Technology

Why do you think it hosts the UN headquarters, ICC headquarters, and so many other IGO headquarters?

Because it retains a lot of soft power from the centuries of being the world power.

It’s the only multi-national federation that I know of and is part of the largest and most widespread defense pact in the world.

Depending on where you draw the line on what counts as federation vs other associations of countries, there are many potential others, like Mercosur, Gulf Cooperation Council, Caribbean Community, African Union.

Clearly people want to live there, otherwise they’d be migrating to BRICS nations and Northern Africa. So it must be doing something right.

I'd say this is irrelevant to the topic? Also a large part of the reason many people want to move to Europe is because Europe fucked up their home countries starting from the centuries of colonisation, resource extraction, arbitrarily redrawing borders that then fosters ethnic tension for generations, etc.

What’s wrong with a civilization being self-centered? Especially when most of the critique it’s received regarding previous centuries was that it was too expansionist?

Well, Europeans tend to feel the world revolves around us (though the USA is even worse in this regard). We feel we can afford not to know about the history and geography of countries outside of Europe, since everything of import happened here. (Though in the post-WW2 era that consideration includes the USA.)

Also, I don't think self-centredness and expansionism are opposites. If anything, self-centredness makes it more easy for people to disregard the rights and interests of the "others", so exploiting them doesn't feel as wrong as if it happened to other Europeans.