Overextended: The European Disunion at a Crossroads

ith hindsight, one might consider Brexit, consummated after long haggling in 2020, the last, and lost, opportunity for the European Union to mend its ways and become a viable political entity, if not community.¹ The departure of the United Kingdom did not register as a warning that the Union had become too internally diverse to hold together, having rapidly expanded both territorially and functionally. To the contrary, Germany under Merkel and France under Macron saw an opportunity, or pretended to see one, to push the old integration project—the “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”—forward, now that “Euroskeptic” Britain, one of the Union’s Big Three, had left. But then, they arguably had little choice as the EU’s de facto constitution (two international treaties each hundreds of pages long) is practically unchangeable as any amendment has to be agreed by all member states, which some can do only after a referendum. One may assume that this rigidity was exactly what was desired when the treaties in their present form were signed in Maastricht in 1992 and Amsterdam in 1997, to cast in stone the logic of neoliberal political economy that was at the time considered the ultimate stage of economic wisdom.

Contrary to what may have been expected, or hoped, internal conflicts intensified after Brexit, between North and South (Germany and Italy) as well as between West and East (Germany and Poland, Germany and Hungary). At the same time, political performance declined dramatically: capital market reform remained stuck, banks continued growing too big to fail, responses to Covid and rising levels of immigration were left to the member states, public debt increased almost everywhere while economic growth declined, and the euphemistically named Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery vehicle, despite €750 billion of funding, left no traces, not even in Italy, the member state it was above all to put back on its feet.² All these were cases, one way or another, of internal borders between member states asserting themselves while external borders with the rest of the world failed to be established or policed.

Given the EU’s declining supply of both input and output democratic political legitimacy,³ European integration rhetoric had become increasingly rare in the years before the Ukrainian war. This continued into the elections to the European Parliament (EP) in 2024,⁴ which in almost all countries showed growing “Euro-pessimism” or “anti-Europeanism,” in the language of those equating criticism of the EU with hatred of Europe. With the latter trend came a new level of politicization of the debate on the future architecture of the European state system, especially on the role and extent of national sovereignty within it.

In this article, I will explore the contours of European Union politics as they are emerging in the course of the disintegration of the European Union project. I begin with an account of what I consider, with Walter Bagehot, the “efficient,” as distinguished from the “dignified,” constitution of the European Union today, with particular attention to the impact of rising “anti-Europeanism.” Next, I turn to the position and the possible future role of what is now by far the most powerful EU member state, Germany. This will be followed by an analysis of what I consider a new integration-as-centralization project, the militarization of the EU in the context of NATO and the transatlantic alliance. Its future, I argue, will depend on the twists and turns of American foreign and national security policy in the second term of Donald Trump. I will conclude with a discussion of the prospects of European countries to disengage themselves from their transatlantic dependence, which both enforces and is enforced by EU centralization, and to join a multipolar New World Order 2.0, if it comes to that.

Nationalism Resurrected: Anti-European, Pro-European

With integration out of reach and no longer on the agenda, and with “anti-European” anti-integrationism stronger than ever, in member states as well as, since the election of 2024, the EP,⁵ the European Union has even more than before turned into a highly institutionalized battleground among its constituent nation-states. Looked at with the cold eyes of realist analysis, EU politics today amounts to an ongoing tournament among national states and cross-national political currents, in a complicated pattern of interlocking national and international interests, power structures and capacities. Unlike the EU’s official constitution, the rules of the game are mostly informal and therefore pragmatically adjustable when newly arising interests and political forces need to be considered.

Past conflicts among EU member states, distributional or ideological, were typically fought out under the cover of a “European idea.” This allowed for joint cultivation of an appearance of cheerful post- and supranational civility, often hiding deep mutual aversions and resentments from a public assumed to expect from “Europe” a new, different, less corrupt, or depoliticized kind of politics. Today, with the re-politicization of the “European question” and the rise of nationally based anti-Europeanism, this has increasingly given way to aggressive public disputes between the old integrationist mainstream and its opponents. Now, European unity rhetoric is used to build a united front of “all democratic forces” against internal enemies of “Europe,” with “pro-European” member states closing ranks with the “pro-European” domestic opposition in anti-European countries like Hungary and Poland, and with the war in Ukraine opening up the opportunity to designate eastern and western European anti-integrationists as allies, if not creatures, of an external enemy, Russia.

