I Still Believe in a United Europe
In every classroom of my primary school years, there was a poster on the wall. A globe in the middle, and around it children with different skin colours reaching their hands across the planet. I have no idea which publisher or NGO produced it, UNICEF maybe, some standard piece of classroom décor, but it was everywhere. In the craft room, in the gym, above the blackboard in maths.
And it said something. Not explicitly, just by sheer repetition: this is how the world is meant to be, this is how we build it, this is what it should look like when we are done.
I grew up inside that world. Not as an ideal, as a backdrop. Racism was a topic from history books and eyewitness interviews, mostly overcome, with a few leftover pockets still to clean up. That was naive, I know that now. But it was the tone of the place back then: war in Europe was school material, the rules-based international order was just there like the weather, nobody talked about it. It was the background against which everything else happened.
Then 2016 came.
The crack
Maybe 2016 is the wrong year and it really started earlier, maybe it started later, but when I look back at the past decade, 2016 is when the feeling shifted for me. Brexit in June, Trump’s first win in November. Two events almost nobody thought possible beforehand, in half a year.
Then it accelerated faster than you could track. In 2020 the pandemic, which exposed everything: how fragile the supply chains were, how thin the common European response, how quickly every country we thought of as careful was ready to close borders and look out for itself. In 2022 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. From that point onwards it was clear that peace in Europe, which my generation had treated as a baseline, was not a baseline. It was something that had been actively maintained since 1945. And we had not really been maintaining it ourselves. We had been living under the umbrella of an American security guarantee that nobody had actually guaranteed.
Trump came back in 2024. Not as an accident this time, elected. In February 2025 JD Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that is best read as a declaration of decoupling. The American Vice President criticised European governments for their “firewalls” against the far right, met separately with Alice Weidel of the AfD, and flipped, in one morning, the transatlantic binding that had been more or less unquestioned since 1945. Since then we have been in a situation where the scaffolding of my political socialisation (peace in Europe, American protection, a Western values community, European unification) looks fragile in all four elements at once.
The poster in the classroom was not a document. It was a direction. And the direction has been moving the wrong way for almost ten years.
Where I stand
I am not writing this as neutral analysis. I have a position and I will state it plainly: I am for a European federal state. Not the Brussels of today with a slightly bigger budget, a real federal state. A common army. A common foreign policy. A common tax base. A commonly elected head of state, or a federal-council construction like Switzerland’s, more on that later. Everything that determines how Europe looks to the outside, on the European level. Everything that is culture, language, education, local politics, stays where it is.
I say this clearly because for a long time in Austrian discourse this position was treated as slightly embarrassing. Pro-EU was fine, pro-federation was for cultural commentators and Macron fans. Since Trump 2.0 more people have been willing to say it out loud. Including me.
One thing I want to be precise about, because the objection always comes: this is not the same as “United States of Europe on the American model”. The American model is one possible federation, not the only one. Switzerland is also a federal state, and it looks quite different: stronger cantonal autonomy, four official languages, direct democracy at every level. When I talk about a European federal state, I mean the Swiss pattern rather than the American one. I will come back to this.
And I am aware that as a citizen of a small nation I am arguing for merging into something bigger. I know that is an emotional stop for many people. I understand it. I do not share it. In an Austria that is part of a European federal state I feel freer and safer than in an Austria that is nominally sovereign but factually dependent on American goodwill and Russian tolerance. I see myself more as European than Austrian. That is not a rejection of Austria. It is a ranking.
The 27-armies arithmetic
Take defence first, because it is the most concrete and because it is the domain that Trump 2.0 no longer volunteers to cover for us.
EU member states together spend about 340 billion euros a year on their militaries. The US spends about 900 billion, roughly three times as much. Russia spends about 150 billion. That looks as if we could more or less defend ourselves, since our combined spending is larger than Russia’s. Then you look at what we actually get for it.
The Draghi report that the European Commission commissioned in 2024 lays out the numbers. Europe operates twelve different main battle tank types. The US produces one. European countries source 78% of their defence procurement outside Europe, 63% of that from the US. Less than a fifth of European defence spending is done collaboratively. In aggregate: we spend about a third of the US budget, and we get substantially less than a third of US operational capability for it, because everything is duplicated across 27 parallel systems that are not compatible with each other.
The Austrian Bundesheer illustrates this in miniature. Budget 4.2 billion euros (2025, including pensions), 1.3% of GDP. 25,000 active personnel, 125,600 reserve. Six months of conscription. Every serious assessment I have read says the same thing: not well enough equipped to actually defend Austria, not NATO-interoperable enough to contribute meaningfully to a European coalition. Formally sovereign, practically in nobody’s league.
