Reading Note, The Enemy Who Names You. Learning to Resist Predators, under the direction of Giuliano da Empoli
There is a particular moment in strategic reflection: when one understands that one has not chosen the combat in which one finds oneself. Julien Freund, an Alsatian philosopher little known to the general public, had drawn from this a lapidary thesis inherited from Carl Schmitt: it is the enemy who designates you, not the reverse. You can repudiate enmity, love one another between nations, declare yourselves neutral. The enemy continues to designate you nonetheless. This principle, formulated in the 1960s, has not aged a day. It structures, throughout, the fifth volume of Grand Continent’s geopolitical collection, assembled under the direction of Giuliano da Empoli and published by Gallimard on May 28, 2026.
The book arrives at a precise moment. The West hesitates. Trump reorganizes the Atlantic alliance into something hybrid, between withdrawal and blackmail for re-engagement. China advances according to a long calendar that its own ideologues have documented in detail, in Chinese, for years. And Europe, trapped between the two, produces excellent reports that it implements only halfway. In this context, a collective work that lets the very ideologues of Xi Jinping speak, often for the first time in French, is not an academic luxury. It is a working tool.
The Essentials
- Wang Huning, chief ideologue of Xi Jinping and architect of the neo-Confucian doctrine of the “Chinese Dream,” is published and analyzed for the first time in French in this work.
- Jiang Shigong, legal scholar and advisor to Xi, exposes his doctrine of Taiwan’s reunification: a source text that European chancelleries had not read in their language.
- Giuliano da Empoli, director of the work, is the author of The Magus of the Kremlin (2022) and founder of Grand Continent, a geopolitical journal published from Brussels.
- The book covers four simultaneous fronts: political philosophy of the enemy, doctrinaire Sinology, information warfare, and digital sovereignty through AI.
- Its principal limitation: the Western bloc is not interrogated with the same analytical depth as the Chinese bloc. The asymmetry is acknowledged but creates a slight imbalance.
The Thesis: Naming the Enemy Is Not a Choice, It Is a Constraint
The guiding thread of the book is not polemical. It is philosophical, in the strict sense: it is a matter of returning to Freund, of confronting him with the geopolitical reality of 2024-2025, and of drawing practical consequences. Freund posited that all politics rests on a friend-enemy distinction. Not from a desire for conflict, but because politics is, by nature, the management of a world where other actors have projects incompatible with yours. Refusing to designate the enemy does not erase it. It only makes it freer to act.
Da Empoli reformulates the thesis for the present era: post-Cold War the West believed it could exit the friend-enemy logic through globalization, international law, and multilateralism. This was not a failure of values, but a failure of diagnosis. The adversaries, meanwhile, never exited this logic. They simply codified it differently, in economic doctrine, in information doctrine, in legal doctrine. The result is that the West found itself in a combat it had not chosen, facing adversaries who had, methodically prepared it for.
This framing is not new. But the book gives it a factual substance that it often lacks in geopolitical essays. Rather than remaining at the level of Schmittian abstraction, each chapter plunges into primary corpora: the texts of Wang Huning, the strategic speeches of Xi Jinping, Russian information warfare manuals, Chinese positions on AI governance.
Wang Huning or How a Doctrine Is Built in Silence
This is probably the most important contribution of the book. Wang Huning is one of the most influential figures in world politics of whom Europeans have, until now, scarcely ever heard. Permanent member of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party since 2017, he is the ideological architect of three successive presidents: Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. He forged the structuring slogans of contemporary Chinese politics: “the harmonious society,” “scientific development,” “the Chinese Dream.” He is not a functionary. He is a political philosopher who has constructed, over thirty years, the framework within which Xi Jinping thinks and governs.
His texts, translated and commented on for the first time in French in this work, are striking in their clarity. Wang Huning does not conceal his vision: China must build an alternative world order to American liberal hegemony, founded on cultural sovereignty, the primacy of the state over civil society, and the refusal of Western universalism as an exportable model. What he calls “civilization” is a political category in the fullest sense: each civilization has the right and the duty to organize itself according to its own values, which makes all external interference illegitimate in the name of universal rights. It is a coherent doctrine, articulated over centuries of Chinese history reread for strategic purposes.
Making these texts accessible in French is an editorial and political act. European analysts have long worked on China from without, observing behaviors and inferring intentions. The Grand Continent book proposes the reverse: reading intentions as they have been written, in their original language, by those who bear them.
American “Neo-Royalism” and Chinese “Industrial Maximalism”
Da Empoli introduces two analytical categories to describe the two great powers. They deserve to be taken seriously, even if they remain constructions.
“Neo-royalism” designates Trump doctrine: a strong executive, distrustful of multilateral institutions, which treats foreign policy as an extension of commercial negotiation. It is not exactly isolationism, nor multilateralism. It is something older: a logic of court, where relations are forged between leaders, without durable institutional constraint. The Atlantic alliance becomes a question of personal loyalty rather than institutional commitment. Europe, built on the opposite idea, finds itself structurally ill-suited to this form of relationship.
Chinese “industrial maximalism” is more complex. Da Empoli and his coauthors describe a doctrine in which economic and technological competition is not separated from strategic competition. Massive subsidies for semiconductors, batteries, electric vehicles, and AI are not classical industrial policies. They are instruments of a century-long doctrine: China intends to dominate global technological value chains by 2049, the centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic. Every industrial decision is read within this long framework. This is precisely what the Draghi report described as European weakness: the absence of a coherent industrial and geopolitical doctrine facing adversaries who have theirs.
