Federalise, or die

Surrounded by adversaries from its East and West, only a united Europe can make itself sovereign and free from occupation.

When I left Washington DC to move to the European Union in 2006, I came with a suitcase full of books and a dream. Fresh from reading books like The United States of Europe and The European Dream, I was transfixed by the potential for the European Union to counterbalance American hegemony, something that was important to me following the Iraq War debacle. Unnerved by the growing aggressive jingoism I had witnessed in my country in the early 2000s, and with a looming feeling of dread over the rise of the far right I was seeing while working as a reporter in DC (later dubbed ‘The Tea Party’), I came to Europe hoping for something better, for a union with the size and heft to stand up to Russia, China and America. I was, and still am, a federalist. Needless to say, my 20 years on this continent have been a steady stream of disappointments. But there have been stops and starts. Though there were some moments when it seemed crisis was going to force Europeans to realise their own potential, such as during the financial crisis in 2011, myopic thinking and a lack of ambition always made Europeans pull back in the end.

When I first moved to Europe I often used the above image from American history to illustrate to people the choice they faced (my first stop was London so unfortunately this almost always fell on deaf ears). I think I was using it ad nauseam on my Euroblog. It was a political cartoon made by Benjamin Franklin originally during the French and Indian War in 1754, when most people would have assumed that were the colonies to secede they would have become individual countries. It is in fact the earliest known pictorial representation of united states. It was based on a superstition that if a snake was cut in pieces and the pieces were put together before sunset, the snake would return to life. The cartoon appeared alongside Franklin’s editorial about the “disunited state” of the colonies in which he stressed the importance of unity in the face of their shared enemies (at that moment, France). 20 years later, that shared enemy because Great Britain and the cartoon was used during the Revolutionary War as a way to urge the states to stay together. Following independence, it was used to argue against the loose confederal government of the first iteration of the United States (1776-1789), and eventually convinced Americans to convert the American confederation into a federation, the United States of America.

That first confederal government of the United States closely resembles what the European Union is today. Though it is politically controversial to say so, among academics it is universally accepted that the EU today is a confederation, while some say it is already in many ways a full federation. European federalists, as a political movement, want to go all the way - to create a federal union that would work much the same as the United States, but with key differences. What that would look like has been outlined by the Young European Federalists movement in the chart below, showing the EU as it is on the left and the EU as they would like it to be on the right.

America’s cultural sleeping potion

The head-spinning events of the past four months, and in particular the dramatic collapse of the transatlantic alliance over the past two weeks which has sent Europeans into a state of shock and trauma, are now making many people who may have not thought about it before engage with these ideas about Europe’s future. The election of Donald Trump a second time meant it finally became clear to Europeans that he wasn’t an aberration and Americans didn’t elect him by accident the first time. He is an accurate reflection of what Americans have become. Kamala Harris spelled out to voters that Trump would abandon Ukraine, Europe and NATO and partner with Vladimir Putin, and the majority of Americans simply didn’t care. It is finally starting to break through to Europeans that America is not their ally, something they should have mentally accepted already eight years ago.

For 20 years I have been making this point to Europeans, but gotten only bemused stares in return. This continent is so thoroughly culturally owned by the United States that Europeans almost feel like they are part of America (and this is a phenomenon that becomes more true the younger a person is). If they turn on the TV, there’s American content. The radio? American songs. Go to a movie theatre? There’s Hollywood. Open a European newspaper and it’s dominated by coverage of American news. Europeans nations have grown further and further apart from one another as they became more and more culturally dominated by the United States. They are inundated with news from America but get no news about the countries next door to them. If a European musician wants to become famous throughout Europe they need to go to America first if they have any hope of then beaming back to other countries on their home continent. There is little cross-cultural exchange, rather there is a shared cultural consumption by all Europeans of American content. This is what bonds young Europeans - America gives them their shared sense of belonging to a common culture. Nevermind the American military protectorate over Europe. America’s cultural domination has made it inconceivable to Europeans that Americans might not be their friends, might not be able to protect them if they were dealing an internal civil war, or that America could even become an enemy of Europe.

But life isn’t Hollywood, and President Trump has made the true relationship between America and Europe painfully evident for all to see. This was never an alliance, this was a 70-year period of vassalage which Europeans accepted in exchange for protection from Russia. In most ways, it worked to Europeans’ benefit. But they spent so much time fearing the Russian wolf, they didn’t think about the possibility of being eaten by the shepherd in the future.

European military autonomy

A lot of time has been wasted, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late. There is still time to federate to give Europe a chance of deciding its own future. While the nationalists on this continent like to talk about sovereignty, the truth is that these small countries can never hope to be sovereign on their own. European sovereignty can only be attained with scale.

The biggest obstacle to ever-closer union has been that the public didn’t see the need for it. Perhaps it’s finally starting to set in. If Europeans are finally ready to see their own potential to be a united federation that America could no longer boss around, this could be the last stop on the Denial Express before the train crashes into the mountain. So, let’s talk about what needs to happen, and how quickly it needs to happen, to stave off a disaster for this continent in this dangerous new world.

The most urgent need, obviously, is for a European Defence Union with command and control separate from the US. European Tomorrow has done a good job of summing up why this is so important. This has for many years been derided as the “EU army” dreaded by British and Eastern European media. Past attempts at establishing an EU defence union, led by France, have been blocked by the UK, Germany, Eastern Europe and the US out of concern that it would undermine NATO. The opponents also argue that this would violate the EU treaties (constitution), but this is not true. The possibility of a common defence policy is enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty's Article 42.