And there is a second layer: the veto. Foreign policy decisions in the EU require unanimity. One member state can block everything. Hungary under Orbán did this on autopilot for sixteen years. Sanctions against Russia repeatedly delayed and watered down. Ukraine aid packages blocked for months until informal concessions to Orbán. Sweden’s NATO accession blocked for months, first by Hungary then Turkey. Sanctions against the Paks II nuclear plant blocked by Hungary, because Hungary depends on Russia for 85% of its fossil energy.
As I am writing this, Orbán has just lost. On 12 April 2026 the pro-European Tisza Party under Péter Magyar won a two-thirds majority, with 78.94% the highest turnout since the end of communism, the first election since 2006 not won by Fidesz. That is the rare good news. But the structural problem remains: a single captured member state can block the EU. Today Hungary is no longer that state, with some luck. Tomorrow it could be Slovakia under Fico, Austria under an FPÖ-led government, or some other national government we have not seen yet. The veto is not tied to Orbán. The veto is structural. And it remains a problem as long as it exists.
That is the structural diagnosis: we spend enough money, but we are split 27 ways, and any single one can block collective action. In a period where the scaffolding itself is shifting. This is the scenario in which the question “more integration, or not” stops being rhetorical.
A European federal state would change the problem at three levels. First: one army instead of 27. What the US does with 900 billion, we could do substantially more effectively with our 340 billion if we did not build every weapons system twelve times over. Second: one foreign policy, not 27 with vetoes. There are mechanisms for this that do not require a full constitutional revision. I will get to those. Third: one voice in negotiations with Washington, Beijing, Moscow. The weight of a continent. Exactly what we lack today.
Who benefits when we are not united
I want to be careful here, because the next step in the argument often slides into conspiracy-thinking, and that is wrong. The world is not coordinated. But interests can align without anybody coordinating.
Russia benefits from a fragmented EU. Moscow has stated this openly for two decades as strategic doctrine. What tends not to register in Austrian mainstream discourse is the concrete form this benefit takes.
In December 2016, under Strache, the FPÖ signed a formal cooperation agreement with Putin’s party United Russia. Five-year term, signed in Moscow, reasonably well documented at the time, not renewed in 2021 but never formally denounced. The French Rassemblement National (then Front National) received a nine-million-euro loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank in Moscow in November 2014, which it used to prepare campaigns. Marine Le Pen confirmed the loan herself, though she described the lender as “a private bank” that stepped in where French banks had refused her. In October 2018, the Italian Lega had an audio recording from the Metropol Hotel in Moscow suggesting that an oil deal was meant to funnel 65 million euros into the party’s coffers. The Italian prosecutor closed the case in 2023, concluding the goal was indeed financing but the money never actually flowed. Three European far-right parties, all three with documented Russian connections, all three opposed to European integration.
Algorithmic amplification sits one layer below. Platforms optimise feeds for engagement. Engagement correlates with outrage, polarisation, extremism, not with accuracy. Documented in the 2021 Facebook Files from leaked internal Meta research. The mechanism is neutral; the outcome is not. And when a Russian disinformation campaign like Doppelgänger, which has been running since May 2022 and was publicly exposed by the EU DisinfoLab, deliberately plants content that algorithms pick up, you get cooperation that does not need to be planned to function.
The most concrete recent example: the 2024 Romanian presidential election. The far-right outsider Călin Georgescu surprised everyone by winning the first round. The Romanian constitutional court then annulled the election because a Russian TikTok influence operation could be shown to have affected the outcome. No longer theoretical. A documented case, in an EU member state, within the last year and a half.
The US side got its own profile through Trump 2.0. Vance in Munich was the most public instance, but already earlier, Elon Musk, operating at the top of the US administration’s government-efficiency operation, published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag in December 2024 endorsing the AfD. In January 2025 he hosted Alice Weidel in a livestream on his platform X, which was treated as effective campaign help. The European Commission opened a DSA proceeding against X over preferential treatment.
These are not two people planning in a back room. These are different actors with different motives whose interests align: everyone who benefits from a weak, fragmented Europe. Moscow strategically, Washington under Trump ideologically and on trade, Europe’s far-right parties on party politics, some tech oligarchs on regulatory grounds. None of them need to talk to each other to push in the same direction.
A federal state would be the structural answer to this. Not primarily for moral reasons, for mechanical ones: majority decision-making makes it impossible for a single captured government to block the whole. What Orbán’s Hungary did for sixteen years would not have been possible in a federal state, because Hungary’s weight in a federal parliament would be proportionally small and a majority against it would be organisable. The convergence of interests can continue. But the leverage of individual actors would drop dramatically.
Because we are not one market, we do not build tech champions anymore
Ask any European under thirty when they last used a European tech service, and you get a long pause. Search engine: Google (US 🇺🇸). Laptop operating system: Windows or macOS (both US 🇺🇸). Phone operating system: iOS (US 🇺🇸) or Android (US 🇺🇸). Email: Gmail or Outlook (both US 🇺🇸). Video conference: Teams or Zoom (both US 🇺🇸). Cloud: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud (all US 🇺🇸). Social media: WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat (all US 🇺🇸), TikTok (US 🇺🇸 plus China 🇨🇳), X (US 🇺🇸). Payment card: Visa or Mastercard (both US 🇺🇸). AI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google (all US 🇺🇸).
