A United States of Europe is not so far-fetched
At the Munich Security Conference in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, informed his hosts that they were a wretched bunch of effete, cheese-eating milquetoasts with whom his country could no longer be bothered (I paraphrase but not that much). There has since been lots of hand-wringing about how the continent should respond to the threat of US abandonment. One of the most robust responses that I’ve heard came from the former commander of the US Army in Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges. Speaking to The Foreign Desk at the Delphi Economic Forum in April, he suggested (and I paraphrase barely at all) that Europe should stop whining, recognise that it is a superpower and start acting like one.
Hodges is correct. Europe’s combined GDP and collective military spending dwarf that of Russia, its only meaningful external threat. But perhaps neither Russia nor Europe can see past the fact that, for all the supranational organisations that European countries might have joined, the continent remains a kaleidoscope of nationalities. The idea of formally uniting them is not new; it has been proposed in various forms by Winston Churchill, Leon Trotsky and George Orwell. But is its moment looming?
There are many examples of disparate democratic polities becoming one. The colonies of Australia formed a federation in 1901. The US became a unitary bloc in stages from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the admission of Hawaii in 1959 (and, as Donald Trump sees it, the country isn’t done yet). Indeed, many of Europe’s modern states were once disorderedly patchworks of fiefdoms.
In many respects, it doesn’t seem that difficult. Europe already has a flag, a parliament and a president. (The latter is not directly elected but that can be fixed. Who wouldn’t enjoy the sight of a Finnish candidate kissing babies in Greece or an Irish contender shaking hands in Montenegro?) Most of Europe already uses the same currency. It is true that there are cultural differences but I would contend that Poland and Portugal, for example, have at least as much in common as Alabama and Connecticut. The US turning away from Europe would have seemed, until recently, unthinkable. A United States of Europe is, at the very least, thinkable.
Mueller is the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio.