What, if not “integration,” is it that keeps the EU together? Why has the EU not been abandoned given its endemic political and managerial failure? Part of the answer lies in the institutional interests shared by member state executives. Leaders of small countries benefit from being seen as equals, or near-equals, of the German chancellor or the French president, while the leaders of large countries can appear at home as responsible co-governors of an entire continent. It has often been noted how meticulously the meetings of the European heads of government in the European Council are staged to convey a sense of unity and drama at the same time, to allow participants to look good to their national audiences—to create the impression that they have gained by hard work something important for their country. Up until recently, all of them together contributed to and benefited from a unique image of the European Union as a new kind of political entity free of the everyday depravity of national politics: a sort of Teflon polity whose imagined future rendered its observable present fictitious, a home of unfalsifiable disappointment-proof promises, too big, too far away, and too diffuse to be comprehensible as a whole for the average political consumer.⁶

In the 1990s, at the latest, when the EU seriously turned neoliberal, the national executives, as masters of what was then still called the “European project,” began to engage in sophisticated games of political level-shifting behind the veil of pro-European imagination. Availing themselves of the EU’s multilevel polity with its vast landscapes of competing, overlapping, and all too often conflicting competences, national governments learned to declare political issues that they were unable or unwilling to deal with to be “European” ones, to be handled not at the national but at the supranational level. There, they could ally themselves with other governments to produce European “solutions” they could sell at home as nonnegotiable EU policies binding all member states. In this way, national democratic debate was replaced with supranational technocratic mandates produced by an international coalition of national executives relieving each other, including themselves, of democratic accountability. Level-shifting also included blame-shifting, in that unsatisfactory national conditions could be attributed to unsatisfactory European policies, due to bureaucratic incompetence or the unfortunate influence of other, more powerful member states which, however, could be hoped to be put in their place at the next summit meeting.

In recent years, as integration continued to wither away as the presumed European finalité, EU realpolitik further expanded the European toolkit of national governments. Today, national strategies unfold in the complex triangle between the European Council, consisting of the member states’ twenty-seven heads of government; the European Commission with its twenty-seven commissioners; and the European Parliament with its 720 members elected every five years.⁷ Under the Treaties, written in EU usage with capital letters, the Council nominates the president of the Commission in consultation with the government of his or her country of origin, who then solicits nominations for the remaining twenty-six commissioners from the governments of the other member states. Next, the Commission as a whole must pass a vote of confidence by the EP, upon which it will be in office until the next European election five years later. During such time, the Commission is the only body that can propose EU legislation for passage by the Parliament and final approval by the Council.

The heyday of EU politics in its latest version is the months after a European election, when the Council picks the president of the Commission, the member states nominate their commissioners, the prospective Commission president defines and assigns the commissioners’ portfolios, and the Parliament gets organized, vertically into its offices and horizontally into cross-national party families. Also, the Council appoints a president of its own, by custom and practice a former head of a member state government. Yet another president is to be found for the EP, together with no less than fourteen vice presidents, while the various party groupings elect their leaders and, between them, appoint an astonishing number of committee chairs, all balanced by country and party. Also, as the designated Commission president allocates portfolios of differing importance to his or her designated twenty-six fellow commissioners, care must be taken that all national delegations and party groupings needed for the confirmation of the new Commission find themselves represented to their satisfaction.

After the 2024 election, all this was complicated by the no longer insignificant number of “anti-European” members (MEPs). In substantive policy terms, their presence may not mean much, as the EP has no right to take legislative initiative and is in its competences strictly limited by the Treaties (the masters of which are the member states, not the Parliament). There is also no formally recognized opposition in the EP. After the 2024 election, the new anti-Europeans were largely excluded by the pro-European parties from the post-electoral jobs bonanza, in effect leaving the number of jobs for the pro-European losers of the election unchanged. In addition, attempts were made to build German-style political “firewalls” between the good and the bad Europeans. Politically, this became relevant wherever there were affinities, perceived or real, between the newcomers and old-style conservatives. Here, it was in particular left-liberal German members who, deploying antifascist rhetoric, tried to get other party families not to admit politically neigh­boring “anti-Europeans” in membership. Since this would have weakened those groups, the effort did not have much practical effect.⁸

In the EU’s effective constitution, a leading role is played by the heads of government of the member states, especially the larger ones. In addition to their vote on the Council, they can draw on their national delegations in the Parliament. For example, they could threaten their colleagues on the Council and the president in spe of the Commission with blocking the confirmation of the new Commission unless their commissioner is given one of the more influential portfolios, or one of particular interest for their country. In normal parliamentary business, as well, they can call on their national delegates to vote in their country’s national rather than their party family’s European interest. Or they can urge MEPs from their national party to pressure their European party family to support particular national interests, or for that matter “European” ones, whatever they may be. Switching from a national to a party-political platform or vice versa, in addition to moving back and forth between the national and the supranational level, requires considerable virtuosity but also promises considerable rewards. In 2024, such skill was demonstrated by the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who not only avoided her party being sidelined in Brussels as “post-fascist” but, among other things, managed to secure for her country a central post on the Commission, with a portfolio of particular interest to Italy.⁹

