The European Union will become a United States of Europe

The argument

The argument rests on a claim about pressure rather than about preference: that the European Union's direction of travel will be set less by enthusiasm for federalism among its member states than by the position those states find themselves in, increasingly stuck between two global powers in the USA and China. Individually, no EU member state approaches the scale of either. In dealings over trade terms, technology standards, security guarantees or energy supply, a single European state negotiating alone with a super-state does so from a position of structural weakness, and the outcome reflects that weakness. Proponents argue that this asymmetry supplies its own remedy. The way for a mid-sized European state to recover leverage is to negotiate as part of something the size of its counterparts, and that requires pooling sovereignty in precisely the areas where acting alone is least effective. On this reading the Union will integrate further not by grand design but by member states electing, case by case, to commit to EU-wide policy in new areas: foreign and defence policy, where fragmented positions are easiest for outside powers to divide; taxation, where competition between members is exploited by actors larger than any of them; and energy policy, where dependence on a single external supplier is a vulnerability that only collective purchasing and collective infrastructure can dilute. The cumulative effect of these transfers, the argument holds, is qualitative rather than merely additive. A Union that sets its own foreign and defence policy, harmonises its own taxation, and manages its own energy security is no longer a treaty organisation coordinating sovereign states; it has become a power project in its own right. Proponents describe the endpoint as a form of United States of Europe, a single federal actor able to counter-balance China and the USA rather than be positioned between them. The European Union continues to exist on this account, but in a substantially more integrated form than the one its member states currently recognise.

Premises

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 member states disagree too much for this to happen, and they will instead break up.