The European Union has two paths ahead of it that can 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 programs for recovery, for the first time it has issued its own debt bonds, it has strengthened the surveillance of state finances, it has established common rules on banking and is trying 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 laws and more corruption, like the existing candidates. And the more members are accepted, the more difficult it will be to advance integration. Already with the current 27 member countries, the euro is only used by 20 and the opening of internal borders by 23; energy policy collides with the interests of different countries in oil, coal, gas, nuclear or renewables; common defense and security is the most backward part of foreign policy, and regulation of the labor market or Social Security are not even considered.
In its current state, the EU can be characterized as an empire, an intermediate, fluid formula between national states and a consolidated federation. A few years ago, the Oxford professor Jan Zielonka and the author of this article, who at the time did not know each other, agreed to publish separate books on the subject (his, Europe as Empire; mine: Great Empires, Small Nations and then The European Empire).
The most notable echo came from the then president of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso. In a massive press conference in Brussels to present the Treaty of Lisbon, he indicated: "The European Union is not a superstate like the United States or an international organization like NATO. We are 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 expands and contracts with expansions and exits. Second, the center maintains asymmetrical relations with the territorial units.
The best comparative reference is the construction process of 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, envisioned the creation of “an empire of liberty”; another of the founders, Alexander Hamilton, said that the USA was “the embryo of a great empire”; and in the middle of the 19th century, President James Polk declared that it was already “a country large enough for a great empire”.
The subsequent federal project almost failed with a terrible civil war. A more stable federation was only consolidated in the USA 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 (two more with no territorial connection, Alaska and Hawaii, were later added). In these 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 across the country.
In comparison, the construction of a united Europe has only taken seventy years. We can spare ourselves 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 today's EU. A Council with more and more diverse members would find it even more difficult to make unanimous decisions, which is why complex reforms of the decision-making rules would be required.
Meanwhile, integration proceeds at various speeds for different countries or a la carte, producing, in EU jargon, a variable geometry or concentric circles: there is a strong core of three or four countries, the other members currently integrated , those who are not quite, and several external associates in some subjects.
Ukraine's bid rules out a neutral zone or intermediate buffer against Russia, as Austria and Finland did during the Cold War, but the pending enlargements will not be completed before 2030. The European Political Community, which met last week past in Granada, seeks cooperation between the 47 geographically European countries.
The EU is already the third largest 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 of the United States, or break 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 the world balance.
