The European Union faces two paths that could lead to a dangerous fork in the road. On the one hand, the EU has increased its powers during the Great Recession and the pandemic. Specifically, it has increased public spending through the multi-year budget and recovery programs, for the first time it has issued its own debt bonds, it has strengthened its surveillance of state finances, it has established common standards on banking and it attempts to control external borders.
On the other hand, after ten years without accepting new members and Brexit, Ursula von der Leyen's Commission and Charles Michel's Council are now proposing a new wave of enlargements with Ukraine, Serbia and up to nine countries.
Internal reinforcement and external expansion are not easily compatible paths. The more integration increases, the more difficult it will be to assimilate new members with lower economic levels, less compliance with the laws and more corruption, like the existing candidates. And the more members are accepted, the more difficult further integration will be. Even with the current 27 member countries, the euro is only used by 20 and the opening of internal borders by 23; energy policy clashes with the interests of different countries in oil, coal, gas, nuclear or renewables; Common defense and security is the most lagging part of foreign policy, and the regulation of the labor market or Social Security is not even considered.
In its current stage, the EU can be characterized as an empire, a fluid, intermediate formula between national states and a consolidated federation. A few years ago, Oxford professor Jan Zielonka and the author of this article, who at the time did not know each other, agreed to publish two books on the subject (his, Europe as Empire; mine: Great empires, small nations and then The European Empire).
The greatest echo came from the then president of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso. At a massive press conference in Brussels to present the Lisbon treaty, he reflected: “The European Union is not a superstate like the United States nor an international organization like NATO. We have the size of empires... and now we are what some authors call the first 'non-imperialist empire.'"
An empire as a form of political organization, like the EU, is distinguished from a State and a federation by two characteristics. First, it has no stable external borders, but rather expands and contracts with expansions and exits. Second, the center maintains asymmetric relations with the territorial units.
The best comparative reference is the process of building the United States. About 125 years passed from independence at the end of the 18th century to the consolidation of a stable federation. One of the first presidents, Thomas Jefferson, contemplated the creation of “an empire of liberty”; Another of the founders, Alexander Hamilton, said that the United States was “the embryo of a great empire,” and in the mid-19th century, President James Polk declared that it was already “a country large enough for a great empire.”
The subsequent federal project almost failed due to a terrible civil war. A more stable federation only took shape in the US at the beginning of the 20th century. Fixed borders were established in 1912, when the initial 13 republics on the East Coast had expanded to 48 states from coast to coast (later two more without territorial connection, Alaska and Hawaii, were added). In those same years, just before the First World War, democratic representation was stabilized by fixing the size and form of election of the House of Representatives and the Senate, a single currency and robust public finances were consolidated through the Federal Reserve. , and the FBI was created in charge of security throughout the country.
In comparison, the construction of a united Europe takes only about seventy years. We can avoid the civil war because we already had it before, the so-called Second World War. In 1912, US public spending was 7% of GDP, a milestone that could perhaps serve as a horizon for the current EU. A Council with more and more diverse members would have even more difficulty making decisions unanimously, requiring intricate reforms of the decision rules.
Meanwhile, integration advances at different speeds for different countries or a la carte, which produces, in community jargon, a variable geometry or concentric circles: there is a strong nucleus of three or four countries, the other members currently integrated, those are not completely, and several external partners on some issues.
Ukraine's membership candidacy rules out a neutral zone or intermediate cushion against Russia, as Austria and Finland were during the Cold War, but the pending enlargements will not be completed before 2030. The European Political Community, which met last week in Granada, seeks cooperation between the 47 geographically European countries.
The European Union is already the third political unit in the world by the size of its population and its economy. In the long term, it could evolve into a more stable and homogeneous democratic federation, as was the case with the US, or break up into multiple territorial units, as happened to the Russian Empire, first with the revolution and then with perestroika. The difficult combination of internal reinforcement and external expansion will determine its future, that is, ours and that of global balance.