Where European politics is more integrated than elsewhere is in advancing the formation of a European political class, with deep connections to the global political class of the American Western empire. No longer is membership in the European Parliament or the European Commission reserved for national politicians on their way to retirement, or offered as a consolation prize for losers in national politics. Today, MEPs and commissioners draw highly attractive salaries—each of the twenty-seven Commission members makes roughly €312,000 a year, plus residence, household, child, and repatriation allowances.¹⁰ If they come from a small member state, Commission members typically have a significantly higher income than their prime minister at home. Nor do they have to fear early elections or a cabinet reshuffle that would cost them their job ahead of time. This makes posts in Brussels, including high-ranking appointments in the EU bureaucracy, important bargaining chips in national politics. Moreover, after five or ten years in office, former commissioners, especially if they come with the right politics, have little difficulty getting a well-paid job in the extensive lobbying network around the Commission and, increasingly, the EP. By then at the latest, they will have developed a “European” or, for that matter, cosmopolitan outlook that may qualify them for positions in the global financial industry,¹¹ in political consulting firms, or in organizations such as the World Bank, unless they choose to enjoy the fruits of their labor as pensioners on some southern shore.

Conscripted: Germany Led, Germany Leading

Who governs the EU? Governing the EU is for its member states, mostly for the stronger of them, alone or in coalitions. The interests of the weaker members are taken into account to the extent that they are considered legitimate by the strong—in other words, as a matter of international, or intergovernmental as opposed to supranational, relations.¹² Today, the strongest member state is Germany. With a population of 84.7 million, 16.3 million more than second-ranking France, accounting for no less than 24 percent of EU GDP, with by far the lowest public debt among large member states—63 percent of GDP compared to 137 percent in Italy, 112 in France, and 109 in
Spain (2024)¹³—and with a reputation for high political stability, dating from the sixteen long years of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship (2005–21), Germany would indeed appear to be the EU’s natural-born leader.¹⁴ It was only after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, however, that German politicians, outside and inside the government, in particular from the SPD, began publicly claiming a leading role for their country in the EU and Europe.¹⁵

The reasons for this go back to the war and the postwar years. Overcoming European nationalism through Greater European regionalism had been a political project already during, not just after, World War II. To the extent that there was a debate in Nazi Germany on the shape of Europe after the imagined German victory, Europe was to be, not a collection of sovereign nation-states, but an imperial Großraum kept together by Germany as regional hegemon, a little like the Americas under the Monroe Doctrine.¹⁶ Support for this was by no means limited to Germany. In almost all European countries, there were fascist as well as conservative movements and collaborators who placed their hopes for European global power and anti-socialist domestic order on German leadership.¹⁷ As Perry Anderson pointed out, not a few of the pro-European collaborators from Italy, France, and the Benelux countries were involved in leading positions in post-1945 European integration politics, some of them, it appears, on the European Court of Justice.¹⁸

In contrast, for the new state of West Germany, founded by the Western Allies in 1949, European integration had lost any connection to—indeed meant exactly the opposite of—German regional hegemony. Still under military occupation, the Federal Republic, the western half of a vanquished and divided country, welcomed being tied into the international organizations of the newly forming West European state system. This was seen as an opportunity not just to rebuild the West German economy but also, at some point in the future, again to be recognized as a sovereign nation-state like all others. In subsequent years, West Germany’s political leaders habitually downplayed the growing economic and political significance of their country, to avoid reviving memories among Germany’s neighbors of past imperial ambitions. Denying any national interests other than general European ones, German foreign policy took pains to emphasize that Germany had learned once and for all that it was better for everyone, including Germany itself, if it were a province of Europe rather than Europe being a collection of provinces of Germany.¹⁹

Even after unification in 1990, under the auspices of what had then become the European Union, Germany took care to stay in the background. One way it did this was by insisting on EU governance by formal rules set out in the Treaties, instead of discretionary decisions negotiated between the member states that would tempt and require the new German state to throw around its weight.²⁰ Also, Germany held on to its sometimes toxic relationship with France, often caricatured as the European “tandem”—two riders on one bicycle, France sitting in front steering and Germany in the back pedaling—with Germany self-stylized as an economic giant and political dwarf and France featuring itself as a great power with a global vision.²¹ Later, Germany allowed France to impose on it the euro as a common European currency, in return for French assent to German unification—the idea being that monetary union would end German control over European monetary policy (which would soon prove less than successful) and forever bind Germany into the EU, as one member state among others, disciplined by majority voting on the Council. Still later, post-Brexit France, having become the EU’s only member with nuclear arms and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, refused to share either of them with “Europe,” meaning above all Germany.