The chapter on Jiang Shigong extends this picture through a particularly powerful moment. Jiang is a legal scholar, informal advisor to Xi Jinping, and one of the doctrinal architects of China’s Taiwan reunification policy. His text, translated in the work, exposes without detour the framework within which Beijing thinks the Taiwan question: not as a territorial question to be resolved diplomatically, but as a historical imperative to reconstruct Chinese civilizational sovereignty. Taiwan’s refusal to accept reunification is not perceived as a legitimate position, but as a temporary anomaly produced by a century of colonial humiliation that must be corrected. The line of division with the Western reading is abyssal here.
Information Warfare and Digital Sovereignty: The Third Dimension
The book does not stop at political philosophy. Two sections cover the fields that opposing doctrines understood before liberal democracies: information warfare and AI governance.
On information warfare, the authors describe a continuum between Russian doctrine of “active measures” (активные мероприятия), theorized since the 1970s, and its contemporary digital declinations. It is not solely a matter of disinformation. It is a strategy of cognitive destabilization: amplify the internal contradictions of target societies, make truth indiscernible from falsehood, erode confidence in democratic institutions. The objective is not to convince, it is to paralyze. The studies cited in the work show that this work of undermining has measurable effects on political polarization in Western democracies, a phenomenon that the collapse of local journalism worsens by removing a check on information anchored in territories.
On AI, the book anticipates a debate that will grow in coming years. China has developed an explicit doctrine of digital governance founded on state sovereignty: the state controls data, infrastructure, and algorithms. This doctrine is actively exported to Global South countries, which sometimes adopt it enthusiastically, because it offers governments a model of control that the American liberal model does not. Europe, trapped between the two, has produced a regulation (GDPR, AI Act) that protects individual rights but does not yet constitute a doctrine of power. The question of who controls tomorrow’s AI models is also a geopolitical question, not merely a market question.
Blind Spots: The West Under-Analyzed
The main criticism one can address to the book is also its structural limitation. The analytical asymmetry is real: Chinese doctrine is dissected with remarkable precision, thanks to the translation of primary texts. American doctrine, conversely, is mostly characterized by its observable effects. Trump is described via his exercise of power, not via an equivalent doctrinal corpus. This is partly inevitable: Trumpian neo-royalism has no ideologue of Wang Huning’s caliber. But the asymmetry creates a slight framing effect: the reader emerges with a clearer image of Chinese doctrine than of a possible Western response.
Similarly, the European question is posed more than resolved. The book correctly diagnoses Europe’s unsuitability to the friend-enemy logic. But the ways out remain sketched. What does “European strategic autonomy” concretely mean when the two great powers have coherent doctrines and industrial and military means that surpass them? The answer is not in this book, and this is not necessarily a lacuna: clearly posing the problem is already a contribution.
One can also note that the question of non-aligned regimes, the “Global South” and its recomposition, is treated only indirectly. Countries that refuse to choose between the two blocs nonetheless constitute the central stakes of geopolitical competition in the coming decades. Their relative absence from the analysis is a real blind spot.
What One Does Not Read Elsewhere
The strength of this work lies in one simple thing: it provides access to primary sources. In the vast majority of Western geopolitical analyses, Wang Huning, Jiang Shigong, and their contemporaries are shadows evoked by their effects. Here, they speak. And what they say deserves to be read directly, not because one must fear them, but because strategic intelligence begins by understanding how the adversary constructs the world.
To whom is this book addressed? To readers already familiar with geopolitics who want to go beyond news commentary. To political leaders and economic actors facing decisions that engage the power relationship between blocs. To researchers working on China, Trump doctrine, or information warfare. And, more broadly, to anyone wanting to understand why the world of the 2020s resembles so little that of the 1990s.
What the book changes in understanding the subject is less a revelation than a reframing. It does not say that the situation is hopeless. It says that it is misread. That the West has long looked at global competition with unsuitable glasses, as if international law, negotiation, and goodwill sufficed to manage actors whose doctrines are fundamentally incompatible with these premises. Returning to the texts of Freund, rereading Schmitt in light of the twenty-first century, translating Wang Huning: these are intellectual gestures that allow one to see more clearly. Not to despair, but to act from an honest diagnosis.
The question the book leaves open is probably the right one: can a democracy adopt a long-term strategic doctrine without sacrificing what defines it, namely its capacity to change course through voting? This is the tension at the heart of any project for Western strategic autonomy, and no ideologue has yet resolved it.
Title: The Enemy Who Names You. Learning to Resist Predators Editor: Giuliano da Empoli Publisher: Gallimard, Hors série Connaissance / Le Grand Continent collection Publication: May 28, 2026 Pages: 384
Sources
- The Enemy Who Names You, Gallimard, Le Grand Continent
- BnF, Nouveautés Éditeurs
- China.org.cn, official biography of Wang Huning
- Le Grand Continent, translation of Wang Huning (2022)
- Wikipedia, Jiang Shigong
- Revue Esprit, The Regime’s Ideologue (Wang Huning)
- IRIS France, Wang Huning, Architect of the Chinese Dream
- Revue Éléments — Julien Freund and the 1965 Defense