The war in Ukraine is corroding the already weak foundations of the long-term European project of eventually establishing a United States of Europe, in which the national sovereignty of all European Union member states is absorbed under one superstate.
This ambition sits at the heart of the EU constitution, its broader jurisprudence, and many of the decisions that EU leaders have taken. It already finds a non-insignificant measure of formal political-legal reflection in the subordination of national supreme courts to the EU Court of Justice.
The idea of a United States of Europe finds particular favor with the EU’s two most economically powerful members, Germany and France. But the project has a problem: Russia’s war in Ukraine is forcing an unveiling of EU members’ diverging national interests. Such divergences are nothing new, of course. Britain’s “Brexit” withdrawal from the EU proved this most dramatically, but so do continuing tensions between Brussels and the Polish and Hungarian governments involving national laws. The point is that Ukraine has made matters far worse and increasingly exigent.
On paper, the EU is unified in its condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has agreed to various rounds of sanctions against Moscow, some clearly more robust than Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government had expected. Yet beneath the surface of cooperation, stark divisions are apparent, as was evident in the EU’s struggle to agree to a total oil embargo against Russia. Facing opposition from Hungary’s pro-Putin leader Viktor Orban, the EU could agree only to cut 90% of Russian oil imports. But this is just the start. Many other EU nations are concerned over the prospect of a ban on Russian gas imports, upon which they are heavily reliant. This pits those states against other EU members such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. For historical, geographical, and political reasons, their governments see Russia as a far more urgent threat that must be confronted.
And the divisions don’t end with energy. Britain, the Baltic states, and Poland also want the EU to join with them in providing larger quantities of more lethal weapons to Ukraine. For that matter, they also want the Biden administration to do the same. In contrast, major EU powers such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain prefer to provide limited supplies of less capable (at least as measured by Ukraine’s immediate needs) weapons. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s repeated phone calls with Putin — calls that have had no obvious effect — also demonstrate that these more dovish nations are also determined to reach an immediate ceasefire in order to placate Russia, even if that comes at the cost of sacrificing Ukrainian territory.
Herein lies the problem for the EU project. No political construct, however wealthy or socially developed, can stand divided on such exigent matters.
The divisions in Europe demonstrate that, where some members see Russia as an existential threat, many Western European powers see Russia as a problematic but still necessary partner. And there is another similar division over China. Lithuania is now suffering under a coordinated Chinese trade coercion campaign because it allowed Taiwan to open a representative office. But where Lithuania and its familiar British, Baltic, and Polish partners are responding to China’s coercion by joining with the United States to confront Beijing, the familiar Western EU bloc is determined to maintain close economic and political ties with Beijing.
This all leads some EU powers to believe that the political union is unwilling to defend their critical interests. As a specific example, Lithuania is growing highly frustrated by EU equivocation over whether to support World Trade Organization action in response to China’s threats against it.
The existential problem for the EU project is how this division corrodes the EU’s very credibility. Macron may eloquently articulate an ideal of EU “strategic autonomy,” threading a course between the U.S. and China. Still, his narrative is worthless unless it can generate a collective EU buy-in. The war in Ukraine is showing that this is easier said than done. Macron’s idea of a standing EU military force, for example, is now openly derided in much of eastern Europe.
The sense of betrayal that the Baltic states feel over the French and German response to Putin cannot be underestimated. Put simply, they no longer trust their EU political allies. This leaves EU project adherents with a catch-22. Brussels can accept these divisions and risk alienating existing members — perhaps eventually leading to new “XYZ-exits” — or the EU can move to consolidate these alienated members. The flipside challenge is that few Western EU members want to do what is necessary to provide that consolidation.
Put another way, the dream of a United States of Europe is dying — or at least going dormant — as its members’ national interests diverge with respect to Russia and China.