As time passed, however, Germany began to show fewer compunctions about political leadership, reflecting both generational change and the growing economic disparity between Germany and the rest. As the EU’s political and cultural heterogeneity grew, with domestic politics in countries like Hungary and Poland turning against the western European left-liberal consensus, German European policy, as increasingly defined by the Greens, began to claim something like moral leadership. Still clinging to integration as the final goal of the “European project,” and having reasons to hope for support from the European Court of Justice, they began to press Council and Commission to use the list of “European values” in the Treaties, claimed to be “common to the Member States,” as a basis for sanctions, particularly financial ones, against wayward eastern countries.²² Green claims to moral authority and to the authentic definition of “democracy” met with wide support among the German public while nourishing anti-German sentiment elsewhere. Green-German efforts at moral European unification through reeducation of member countries by the EU bureaucracy added another line of conflict to European Union politics and very likely contributed to the increase of “anti-European” votes in the 2024 EP election.

Meanwhile, a major reason for Germany’s reluctance to develop ideas of its own on European “strategic sovereignty,” comparable with what Emmanuel Macron liked to proclaim in the name of France, was the country’s dependence in matters of national security on the United States. With up to forty thousand American troops and any number of American military bases, command centers, and nuclear warheads on its soil, even after unification, Germany has long been hardwired into American-led transatlanticism. Since thinking about an independent national security doctrine appeared pointless under these circumstances, German policy felt it could afford avoiding conflict with France by allowing it to speak for Europe as a whole on the world stage. Also, by leaving it to the United States to take care of its national security, Germany could hope to reassure its other European partners as well that it would never again seek a dominant position in the European state system.

This approach, however, has now become obsolete. As the war in Ukraine goes on, calls are being heard not just from the United States but also from inside Europe for Germany to step forward and accept the responsibilities of international leadership commensurate with its size and power—a development considered by the German political class with some apprehension. For them, the call for more German leadership sounds like a demand for more assistance to others rather than a promise of more authority over them. German political leaders know that an important reason for other countries to hold on to the European Union, which has in so many respects been a failure, is that they hope it will bind what has again become a German giant into a European state system that internationalizes parts of its sovereignty. Although in the postwar era, binding Germany could still be achieved by tying it down, now that it has grown big again, binding might require the opposite: accepting it as leader, subject to the constraints imposed by the Treaties and the “community method” on all EU member states regardless of size. If need be, occasional reminders of Germany’s Großraum past might serve to discipline Germany as a European big power, forcing it to be a benevolent rather than a predatory hegemon, one ready to shoulder obligations in excess of its rights, contenting itself with an imperial seigneuriage too low to cover its imperial expenses.²³

Today’s calls for Germany to accept a leading role in Europe are coming at a time when the German government, like other European governments, is facing critical economic and political conflicts at home. Still, expectations for Germany to carry a larger share of the European burden are being expressed by other European governments with growing impatience. They are accompanied by a barrage of allegations echoing previous U.S. complaints of too much détente with Vladimir Putin, too much reliance on Russian gas and oil, too little spending on defense, unreasonable reluctance to supply arms to Ukraine, and resistance against full-scale economic sanctions on China. The short-term purpose of rhetoric like this appears to be to get Germany to take the lead on the European, if not the Western, side of the war in Ukraine—or, alternatively, allow the European Union to do so, with German support for centralization by militarization and for a sovereign capacity for the EU to take on debt to pay for the war, even perhaps for a European army, and certainly for Ukrainian reconstruction after the inexorable Western Endsieg.

Back to the Future? The Wages of War

For those who had been fighting a losing battle against the accelerating disintegration of the EU’s overextended would-be state, the war in Ukraine came like a stroke of luck. It offered a highly welcome opportunity, perhaps the last, for a return to European centralization binding Germany, now the EU’s most powerful member state, into the discipline of a supranationally organized European entity, as an alternative to a nationally dominated German Großraum. From the first day of the war, Ursula von der Leyen, a little more than two years after taking office as president of the European Commission, threw herself behind the Western strategy, with or without a Treaty mandate, presenting herself to the world as the authoritative voice of Europe, including Ukraine, which a few days into the war she declared “belongs in the European Union.”²⁴

Before taking office in Brussels, von der Leyen had been minister of defense in Angela Merkel’s last Grand Coalition government, in which Olaf Scholz had been minister of finance. Her moment came in 2019, when Emmanuel Macron refused to endorse Manfred Weber, a member of Merkel’s sister party, the CSU, and leader of the European People’s Party, the Christian Democratic party family in the EP, for Commission president. As a compromise, he suggested von der Leyen, to which Merkel ultimately agreed. Von der Leyen’s appointment, which was only narrowly approved by the EP, came as a surprise to the German public, as she was at the time facing parliamentary investigations over mismanagement in her ministry and was expected to be dismissed from the cabinet.²⁵

