Why isn’t the European Union a superpower?
This question has fascinated me all my adult life. It should fascinate anyone who wants to understand how great powers are formed, or how they fail to form, and how they survive, or fail to survive. Let me immediately answer the question: Europe has not a superpower precisely because it has never really been unified. It has had no common foreign policy, no supra-national armed forces, no single authority capable of raising taxes or allocating spending. It doesn’t even have a common language. It does have a single market, a single currency, and a single set of trade arrangements with third countries. It has had aspirations to unify, but that’s all.
The US was founded in 1776 and certainly had its teething troubles, culminating in a terrible civil war in the 1860s. It was only through the victory of unionist forces at Gettysburg that the American Federation survived, but after that it was and is secure, and unified according to my criteria listed above. (In fact, except for the common currency it was fully unified from its foundation). Rapid migration and economic growth ensured that America became the world’s biggest superpower at some point in the early twentieth century.
China has been a large, homogeneous nation since ancient times, but emerged in its modern form in the 18th century, with strong central government restored after the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949. After the reforms of the late 1970s, China’s very rapid economic growth has ensured its status today as the world’s only other superpower.
By contrast, the European Union has never really succeeded in establishing a real union on American (let alone Chinese) lines, even by pre-Civil War standards. To many of us this failure calls for an explanation.
After all, the European Union is an economic superpower, still right up there with America and China. It has a population of 447 million and a GDP of $17 trillion, even after Brexit. The comparable figures for the US are 332 million and $23 trillion, and for China 1,413 million and $16.9 trillion (estimates vary). The members of the European Single market who are not in the EU—Norway, Iceland and Switzerland—add a few upward ticks to both numbers (14 million and $1.3 trillion). Brexit deprived the EU of a further 67 million people and $3.4 trillion in GDP. In other words, Europe is, at least in economic terms, still (just) a bigger deal than China, almost up there with the US, and without Brexit would have been even closer. To many thoughtful observers, such as Tony Blair, the UK’s former Prime Minister, the EU is an exercise in power waiting to happen.
And yet when Putin’s Russia is apparently on the verge of invading a European country, Ukraine, admittedly not a member of the EU, he cavalierly refuses taking the EU seriously, but instead cruelly insists to President Macron of France, that it is only the Americans he needs to discuss things with. If the EU were a superpower, sidelining it in negotiations over its backyard would be inconceivable.
The proximate, superficial answers to these questions are: First, Europe has not been united; its members have had very different reactions to almost any foreign policy issue, such as Russian games on its frontiers or migration. Second, Europe has no credible military power. But these are outcomes, not causes, of Europe’s failure to unify in the way the US and China have done. What’s been fundamentally different?
Let me hastily add, I do not know the answer. Nobody does. However, I can offer a suggestion for the really important reason.
First, if you ask an American or Chinese citizen where they are from they will reply, respectively, ‘America’ and ‘China’. This is partly because an American assumes that if they answer ‘Iowa’ or a Chinese person answers ‘Shandong’, no-one will understand their answer. While they are usually correct, this is again an outcome, not a cause, of their attitude: Everyone’s heard of America and China, because they are great nations. No European I have ever met answers ‘Europe’ to the same question. Indeed, an Italian from Rome is quite likely to answer ‘Rome’. Everyone’s heard of Rome.
Secondly, a common language clearly helps. Americans mostly speak English and Chinese people mostly speak Mandarin. Europeans mostly don’t speak a common language, although in recent years English has been on the rise. However, a common language is once again is an outcome, rather than a cause, of real unification: Most first-generation Americans in the past 150 years didn’t speak English when they arrived and most Chinese speak another dialect at home in their locale, and these dialects are often mutually incomprehensible.
More fundamentally, it was Europe’s misfortune that some very great European nations were formed before the project of European unification could have been successfully undertaken. (The Romans and Charlemagne did it, but too early; Louis 14th, Napoleon and Hitler all tried but ultimately failed and the Soviet Union occupied the eastern half of Europe during the Cold War. Their failures suggest European unification must have some degree of consent from the unified.) In particular, France and Germany were unified first-rate powers before European unification seemed possible and fought three ruinous wars against each other between 1870 and 1945. Some historians refer to the last two of these collectively as the European civil war, as they dragged in almost the whole of the rest of Europe.
