes future-oriented to the point where the present appears provisional.

The question that arises is not whether Europe is capable of governing complexity but whether it still defines its own temporal horizon of decision-making. Cavafy’s insight suggests that waiting is not neutral. It is a political form in itself.

Institutional hesitation and the problem of deferred sovereignty

A first intellectual lesson concerns the nature of institutional hesitation. In modern governance systems, hesitation is often justified as prudence. Yet when hesitation becomes structural it risks transforming into a mode of governance.

Deferred decisions accumulate not only through incapacity but through fragmentation. In a multi-level system such as the European Union, responsibility is distributed across national governments, supranational institutions and private actors. This complexity can generate sophistication yet it can also produce ambiguity.

The result is a subtle displacement of sovereignty. Not in the formal sense of its disappearance but in the operational sense of its diffusion. Decisions are frequently delayed not because they are impossible but because they are shared in ways that make their ownership unclear.

The philosophical question is therefore not simply who governs but how time is governed within systems of shared authority.

From anticipation to intentional governance

A second lesson emerges from this structure of anticipation. Governance must not be confused with foresight alone. To anticipate is to imagine possibilities. To govern is to commit to direction.

Cavafy’s poem warns against a political order that substitutes expectation for action. The barbarians function as a placeholder for decision. In their absence, the system struggles to define itself.

For contemporary Europe, intentional governance requires the recovery of strategic clarity that is not entirely dependent on external shocks. This does not mean rejecting foresight but subordinating it to a coherent articulation of long-term objectives.

The philosophical distinction is important. Anticipation belongs to imagination. Governance belongs to judgement.

The aesthetic of institutions and the problem of transparency

There is also an aesthetic dimension to governance that is often overlooked. Institutions are not only functional structures but symbolic systems. They communicate order, legitimacy and predictability.

Yet in digitally mediated environments, this aesthetic coherence is increasingly fragmented. Algorithmic systems distribute decision-making in ways that are often technically visible but institutionally opaque. The paradox is that there is more data than ever and less interpretive clarity.

This gap between information and understanding produces a form of epistemic hesitation. When processes cannot be fully read, action becomes cautious and delayed. Transparency therefore becomes not merely a procedural requirement but a condition of institutional confidence.

In this sense, governance is also a question of legibility.

Cultural diplomacy and the politics of shared imagination

At this point, cultural diplomacy becomes relevant not as a soft complement to policy but as a medium of shared interpretation. If Europe is to navigate a condition of fragmented agency, it requires spaces in which different intellectual traditions can articulate common questions without reducing them to technical language alone.

Literature, philosophy and cultural exchange provide such spaces. Cavafy’s poem itself is an exercise in cultural diplomacy across time. It speaks from a specific historical context yet resonates across political systems because it captures a universal structure of expectation and delay.

In contemporary terms, cultural diplomacy can help reframe governance challenges as shared interpretive problems rather than isolated technical failures. Exchanges between institutions, universities, cultural organisations and policy actors create a form of reflective distance that is often absent in immediate decision-making environments.

Europe, with its plural intellectual heritage, is particularly well positioned to cultivate this dimension. Its strength lies not only in institutional architecture but in its capacity for sustained interpretive dialogue.

The temporality of decision

A further philosophical lesson concerns time itself. Modern governance operates within multiple overlapping temporalities: electoral cycles, technological acceleration, economic volatility and geopolitical uncertainty.

Within this complexity, deferral becomes tempting. Yet deferral is not neutral. It reshapes the conditions under which future decisions remain possible.

Cavafy’s poem suggests that waiting can become self-reinforcing. The anticipation of clarity can replace clarity itself. In such a system, time ceases to be a medium of resolution and becomes a structure of postponement.

The challenge for governance is therefore not acceleration but temporal coherence: the ability to align decision-making processes with meaningful horizons of responsibility.

Conclusion: beyond the politics of waiting

To read Waiting for the Barbarians today is to encounter a political metaphor that extends beyond its historical setting. It describes not only a city awaiting an external force but a broader condition in which expectation becomes a substitute for agency.

Europe’s contemporary challenge is not a lack of institutional capacity but a risk of temporal displacement. Decisions are often present in form yet absent in orientation.

A more integrated approach to governance would combine intentional strategy, shared responsibility, transparency, cultural interpretation and temporal discipline. These are not separate reforms but interconnected dimensions of institutional maturity.

The deeper lesson of Cavafy’s poem is therefore not pessimistic. It is diagnostic. It suggests that political orders do not collapse primarily through external shocks but through the gradual substitution of waiting for acting.

The task, then, is to restore a condition in which action does not depend on the arrival of barbarians, real or imagined, but on the continuous capacity of institutions to define their own horizon of meaning.

Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”: The Ethics of Imperial Self-Deception

The 1980 novel “Waiting for the Barbarians”, written by the Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, extends Cavafy’s diagnostic insight into a complete developed political and ethical narrative, transforming the abstract condition of waiting into a lived structure of imperial governance. Set on an unnamed frontier, the novel depicts an Empire that maintains its legitimacy through the construction of an imagined enemy, even as that enemy remains elusive or indeterminate.

The Magistrate, who becomes the novel’s central consciousness, gradually recognises that the so-called barbarians are less a concrete external threat than a projection necessary for sustaining the Empire’s internal coherence. Coetzee thus deepens Cavafy’s meditation on deferred meaning by showing how expectation can be operationalised into systems of interrogation, surveillance and violence. Where Cavafy’s city risks paralysis through absence,

Coetzee’s Empire actively produces moral decay through the attempt to fill that absence with coercive certainty. The result is an exploration of how political order, when dependent on imagined threats, risks becoming indistinguishable from the barbarism it claims to oppose.

• Independent