Why A United States Of Europe Has Been A Non-Starter

Monday, 15 December 2025, 12:34 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Can The EU Save Itself, And Humanity, From Fascism?

As an American who predicted Trump would win in 2016 and 2024, I feel for Europeans now squeezed by authoritarian America on one side, and authoritarian Russia and China on the other. But from my perspective, for the EU to survive and thrive as the last democratic bloc in the world, it’s going to have to stop clinging to NATO, and eschew the growing militarism of its member states.

The transatlantic partnership that provided an economic and nuclear umbrella for Europe after World War II has been sundered. But do the loosely stitched Brussels-based confederation of 27 ‘sovereign’ nations realise, in Benjamin Franklin’s famous dictum to the separate colonial states during the American Revolution, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately?”

The psychological, philosophical and political dilemma for the European Union, and the difference between the US at the end of the 18th century and the EU well into the 21st, is that the latter’s member states want to have it both ways – retain their independence and be a confederation.

The 70-year old European Project has failed to yield a United States of Europe because it cannot have it both ways, and now Trump is forcing the issue.

However a crisis, when faced, traces a new way ahead, and the malice and malevolence of the Trump Administration towards the European Union affords the EU both the opportunity and the incentive to achieve what dependency on the United States prevented it from achieving before: be a true union.

A revitalised European Project must be placed in a global context however, rather than remain shackled to the old sovereign nation-state paradigm. In other words, since a real European Union has been essentially a non-starter, sovereignty must be redefined to permit the creation of a true and workable confederation. And the only sovereignty (“supreme principle”) now is the sovereignty of humanity.

Why has the “US has made it an official policy to work to end the EU as we know it by publicly supporting far-right parties committed to its destruction?” I submit that’s secondary, since the vaunted “international order” has been defunct since the Bush-Cheney lunacy of Gulf War II. Now, under a much lunier Trump, the “rules based international order” has become a bad joke.

Many European progressives are asking: How do we overcome this crisis, and turn a politics of resentment into a politics of European belonging?

It’s a wrong question however, since the mindset of nationalism inevitably leads to war. More and more people don’t feel they belong to nations or regions anymore. Clinging to identification with groups as the basis of belonging is not only foolish; it’s detrimental to the human prospect.

Citizenship is a functional necessity, but national, ethnic or religious belonging is psychological atavism. The logic of extending national sovereignty hasn’t worked for the European Union, and it’s become destructive to humanity.

The right question, I propose, is: Can human beings end tribalistic identification from clans to city-states, from early empires to modern nations, and from colonial to neo-colonial empires (like the United States has become), and emotionally instill true belonging, which is to humankind as whole?

This isn’t a matter of “changing the narrative.” The idea that “changing Europe’s material reality requires changing the narrative” is willfully naive. Changing the narrative is just putting a nice suit on the corpse of the post-World War II order. Only transnational capitalism is served by cutting the legs off humanity to squeeze the EU into the Procrustean coffin of the Westphalian Order.

The break between America and Europe is much deeper than what the philosophers Derrida and Habermas foresaw two decades ago. The challenge is far greater than their failed call for “Europe to capitalise on the wave of popular opposition to the Iraq war to produce a new kind of European public sphere with a common sense of shared political fate and future.”

Derrida’s “deconstructionism” has not produced any benefits, but has become merely a faddish word in the popular lexicon. Indeed, a good argument can be made that deconstruction was appropriated by the right, and helped fuel the ‘tear everything apart and tear everything down’ ethos of fascists throughout the west.

It’s true that “the rift over Iraq that so many thought was temporary has returned as a divide between America and Europe that is structural and probably irreparable.”

But the divide hasn’t returned, because it never left. Despite the eight-year Obama interregnum and a four-year Biden interregnum, there was no reckoning, and America never recovered from the moronic invasion of Iraq and the quagmire of Afghanistan. (Obama doubled down in Afghanistan while Biden orchestrated an ignominious, Vietnam-like withdrawal.)

It’s also true that “the EU is the sole global actor with superpower potential that remains committed to the rule of law and inclusive, progressive politics.” However, the EU’s potential cannot be realised if Europe adheres to the same rules of the defunct international game that have brought the world to this pass.

In short, the EU must create something new at every level -- psychologically, philosophically and politically.

Sovereignty as we know it is just a modern word for the tribalism of nationalism. Yet most progressives subconsciously believe group identification is good, and so sustain the illusion that it can be extended not only to the European Union, but to the entire world.

The “cognitive space” of nationalism (including false EU regionalism) is rooted in an ancient emotional place. It’s why Trumpian troglodytes are hell bent on destroying the EU, and doing things like insisting that dual citizens choose between being US citizens or French, Irish or any other nation’s citizens.

But they’re actually providing a service to humanity by pushing tribalism/nationalism to its logical limits. It’s now up to thinking human beings, who see and feel what man is doing to the earth and humanity, to transcend the atavistic confines of tribalism and nationalism.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail