What is the future of the European Union?

The EU will integrate further, but remain a membership organisation

Question: What is the future of the European Union?
Position1 of 2›: The European Union will continue to exist
Argument‹2 of 3›: The EU will integrate further, but remain a membership organisation

EU integration will increase, but not to the point of completely pooled sovereignty.

The argument

The argument is an extrapolation rather than a prediction from first principles: the last thirty years offer a clear blueprint for where the EU will be in the next thirty years. What that period shows is not a series of separate bargains but a consistent direction of travel, which is what makes it projectable — the forces that produced integration in the past remain in place, and have not been reversed by the crises that were widely expected to reverse them. The engine of that trajectory is the Union's own stated purpose. With a commitment to ever closer political and economic union, this will naturally lead to a future where member states pool resources and sovereignty in more areas and further power is given to EU's institutions, including the Commission and EU Parliament. The mechanism is incremental rather than dramatic: each area in which states coordinate creates a need for some body to administer the coordination, and each body so created becomes a permanent institution with an interest in the next area. The second half of the argument places a limit on that process, and it is what distinguishes this prediction from the more familiar one. It will not lead to the creation of a 'United States of Europe', as member states will continue to make policy through consensus in the EU Council of Ministers. Consensus is the decisive detail: a federation exists once a central authority can bind a member against its will, and for as long as the Council proceeds by agreement among governments, each member retains the ability to stop what it will not accept. The future projected here is therefore one of deepening without transformation — a European Union that continues to exist, takes on steadily more, and remains a membership organisation of states rather than becoming a state in its own right.

Premises

[P1]The last thirty years of EU history show a consistent trajectory of deepening political and economic integration among member states. [P2] This commitment to ever closer union will lead member states to pool more sovereignty and grant further power to EU institutions like the Commission and Parliament. [P3] However, because policy will still be made by consensus in the Council of Ministers, integration will stop short of creating a 'United States of Europe'. [C] Therefore, the EU will continue to exist, integrating further while remaining a membership organisation of sovereign states.

Counter-arguments

The European Union faces a litany of challenges including the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, Britain's exit, and rising levels of populism in individual EU Member States. While taken individually the European Union might survive, but taken together the European Union's future looks bleak with it likely to break up. Its inevitable decline will come about as a result of increasing disagreement amongst Member States from the different geographic regions of Europe, who ultimately have different priorities and interests.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The problems facing the EU are too great for it to simply continue on as it has historically.