What the Confederacy teaches the EU

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What the Confederacy teaches the EU

One reason the South lost the American Civil War, it is said, was 'States' Rights'. The southern states, in their overriding desire for autonomy, could not agree on funding, budgets or military strategy. The parallels with the European Union seem almost too exact.

In fact, the Confederate States of America did not lose the American Civil War because it believed in states’ rights, but because it believed in them too much to fight a modern war effectively. The ideology that justified secession also crippled central authority once war began.

Southern governors routinely resisted Richmond’s attempts to raise troops, impose conscription, requisition supplies, or coordinate railways. Each state wanted victory, but not at the price of yielding control. The result was chronic underfunding, logistical chaos, and strategic incoherence. War is the ultimate collective-action problem. The Confederacy failed it.

Weak central finance is fatal in prolonged conflict. The Confederacy could not tax effectively, could not borrow credibly, and could not impose budgetary discipline across states. Inflation ran wild. Armies starved while states hoarded resources. The North, by contrast, built a centralised fiscal-military state almost in real time.

The EU’s position is not identical, but the structural resemblance is obvious. The EU has fragmented fiscal authority, no unified defence budget of consequence, no centralised military command, and no shared willingness to impose sacrifice. And no unified political-military strategy. In peacetime, this looks like pluralism; in crisis, it looks like paralysis.

Ideology substitutes for capacity until it doesn’t. Southern elites believed moral legitimacy and local autonomy would compensate for industrial inferiority and weak coordination. They assumed that because their cause was “right”, the machinery would somehow follow. It didn’t.

The EU exhibits a softer version of the same error: an implicit belief that norms, procedures, and moral language can substitute for hard power and decision speed. That works only while someone else guarantees the security envelope.

Confederations struggle against centralised adversaries. The Union was not just larger; it was more decisive. It could concentrate force, absorb losses, and pursue long strategies despite political noise. Confederations are bad at that. They argue while the other side acts.

The EU was never designed to fight a war. It is designed to prevent one internally. That design choice carries a price in a world where external coercion has returned.

The Confederacy’s ideology was not merely decentralised; it was internally contradictory. It demanded autonomy for states while requiring unified sacrifice. The free-riding narrative writes itself.

The EU’s ideology is different: it deprecates sovereignty rather than worships it. But the functional outcome in extremis can be similar - reluctance to centralise power even when survival arguments are made.

So the thesis is best stated like this. The problem is not “states’ rights” per se. It is the refusal to subordinate autonomy to survival. That is a lethal trait in wartime systems.

If Europe ever faces a genuine existential crisis - not a managed proxy conflict, not a sanctions regime, but a direct strategic threat - it will discover very quickly whether it is a union or merely a committee. Most likely the EU will do what it usually does: fracture into competing, antagonistic allegiances.

This post follows on from: Preparing for War.

The next post, The failure to create a 'United States of Europe', explores why the EU can't become a unitary state.

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