The failure to create a 'United States of Europe'

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Why Europe Cannot Become a “United States of Europe”

The question is often posed with a note of bafflement, sometimes irritation: in a world that is plainly becoming harsher, more coercive and more dangerous, why does Europe still struggle to act as a single political, economic and military unit? Why, when the logic of scale, deterrence and strategic autonomy seems obvious, does the European Union fail to harden into a true “United States of Europe”?

The short answer is that Europe is not failing to become a superstate by accident. It is behaving exactly as its institutional design, political economy and historical memory would predict. It is also worth recalling that even the United States did not emerge as a coherent federal power by design alone: it required a shared revolutionary origin, a long period of internal bargaining, and ultimately a civil war - which settled the question of sovereignty by force.

The EU as a regulatory state, not a sovereign one

The EU is strongest where coercion is weakest. It excels at rules, standards, market integration, competition law and trade policy. These are domains where authority can be exercised through law, process and courts rather than force. What it conspicuously lacks is a thick fiscal core and a unified coercive apparatus. Its budget is small, its taxation powers negligible, and its ability to borrow jointly remains politically exceptional rather than normal.

States, however, ultimately cohere through money and force. War, deterrence and large-scale redistribution are paid for through taxation and debt, and enforced through command structures that answer to a single political authority. Europe can coordinate, consult and regulate; it struggles to command. This is not an accident.

National sovereignty as an alarm system

The EU’s much-criticised vetoes and unanimity rules are often described as design flaws. In fact they are better understood as sovereignty alarm systems. They exist precisely to prevent national elites from being dragged into commitments - financial, military or constitutional - that they cannot control domestically and which adversely affect their interests.

Under calm conditions, these vetoes look like bureaucratic inertia. Under stress, they become political tripwires. A single election, coalition collapse or captured party system in a medium-sized member state can paralyse collective action. From the perspective of national elites, this is not a bug; it's insurance.

Olson, Schumpeter and the politics of capture

Mancur Olson’s logic of collective action applies with brutal clarity to Europe. Each member state already contains a dense web of special interests: regulated industries, “national champions”, unions, NGOs, quangos and professionalised lobby groups. These actors are highly motivated, well-organised and intensely defensive of their rents.

European integration cannot and does not dissolve this structure; it duplicates it. Some interests lobby Brussels to entrench advantages. Others lobby national governments to block EU initiatives that threaten domestic arrangements. Free-riding is rational, resistance is organised, and the costs of fragmentation are diffused across electorates that rarely mobilise in favour of abstract continental goods and services.

Joseph Schumpeter’s profound insight - that democracy is often a valued enabler of competition between elites rather than an unmediated expression of 'popular will' - only sharpens the point. European publics are not clamouring for a supranational state that taxes them directly, drafts their children or reallocates resources across borders indefinitely. National elites know this, and are happy to leverage such sentiments.

“Integration through crisis” has limits

The architects of European integration were not naïve. They understood that centralisation could only advance incrementally, often under the cover of necessity. Crises could justify new instruments: common rules, emergency funds, shared borrowing. This ratchet worked tolerably well in financial and regulatory domains.

But existential crises cut both ways. They do not merely enable integration; they politicise it. When costs become visible and unevenly distributed - energy prices, industrial decline, migration pressure, military risk - national interests harden. “Solidarity” turns into an argument about who pays, who benefits, and who is cheating.

At that point, the logic of Olson reasserts itself with a vengeance. Blocking becomes profitable. Defection becomes electorally attractive. The centre weakens precisely when it would have needed to harden.

Military power remains national

Despite years of initiatives, Europe does not possess a unified military force with a single chain of command answerable to a European executive. Defence remains national, shaped by deeply different strategic cultures, threat perceptions, historical memories and above all different national interests.

Eastern and northern states see immediate existential danger; southern and western states see instability, energy risk and trade exposure. These are not trivial differences of emphasis; they shape willingness to spend, to escalate, and to accept casualties. A common army without a common political community is both paralysed and dangerous (who in the end gets to direct it?).

The shadow of history

The last attempt to unify Europe under a single authority occurred during the Second World War, and it arrived in the form of conquest, the only way to truly break the power of the elites in the conquered nations. The diverse national elites of today don't see that as a model which works for them: unity imposed through domination, leading to their permanent subordination, is intolerable.

What is more likely than a superstate?

The most plausible future for the EU is neither neat consolidation nor outright collapse, but fragmentation-within-framework. The EU will persist as a powerful economic and regulatory platform. Security and deterrence will increasingly run through NATO if it survives as a functional arrangement, bilateral arrangements and ad hoc coalitions of the willing. Joint action will occur where interests align sharply and visibly; paralysis will return where they do not.

Conclusion

Europe struggles to become a “United States of Europe” because such a state would require what Europe does not yet possess: a unified demos, a thick common treasury, a shared strategic culture, and national political and economic elites willing to surrender veto power over war, money and destiny - that is, over their own vital interests.

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