Will the European Union Ever Become a Country?
It has a flag, a parliament, and even a (supra)national anthem — but will it ever become the United States of Europe?
At school, I went through a nerdy phase of being interested in emerging geopolitical superpowers like China, India, Russia, and Brazil. These countries were largely poor and underdeveloped, except for a few impressive megacities like Shanghai or Moscow; they were rich in resources, growing at breakneck pace, and had questionable democratic credentials at best.
But in between reading articles about China’s GDP and Russia’s natural gas reserves, I occasionally came across references to a fifth potential superpower: the European Union.
Unlike the BRIC nations, the EU (or at least the Western half of it) was rich. Pre-2008 Financial Crisis, the EU was the world’s most important economy, bigger than the US or China. It had a front-row seat at all major diplomatic events, and twice as many people as the US.
With China or Russia, the debate was whether they would ever grow enough to reach superpower status. The EU, on the other hand, could very obviously be a superpower — if only it one day decided to be a sovereign state.
The 2000s were an era of optimism, expansion, and deeper integration in Europe — right up to the moment when the 2008 Financial Crisis delivered a blow from which it has never fully recovered. In the 2010s, Europe also had to contend with democratic backsliding in Poland, Hungary and Turkey; with the threat of Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe; and with Brexit, which marked the first real backward step in the EU’s history.
There are people in the EU who still dream of a bigger future, whether that means admitting new members or deepening the links between the old ones — forming a United States of Europe, as it is sometimes called. In the past, such diverse thinkers as Vladimir Lenin, Napoleon Bonaparte and Victor Hugo have predicted the eventual emergence of a US of Europe.
Will these dreams ever be realised? I think so. Read on to find out why.
An essential key to understanding the nature of EU politics is knowing that two distinct gravitational pulls are fighting against each other:
- geographical expansion.
- greater integration
The EU can trace its origins back to the European Coal and Steel Community, which was established in 1951 by France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (useful to remember the last one — I’ve heard this as a question in a pub quiz before).
Its overriding goal was to make a future war between France and Germany impossible by creating a common market for the most important war resources (coal and steel) and splitting up the holdings of German steel barons in an extremely important industrial region of Germany known as the Ruhr. With enforced transparency and free trade, it would be unfeasible for Germany to stockpile these materials and start another war.
From such humble beginnings, the 6-member ECSC grew to become the 28-member European Union.
- Britain, Ireland and Denmark joined in 1973
- Spain, Portugal and Greece all joined in the 1980s after emerging from military dictatorships in the 1970s; East Germany joined through the backdoor in 1990 by united with West Germany
- With the fall of European communism, several rich nations that had refused to join on grounds of neutrality (Austria, Finland and Sweden) finally became members in 1995
- In by far the most dramatic expansion yet, 8 poor Eastern European nations (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Hungary) joined in 2004, as did the small island countries of Malta and Cyprus. Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007, and Croatia in 2013
The founding members of Europe were the industrial heartland of the continent and amongst the richest countries on the planet. As the EU expands away from that baseline, it is almost certain to become poorer, more unequal, and more zealous for reform.
There are few rich potential recruits left, with countries like Norway and Switzerland repeatedly showing in referendums their lack of interest in becoming part of the EU family. The most likely future entrants are small countries in the Balkans like Albania.
With Turkey and Ukraine both totally unprepared to join, with Serbia in turmoil over election fraud and fears of conflict with Kosovo, and with the EU’s unwillingness to accept North African applications (tested by Morocco in 1987), there is basically nowhere left for the EU to expand. For the foreseeable future, the era of EU enlargement is over.
This all means that the only way the EU can grow is by deepening the existing links between countries in the block.
For all the commonalities between EU countries, there are still differences between them. For example, many countries have not adopted the euro currency, and some mainland European countries are not members of the borderless Schengen Zone.
However, these differences are slowly evaporating, with Croatia joining the eurozone and the Schengen Area last year, and Romania and Bulgaria partially joining the Schengen Area in March 2024. When they fully enter the Schengen Area, every mainland EU country will be in the free-travel zone.
Smaller, more pragmatic changes are also being introduced all the time in the EU, such as legislation banning roaming fees between EU countries (so your French SIM card works pretty much as normal in Spain or Greece too), and regulating transaction fees across the union in a similar fashion.
The end result, of course, is that the everyday legalities of European countries will eventually converge as the EU bureaucracy seeks to expand its responsibilities.
There will always be differences between the EU states, such as different tax policies, minimum wages or different legal systems (common law vs civil law, for example).
Yet are these really any greater than the variation within large countries? The difference between the minimum wage in Germany and Lithuania is smaller than the variation between California and Texas.
And in many ways, the US shows less uniformity than the EU states. In the EU, for example, there is a complete ban on the death penalty, whereas individual US states can make their own choices on it. As an Irish person, universities anywhere in Europe would have to charge me the same fees as a local, whereas in-state tuition is a huge factor in the US tuition fee landscape.
Some people believe that the EU is too culturally diverse to ever become a unified geopolitical entity — a common example is that almost no European would ever care more about a European soccer team than about their national teams.
Then again, people from Scotland or England would care more about their “regional” team than they would about a unified UK team. In the US, most people care more about their local NBA team than international basketball. In short, sports do not a country make.
There are a few important barriers that remain in the way of the EU’s slow march towards becoming a US-style federation, such as the lack of a unified military, the diversity of opinions on foreign policy (try getting Ireland and Germany to agree on a stance regarding Israel-Palestine), or the desire of some countries (*cough* France) to pursue their own international policy as great powers.
But these barriers, I suspect, will be broken down by the realities of the 21st century. In a world where the US is increasingly unwilling to subsidize Europe’s defence, and in which NATO has become increasingly controversial, it seems natural to me that Europe will move towards closer military cooperation under the EU banner.
Furthermore, we no longer live in a world in which individual European nations can act as great powers on their own. In 1995, Italy still had a bigger economy than China; today, China’s GDP might be larger than the whole EU combined.
If European countries expect to exert real influence in the coming decades (and many of Europe’s leading nations are psychologically unprepared for anything else) in a world increasingly dominated by large developing economies like China and India, they will have to do so collectively.
Most of the EU’s member states hold their national identities very dear and will be in no rush to submit themselves to a centralized EU, but it seems obvious to me that the direction of travel in Europe is towards a stronger federal entity, one that might even be considered a unified sovereign entity.
Today’s EU, with its flag and anthem and currency, would already be unrecognizably nation-like to the founders of the humble European Coal and Steel Community. If the EU survives another 50 years, today’s leaders might also be shocked to see how closely it resembles a real country.