Less than three months before the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, the German government changed, with Scholz becoming chancellor. Usually, national governments nominate their country’s European commissioner from among their political parties. Commissioners whose home government changes during their tenure cannot be recalled; they can, however, be replaced after the next European election. In fact, the coalition agreement of the Scholz government had provided for someone from the Green Party to take von der Leyen’s place as German commissioner, which would have meant that she could not have been selected by the Council for a second term. By publicly urging the German government to intensify its support for Ukraine, however, von der Leyen made it impossible for Scholz not to nominate her, as this would have exposed him to accusations of sabotaging the European war effort for party-political reasons.²⁶

From the beginning of the war, von der Leyen saw it as her first priority to organize international pressure on a hesitant Germany to fall in line with EU policy, as defined by herself together with Poland and the Baltics, under the auspices of the United States and NATO. In her first term, von der Leyen had often been closer to the Greens than to her political home, the EPP, because of their support for her “Green Deal” climate protection program. When, after the 2024 European elections, the Green Deal no longer had a safe majority in the EP and the Council, she could use her position as Commission president to support Friedrich Merz, successor to Merkel as leader of the CDU, against Scholz, on the assumption that the former would be easier to enlist in support of Ukraine and, generally, for a return to “European integration.”

Using the war in Ukraine to reverse the disintegration of the EU called for keen political entrepreneurship. From its beginnings in the 1950s, the EU had been a solidly civilian institution, with European national and international security being the exclusive domain of NATO and its member states—which is why the EU could present itself as a “peace project.” For von der Leyen, this meant that to make the war an EU cause, she had to rely above all on symbolic politics, in particular on public announcements committing the Union to the Ukrainian and Western cause far beyond its competences and capacities, hoping that it would be impossible for the member states to walk back her promises later.

Going to war can be an effective way of integrating a society and centralizing its state. Opponents of centralization can be kept in check by the prospect of being branded as traitors; having kept silent early, they may later be unable to undo what will eventually prove to be a fait accompli. Foremost in von der Leyen’s repertoire of war-making without war powers were frequent visits to Ukraine, more frequent than any European head of government, together with invitations for the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to any remotely war-related public occasion in Brussels, as though Ukraine was already an EU member state. In fact, mutual invitations were accompanied, as a way of sustaining the morale of Ukrainian troops and civilians, by endlessly repeated promises of EU membership, together with assurances that the EU would provide for a complete rebuilding of Ukraine after the war, to begin even while the war was still going on. That an early accession of Ukraine would mean the country jumping the long line of applicants from the western Balkans that had for years been waiting for admission was not mentioned, or only mentioned together with hints that waiting times might perhaps be shortened for these countries, too.²⁷

Generally, as the war went on, expanding EU membership became part of a strategy of building an international front against Russia, inviting and economically propping up all countries west of the Russian border in preparation for their subsequent accession to NATO. This included listing Georgia and Moldavia as future member states, their less than fully democratic politics notwithstanding, and despite, or perhaps precisely because, significant sections of their populations being of Russian ethnicity or gravitating more to Russia than to Western Europe. More recently, in December 2024, the Romanian Supreme Court’s cancellation of the Romanian presidential and parliamentary elections for alleged Russian interference, which was hardly commented upon by EU bodies, indicated that the war had, even more than in the conflicts with Poland and Hungary, politicized the EU’s “rule of law” principles. Increasingly, the Commission began identifying democracy in present and future member states with loyalty, not to liberal “values,” but to the EU and NATO as instruments of transatlantic Westernism. Accordingly, the European Commission in late 2024 censured visits to Moscow by the prime ministers of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and of Slovakia, Robert Fico, as “anti-European.”

Furthermore, immediately after the war began, von der Leyen offered the EU’s political support and technical-economic expertise to assist in the conception and execution of Western economic sanctions, which she promised would destroy Russia’s financial and industrial sectors in no time and thereby defeat Russia.²⁸ That this badly misfired, and that most of the damage was done to EU member states including, in particular, Germany, never became a subject of debate, as von der Leyen managed to have Western losses written off as necessary sacrifices for the common cause of freeing Ukraine, subduing Russia, and saving European democracy from Putin’s mischief. When the sanctions failed to do the job, von der Leyen and the EU placed their hope on expropriating Russian central bank funds held in Western private and public banks, to the tune of about $300 billion, to divert them to the war effort.²⁹

