I think this is a far sunnier depiction of Europe than the material reality and historical record allows to be tenably held. It's worth going back to interrogate the sheer history of the notion. The idea of a scenario of inter-imperialist rivalry within the West posed by a resurgent Europe against America, to the benefit of the Global South, traces back all the way back to the immediate post-war period. Stalin himself speculated that:

The question is, what guarantee is there that Germany and Japan will not again rise to their feet, that they will not try to wrest themselves from American bondage and to live their own independent lives? I think there are no such guarantees. But it follows from this that the inevitability of wars among the capitalist countries remains.

Stalin was wrong because World War II turned out to remain the last inter-imperialist war within the West up to today.

Europe's fundamental problem is that it has never been held accountable for the original sin of 500 years of colonialism and imperialism. Rather than facing any retribution, it has been rewarded. The continent has managed to retain the material wealth gained through its imperial past, and even now, it continues to benefit from neo-colonial economic structures that give subsidy to its luxury through the continued unequal exchange with the rest of the world.

On the other hand, the only thing it really ever has been punished for is the cautionary lesson of inter-imperialist infighting when Europe turned its guns against itself. The lesson Europe took from the 20th century, and continues to hold today, is this: karma hasn't ever punished its external violence, but it strikes if it turns on itself. Europe was the victor of history—until the victors began fighting among themselves.

This is the etiological source of its cultural and racial alignment with Western hegemony. It's a self-perpetuating cyclical logic that was only broken through the alternative presented through socialist internationalism that provided a different narrative of Europe that allowed coexistence and solidarity with the rest of the world beyond the now increasingly bankrupt paper facade of liberal "internationalism." Socialist internationalism (though itself insincere at times) offered Europeans, the first time, a way to reimagine our identity beyond the deeply entrenched cultural and racial divide of "the West and the rest," a paradigm that had shaped the idea of "Europe" for centuries, if not millennia.

Incidentally, as a result, this is a contributing factor to why the entirety of all Eastern European states, as if eager to make up for lost time now that they're in the club, have become uniformly some of the most ideologically extreme and right-wing chauvinistic freaks within Western hegemony today.

Lenin’s prediction of inter-imperialist infighting only came to pass once, during WWII, and hasn’t happened again since. Europe does learn lessons but the wrong ones. Stalin’s succession to Khrushchev meant the USSR never updated Lenin and Stalin’s analysis, which led to the policy of "peaceful coexistence." This approach utterly failed to account for the solidarity among imperialist powers under Western hegemony, which ultimately contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

The plain reality from the history of post-war inter-imperialist solidarity, for which the USSR already paid the price, should indicate that unless the original sin of our continent is addressed in one way or another, Europe will never be a protagonist of any scenario of multipolarity against the existing hegemonic paradigm. If it had the chance, Europe would happily loot China alongside the US just as it did in the Opium Wars and the Boxer Uprising. It doesn't do so today not because of a lack of any will, but a lack of capacity and capability. Unless it discovers a new narrative of its identity, as it did once through socialist internationalism, the rest of the world should prevent it from ever regaining that capability - and should reject as realistic any notion of an "independent Europe" willing to repudiate Western hegemony.