The European Union will break up

The argument

The argument's structure is cumulative rather than pointing to one fatal problem. 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. Taken individually the European Union might survive each of them — it has institutions built to absorb shocks, and precedent for having done so. But taken together the European Union's future looks bleak, with it likely to break up, because each crisis consumes the political capital and attention that managing the others would require, and each is settled, if at all, by bargains that leave some members feeling they have paid for another's problem. The mechanism of decline identified here is internal rather than external. 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. That is the more serious difficulty, because the Union's method is agreement: where interests diverge along stable regional lines rather than shifting from issue to issue, the same coalitions form in every negotiation, and outcomes begin to look less like compromises than like defeats for a fixed group of members. The evidence offered is a dispute in which the divergence is already visible. This is particularly evident in the current debate surrounding the EU's multi-year budget, where there are divisions between Member States from Eastern Europe and Member States from Northern Europe over the level of spending. A budget is the test case precisely because it can be neither deferred nor left vague: it requires every member to agree what each contributes and receives, so disagreements that can be papered over elsewhere have to be settled here. A union unable to settle them, on this argument, will not continue to exist.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Increasingly stuck between two global super-powers in the USA and China, European countries will continue to support the existence of the European Union as a counter-balance. Recognising that as individual states they cannot compete alone, as well as the economic and political cost they would incur if the European Union collapsed, Member States will elect to pool sovereignty where necessary.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] It can overcome these challenges and will elect to remain united to do so; they are stronger together.