Taking everything together, there is reason to believe not just that von der Leyen vastly overplayed her hand, financially and institutionally, but that this was done with strategic intent. As to institutions, admitting new members to the EU normally requires a long procedure that lasts years if not decades. Conditions of accession are demanding and in principle cannot be waived, and admission requires unanimous agreement among member states. To admit all of Russia’s border states in time to help the Western war in Ukraine would require deep changes in the Treaties, which would themselves need years to bring about. Also, an EU with thirty-five or more member states would, with its present constitution, be terminally dysfunctional. Council and Commission, still with one member from each country, would become even less “efficient” and more “dignified” than now, especially since, given the increased level of internal political diversity and conflict, no member state is likely to sacrifice its seat at the altar of improved governability. Another problem is decision-making by voting, with both majority and unanimity, where the large countries need to be assured that small countries, like Moldavia, cannot block decisions or demand compensation for letting a decision pass. Major changes would also be required in crucial policy areas like economic cohesion and, in particular, agriculture, where the huge and highly productive agricultural sector of Ukraine would profoundly upset the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), carefully calibrated over decades to benefit, above all, French farmers and rural areas.

Concerning finance, the Union envisioned by von der Leyen would need contributions from its members far in excess of today’s 1.0 to 1.6 percent of GDP, at a time when member states across the board are already more or less heavily underfunded. This holds even for comparatively rich Germany, where a future Merz government, while undoubtedly more warlike than that of Scholz, will have to repair a collapsing physical and institutional infrastructure. This will require enormous increases in public spending over many years, at a time when the German economy is undergoing unprecedented deindustrialization, partly as a result of the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia and China, with German assent. Add to this the never-ending demands of NATO and the United States for national defense budgets to be increased, recently to 3 percent of GDP but unlikely to stop there.³⁰ It is hard not to expect intense political resistance in such circumstances against a higher German contribution to the EU budget, resistance that even a CDU-led government is unlikely to be able to ignore.

A possible solution for the coming fiscal crisis of an EU warfare state might be member states allowing the Union to issue its own debt—which would, however, also require changes in the Treaties. It is fair to assume that von der Leyen’s out-of-thin-air fiscal commitments in the context of the Ukrainian war were, and are, aimed exactly at getting member states to grant the EU this right to incur debt, constitutive for a modern state. Indeed, that right has long been demanded by advocates of European supranational centralization and integration. An EU borrowing capacity would give member states access, outside of national state budgets and therefore invisible to national voters, to the favorite medicine of underfunded capitalist states, public debt. Keeping national contributions to the European Union low by allowing the Union to debt-finance part of its expenses would amount to another, more advanced, form of political level-shifting.³¹ In the past, it was Germany which objected more than others to EU borrowing, afraid that, in case of an insolvency, it would in effect fall to the richest and least indebted member state to jump in. Yet, for a conservative Merz government, making national borrowing unnecessary by letting the EU borrow instead might be tempting enough to consider seriously. Ultimately, however, it seems unlikely that the German government would in the end sufficiently change its traditional position to underwrite current commitments.

Von der Leyen’s gamble on reviving European integration banks on the power of authoritative commitments being difficult to withdraw once publicly entered into. Among the reasons to doubt that this will work is the entanglement of von der Leyen’s strategy in an emerging conflict between the EU as an international organization and Germany as its largest member, a conflict that may be conceived as the latest version of the old built-in tension in the architecture of the EU between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism.³² Given the heterogeneity of the geopolitical and economic conditions and interests that today are encompassed by the EU, it appears unlikely that Germany will subject itself to the discipline of a Europe-wide supranational quasi-state as imagined by von der Leyen. EU discipline after a war-driven return to integration and centralization would demand German solidarity, not just with Southern Europe as in the past, but also with Poland, the Baltics, and Finland, and later with Ukraine and Georgia, under growing fiscal stress and increasingly without the traditional German compensation, export-driven prosperity. A war-driven EU would require Germa­ny to accept being overruled by other members in matters of life and death, and would require it to trust EU officeholders to be as protective of German interests as it would be itself—and indeed would have to be as a democratic state accountable to its citizens.

The Trump Enigma

By the end of 2024, although a military defeat of Ukraine appeared to be coming closer, European governments still had no idea what this might mean for Europe and the Eurasian continent. Nor did they know what the incoming Trump administration will do, if anything, either to turn the tide or to impose on western Europe some sort of Eurasian settlement. In the transition period between the American election of November 2024 and Trump’s inauguration, there were in effect two presidents in Washington, making Europeans wonder whose decisions would eventually count. To everyone’s surprise, Biden, in response to his defeat at the polls and his approaching defeat on the battlefield, seems to have allowed Ukraine to fire American long-range atacms cruise missiles deep into Russia; he was soon followed by the United Kingdom and France, with their Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles, respectively. Targeting had to be done by American, British, and French specialists, which Russia declared to be tantamount to participation in the war.³³ Germany, which unlike its three allies and Russia is not a nuclear power, continued to refuse Ukraine its Taurus missiles. This left Scholz holding the bag, exposing him to pressure from NATO and the EU to behave like a proper leader and fall in line, echoed by German published opinion with its transatlanticist pensée unique. One reason why Scholz hesitated, apart from Germany’s lack of a nuclear defense, seemed to be that the German missiles have a greater reach than the American, British, and French ones, enabling them to travel as far as Moscow. In response to Biden, Russia revised its nuclear doctrine, declaring countries that help other countries fire missiles into Russia legitimate targets of Russian nuclear retaliation.