But efforts to establish this united European defence have been beaten back by NATO for 80 years, starting with the Brussels Treaty Organisation established between France, the UK and the three Benelux countries in 1948 and followed by the proposed European Defence Community in 1952 which added West Germany and Italy. This would have created a European Defence Community with a unified defence force, divided into national components, acting as an autonomous European pillar within NATO. But Washington didn’t much like these plans, which would have given the US much less control over post-war Europe (there were also concerns that it was being presented as an alternative to West Germany joining NATO). The real coup de grace, however, came when the EDC was rejected by the French parliament - a historic mistake for France. So the EDC was scrapped. Since then, every effort at establishing autonomous European defence has been cannibalised by NATO. And even after NATO’s raison d’etre was theoretically removed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, American bases just kept spreading throughout this continent. Europeans over time grew more and more dependent on the United States.

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 gave rise to a renewal of these attempts, as did Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. But each time, the efforts fizzled out. In his 2016 State of the Union speech, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker proposed a number of initiatives in defence, including the creation of a European Defence Fund, a single headquarters for operations, the implementation of permanent structured cooperation and a move towards common military assets. The point, he insisted, was not to replace NATO but to give Europe an autonomous pillar within it equal to the United States. But as it became clear that the Republican establishment ‘adults in the room’ were going to restrain Trump from taking the US out of NATO or allying with Russia during his first term, these ideas moved to the back burner. When the staunchly Atlanticist Ursula von der Leyen took over from Juncker in 2019, it was clear these efforts would be killed. And even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the taboo against EU military expenditure was lifted, the short-lived impetus for these efforts came from the Council and France, and not from the Commission. President von der Leyen is not the hero we need at this moment.

Brexit, of course, has majorly complicated these efforts toward EU defence. Britain and France are the two significant European militaries, and the only two nuclear powers. Without the UK, autonomous EU military defence will have greatly reduced credibility - at least in the near term. This is a big part of the reason why this week’s crisis summits happened in Paris and not in Brussels - to make clear these efforts are outside the EU and involving Britain. But this, in my opinion, is a major mistake, because these efforts need to be tied to existing democratic institutions if they are to be successful.

There is nothing stopping the UK from participating in an EU defence union without joining the EU single market or customs union. It would be complicated, both logistically and politically for Keir Starmer and his domestic politics. But it’s possible. There are existing institutions already set up at EU level under the Common Security and Defence Policy that are not being used, such as the EU Military Committee, the EU Defence Agency, PESCO, the Commission’s new Defence Industry Directorate-General, and the External Action Service's permanent Operation Headquarters (OHQs) for command and control. It’s all there, but Europeans have been afraid to properly use these tools for fear of undermining NATO. If NATO is now effectively dead with the lack of confidence over Article 5 (As Germany’s most-likely next chancellor has admitted), these concerns seem absurd.

A military union needs a federation

Trying to organise European collective defence outside of these existing structures is dooming the effort to failure. The hope is that NATO can be preserved, but it must be fundamentally restructured to be an actual alliance rather than a protectorate. That would mean that NATO has two main pillars, American and European, which are equal in power. This is possible - together European countries actually spend roughly the same as the US on defence, but this is an irrelevant bit of trivia as long as these militaries are not united. A report published by Bruegel yesterday found that Europe would need to spend just 1.5% of the EU’s GDP to be able to defend itself against Russia with 300,000 soldiers, but only if it was coordinated as a unified effort.

What we’re talking about here is something more than a "European NATO within Atlantic NATO”. To really equal the US, the European half needs to be attached to federated democratic institutions that can take decisions. Whether they like it or not, this has to mean scrapping the unanimity requirements for Council voting. Imagine how effective American foreign and defence policy would be if, for every decision, the government had to get the unanimous approval of all 50 governors. Nothing could ever be decided.

That will require treaty change, which is no small feat. European leaders have been terrified of treaty change since the experience of the Lisbon Treaty’s rejection by Irish voters in 2008. The prospect was dismissed out of hand by the EU’s Northern and Eastern governments after it was recommended by citizens in 2021’s Conference on the Future of Europe. But as the former prime ministers of Italy and Spain have argued, it’s time for a European constitutional convention:

The Lisbon Treaty was signed in 2007, to include part of the contents of the Constitutional Treaty of 2004. We live in an EU designed 20 years ago: before the financial crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and at the beginning of China’s rise and of the erosion of the world international order.

It is time to reform the EU to make it more democratic and able to decide and act as a Union, to deal with the many challenges that member states cannot face alone, also on the international scene.

Some might argue that now is not the time to be engaging in divisive talk of ever-closer union, particularly as the far right is on the rise in Europe and treaty change is bound to be rejected by Hungary. But if not now, when? What would our grandparents who lived through the 1930s and 40s think of us if we just shrug our shoulders and say Europe can’t get its act together because Trump’s far-right allies in Europe have already won? They haven’t already won. All is not yet lost. If Orban wants to reject the moves that would make the EU free from Russian and American domination, then Hungary can be asked to leave the union. If Meloni wants to risk her domestic popularity by cow-toeing to Trump, let’s invite her to try it. The time for shoulder-shrugging is over. Federation is Europe’s only hope. Do Europeans have the courage to pursue it?