I want to suggest that the fundamental reason Europe has so far failed to unify is that two of its constituent nations, France and Germany, are already internally too unified and too powerful to believe in the present supranational project. Unification demands sacrifices from such states, as were demanded of, for example, New York and Massachusetts in the late 18th century and are currently demanded of Shanghai and Guangdong. It is the rich, powerful states for whom the phrase ‘pooling of sovereignty’ requires giving stuff up, rather than gaining stuff, in the short term.
Even before re-unification, West Germany in 1989 produced 27% of the then EU’s GDP (according to the World Bank). Today the number is 25%. For France the numbers are 20% in 1989 and 17% in 2020. Thus the EU’s largest two national economies produced 47% of its output in 1989 and today 42%.
By contrast, California produces 15% of US GDP and that number is likely to fall in coming decades. The five largest states by GDP produce 41% of US GDP, but only one of these states existed at the time of the foundation of the United States.
Unification is a public good in that Romania, Greece or Portugal benefit from a large increase in power (for example in terms of security from uncontrolled migration) without having to contribute more than a fraction of the cost. Understandably, Germans are reluctant to commit control of their hugely successful economy to a superstate in which they will inevitably play a reduced role. These pressures to resist deeper unification will only be overcome if a situation arises in which the pressures in favour are much stronger than they are today. In 1776, America was fighting a war of independence. In 1949 the Chinese Communists had driven their political opponents out of the Chinese mainland. It doesn’t matter that Greece, Italy and the Eastern European countries would have much more secure economies and borders were Europe a unified state with a single government. Once again realism fundamentally explains why things happen or don’t happen.
Why does it matter? Because history furnishes many examples of great quasi-empires whose failure to provide strong central government ultimately resulted in their collapse at the hands of stronger but smaller neighbours. Perhaps the most relevant example in the case of Europe is the state of Poland-Lithuania. Once the largest country by territory in Europe, its failure to unify fully ended in its breakup at the hands of Prussia (a former province of Poland), Austria and Russia. The centrifugal forces acting on the EU are visibly at work today in the West, via Brexit, and the East, via a revanchist Russia, a far weaker power than a unified EU would be. Watch this space.
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In the past week, in the course of writing this look at the reasons for the failure of Europe to become a genuine superpower, ironically the EU moved farther and faster towards unity in seven days that it has done in the prior 20 years. That does not render all that we have said useless; rather it enriches. As I wrote earlier, events crystallise the efforts to forge a common polity. It wasn’t until the third day of the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg that it become clear that the correct political verb tense for the US should be ‘The United States is,’ versus ‘The United States are,’ that the federal union was not paramount over its constituent parts. While this dramatic past week for Europe has not proven to be this decisive, it remains the case that the sudden, Russian adventurist threat galvanised a sleepy Europe into belated, if surprisingly decisive, action.
In the course of seven days, Europe—particularly pivotal Germany, whose wholehearted support is necessary for any further, genuine European integration—seemed to change by the hour. Gone was Nord Stream 2 and the calamitous addiction to Russian natural gas. Suddenly the impossible became possible, with the new Scholz government committing to spend NATO’s required 2 percent of GDP on defence (after American pleading for decades), even as Berlin also committed to spending another 100 billion euros to modernise Germany’s antiquated weaponry. The German government also spearheaded a new European energy policy, committing to building expensive off-shore LNG terminals to offload natural gas from Qatar and the United States, over time decreasing European energy dependence on Russia. Suddenly, Europe (which as we have said always has had a superpower-sized market) looks to be far less militarily impotent in the medium term, even as it is far more geo-strategically coherent.
While the jury remains out, and all the above analysis still rings true, it is also a fact that the unexpected strategic pressure that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put on a sclerotic Europe—as was true for Revolutionary America and Civil War-infested China—may paradoxically prove to be the best thing that ever happened to the cause of European unity.
Another great read - Thank You