Paramount in all this was the mystery of what the United States would do in Ukraine once Trump was sworn in. According to the American political calendar, Trump would have to face midterm elections in early November 2026, meaning congressional campaigns would begin less than one-and-a-half years after his taking office, at the latest. From then on, Trump would have to do what he could to defend his majority in both chambers of Congress, to avoid becoming a lame duck for his remaining two years. While he had sometimes insinuated that he would pull out of America’s Ukrainian proxy war on short notice, by the end of 2024 it no longer seemed clear that this was his intention. There were instead indications that he might adopt Biden’s strategy of continuing the war on a back burner while holding the EU, and particularly Germany, responsible for providing sufficient military and financial support.

In any case, assuming that Trump, pressed for time, would decide on the fate of Ukraine in the early summer of 2025, he will not be under much pressure from Europe. After the break-up of its “traffic light coalition” in November 2024, Germany will still be led by a caretaker government under Olaf Scholz, until the formation of a new coalition which might last until well into the summer. While it seems a foregone conclusion that the next chancellor will be Friedrich Merz, it is not clear with which party he will govern, or have to govern. Merz would probably prefer the warlike Greens, leaving Annalena Baerbock, a Young Leader of the World Economic Forum, at the Foreign Ministry and giving either finance or economic affairs to the Green chancellor candidate, Robert Habeck. But Merz might lack a majority for this, if not in the Bundestag, then in his own party. This would mean another Grand Coalition, of cdu/csu and SPD, unless AfD and BSW win big enough to make a two-party coalition impossible. However this will turn out, in the formative months of the second Trump administration there is likely to be no German government to be reckoned with in Washington or, for that matter, in Brussels, at both the EU and NATO.

Something similar may be said for France, the EU’s second-largest member state. Having dissolved the French National Assembly follow­ing the defeat of his party in the 2024 European Parliament elections, Macron has had to make do with a succession of weak and short-lived minority governments. French politics turned inward, in early anticipation of the presidential election as far back as April 2027, widely expected to be the decisive showdown between the left, the center, and Marine Le Pen’s radical right. Europe played no role in this, nor did Ukraine. Indeed, Macron kept changing his mind on France’s relationship to Germany, the European Union, and the United States, at one time accusing Germany of failing to help France liberate Europe from “American vassalage,” at other times following along with each and every step of escalation in Ukraine as ordered by the Biden administration. Even more than Germany, the character of the next French government, along with its European and foreign policies, will remain an open question for some time.

Stark Choices: Europe between Transatlanticism and Multipolarity

Behind the multiple European uncertainties of today looms the question of what the world will be like after the demise of George H. W. Bush’s New World Order of 1990, the era of unipolar American-controlled neoliberalism, and what will be the place and the structure of the European state system in a coming New World Order 2.0. It is indicative of the disorientation of European geopolitics, but also of the perhaps intentional vagueness of Trump’s political program at the time of his second election, that the possible futures of Europe after unipolarism have only recently begun to be explored. This applies certainly to Germany, where wishful pro-Atlanticist conservatism has characterized the long tenures of Helmut Kohl (1982–98) and Angela Merkel (2005–21). Its latest version, espoused by the short-lived Olaf Scholz government (2021–24), involved a tenacious belief that, with Biden’s election in 2020, Trumpism had gone for good. Then, immediately after Trump’s second victory, belief gave way to hope that, in yet another four years, some new version of Biden-Harris would again offer a united Europe its well-deserved and secure place as America’s transatlantic extension, in the course of a restoration of what the Europeans had long made themselves believe was a “rule-bound” liberal international order devoted to fighting autocracy and making the world safe for democracy.

Now, however, it is Trump again, and with him the question of what exactly MAGA—his Make America Great Again program—will mean. If it means that the United States will turn inward, attending to its domestic ills to the neglect of its international commitments, this would leave the political and economic elites of America’s client countries out in the cold—“protectionism” and “isolationism” depriving them of their capacity to secure all sorts of American benefits for their societies to justify their adherence to “the West.” Alternatively, MAGA could mean a return to a neoliberal Neocon era, albeit with different rhetoric, drawing on America’s superior military power to defend and restore its international privileges. The ultimate object in this case would be a return, first, to the bipolarism of the Cold War, taking on China in the place of the Soviet Union, and from there, hopefully, to the unipolar world after 1990, defeating global tendencies towards multipolarism. Very likely, this would involve armed conflict of some kind in Asia, probably rather early than late, following Thucydides’ advice that a sitting hegemon should attack a rising rival early.³⁴

Complicating matters, it may well be that the Trump administration will not be able or willing to decide one way or another between MAGA I and MAGA II. Without its imperial privileges, the domestic crisis of a deindustrializing United States might become worse before it could, perhaps, become better. Trump’s new American friends, formerly from Silicon Valley, now increasingly from Texas and Florida, may be more interested in global markets than in domestic betterment, and this certainly applies to the financial industry. Similarly, America’s huge military and intelligence establishment might be averse to giving up its foreign operations, including the 750 military bases and the global network of political contacts available for engineering regime changes wherever desired. Also, there is likely to be disagreement within the American military on whether to attack China now, and whether to do so with or without NATO. Not least, threats to withdraw from foreign commitments may be effective means of making allies comply with American wishes, passing some of the costs of global interventionism onto them, thereby making turning inwards relatively less attractive. Wavering between the two MAGAs would make U.S. policy unpredictable for friend and foe for some time.

As for Europe, in particular, it is widely taken for granted that European countries, especially Germany, will have to spend more on defense if they want to remain in good transatlantic standing, not least by purchasing expensive American off-the-shelf equipment like F-16s or F-35s. How much of a say they will be allowed regarding American strategy and tactics in Ukraine, and in Eurasia generally, nobody knows. If the United States demanded too much from a centralized European Union and its member states, like participating in an American war in the Chinese Sea or, more likely, cutting social spending to pay for continued warfare in Ukraine, European countries, including Germany, might under popular pressure desert American neo-imperial revisionism and break out of transatlantic European discipline, seeking a Eurasian settlement of their own rather than joining an American crusade for renewed unipolarity.

In any case, what the United States will or will not do will have consequences for the European and indeed Eurasian state system. Von der Leyen’s retro-centralism is sustainable only in a transatlantic confrontation with Russia, kept alive and remote-controlled by the United States. Only in a close transatlantic alliance could a centralized European Union unify its member states’ divergent interests with respect to the future of Eurasia, in particular bind Germany into a European united front, with the United States and Russia, in different ways, as external unifiers. Given its new “Pivot to Asia,” this means that the United States must get Germany to pay for the bulk of the costs of its Ukrainian proxy war. Military operations in Ukraine would still be governed by the United States through NATO, with fighting and dying delegated to the Ukrainians. Obviously there will be no European army under the unified command of a European government; no Commission president will ever advance to commander-in-chief. There will, however, be a European arms industry, promoted by Brussels and more or less coordinated by the French state and German firms such as Rheinmetall, wrestling backstage with their American competition for a share in the, vastly increased, European military spending. And, perhaps, a centralized EU confronting Russia and dependent on American support can be recruited to support the United States in its confrontation with China, at a minimum by tying down Chinese resources in Eurasia and thereby draining them from the East Asian war theater.

Given the diversity of national geopolitical interests in Europe, there is no way that a centralized European superstate could be held together by Germany as a regional hegemon without a military confrontation with Russia kept alive by the United States. This implies that those who want a more loosely organized Europe—a Europe “à la carte,” one of “variable geometry” if not of “fatherlands,”³⁵ one that is not led by Germany through Brussels on behalf of NATO and the United States—must seek accommodation with Russia instead of confrontation, so as to end the need for militarized centralization. Unless forced together by a common ally against a common enemy, the different interests of European countries will require, and would naturally give rise to, a continental state system that leaves room for national sovereignty. An EU that refuses its member states that room, ignoring the strong centrifugal forces produced by its functional and territorial over-expansion, would under conditions of international peace, unless deeply restructured, turn increasingly dysfunctional—the condition toward which the EU was trending before the war.

At the same time, a European Union centralized and unified to become a supranational great power, especially as a Eurasian counterforce to Russia, would not be acceptable among the brics, the new global alignment of the non-aligned, of which Russia was from the beginning and will continue to be a leading member. This might be different for European coalitions of the willing, for example in trade and industrial policy. Again, Western Europe can be a centralized superstate only as a civil auxiliary of NATO, kept together by the United States and Russia in a renewed Eurasian confrontation, providing the United States with that single phone number that Kissinger, as Nixon’s foreign policy operative, so desired. European countries wanting to talk and be talked to individually, without a detour through the Brussels headquarters of EU and NATO, would have to find their own way, alone or with others, into the emerging multipolar world, if this is indeed what is emerging.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 1 (Spring 2025): 100–22.