The Draghi report puts the diagnosis in one sentence: Europe largely missed the digital revolution. Specifically: only four of the fifty largest tech companies in the world are European. There is no EU company with a market capitalisation above 100 billion euros that was built from scratch in the last fifty years. In the same period, six US companies were built from scratch with valuations above one trillion dollars: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta. Thirty percent of European unicorns, meaning startups that reached a one-billion-dollar valuation, relocated from Europe to the US between 2008 and 2021.
The question is not whether this is because of lack of talent. Europe has top universities, plenty of engineers, deep research traditions. Europe has ASML (the only company in the world that produces cutting-edge semiconductor lithography), SAP (world-leading enterprise software), Airbus, Ericsson, Nokia, Spotify, Mistral. There is nothing structurally impossible about European tech. What is missing is scale.
Why is scale missing? Because the European market is not one market but 27. 27 tax regimes, 27 corporate law systems, 27 insolvency frameworks, 27 labour law frameworks, 27 stock exchanges, 27 regulatory authorities in most sectors. A startup in Madrid that wants to scale across Europe has to navigate 27 separate legal systems. A startup in San Francisco that wants to scale nationally has a single internal market and a single currency. The Draghi report estimates that the fragmentation of the European internal market alone costs about ten percent of potential GDP every year.
The Capital Markets Union, the EU project that has been trying to fix this fragmentation since 2015, is still not complete ten years later. Enrico Letta delivered a report in 2024 on behalf of the European Council proposing a “28th regime”: an optional EU-wide legal framework for companies, which firms could voluntarily opt into instead of registering under a national system. Technically elegant. Politically blocked for over a year.
A federation would cut through this knot, not because national systems disappear, but because a real common framework exists. Common corporate-law baseline, common capital-market supervision, common taxation at the federal level with national taxes underneath (as in Switzerland), a proper stock exchange that can compete with the New York Stock Exchange.
You can see this beginning at the payments layer. The digital euro, a central bank digital currency that the ECB has been developing since 2021, is scheduled for first issuance in 2029, assuming EU legislation passes in 2026. The idea: a European retail payment instrument, not tied to Visa or Mastercard, privacy-by-design, with offline functionality. Independently of that, since July 2024 there has been Wero, a pan-European mobile payment system by the European Payments Initiative, which has replaced Giropay, Paylib, Payconiq and iDEAL. 14 million users four months after launch, now with Revolut, N26, five Luxembourgish and five Belgian banks integrated, point-of-sale scheduled for 2026. The stated goal: “greater independence from American payment service providers”.
These are not finished alternatives to the US platforms. But they are infrastructure being built, at a European level, under European rules. A federal state would be the structural prerequisite for these approaches to scale, instead of getting stuck in the usual 27-country mess.
Switzerland already exists, by the way
Before I go further, I need to clear one objection out of the way that would otherwise sabotage the rest: “But a European federal state means we become America, we lose our culture, Brussels rules everything, Austria turns into a district of Berlin.” I know that objection. I take it seriously. And I think it does not describe the federation I actually mean.
Switzerland has been a federal state since 1848. It has 26 cantons, four official languages (German 62%, French 23%, Italian 8%, Romansh 0.5%), and a radical subsidiarity principle: most state authority stays with the cantons; the federal level has only the competencies that have been explicitly transferred to it. That is not the US model. It is almost the opposite of the US model.
Concretely: the Federal Council has seven members, serves as collective head of state, with the presidency rotating annually. No single imperial executive president. Since the Second World War the Federal Council has by convention been a permanent grand coalition including the larger parties and all language regions. The legislature is bicameral: National Council (proportional to population) and Council of States (two seats per full canton regardless of population).
The Council of States is where small-state protection is structurally entrenched. Appenzell Innerrhoden has 16,000 inhabitants and one seat; Zurich has 1.46 million and two. The ratio between the smallest and largest canton, measured by inhabitants per seat, is 45.8 to 1. If an EU federation replicates this mechanic, Malta carries roughly the weight of Appenzell, Germany has proportionally more seats but nothing close to proportional to its population, and small states are structurally not overridable.
Healthcare is cantonal. Education is cantonal (including language of instruction). Police is cantonal. Tax rates are cantonal plus a federal layer. Cultural policy is cantonal. Direct democracy exists at every level: mandatory referenda on constitutional changes and membership in international organisations, optional referenda triggered by 50,000 signatures for any federal law, popular initiatives for constitutional amendments triggered by 100,000 signatures.
What is centralised? Foreign policy. Defence. Currency. Customs. Federal courts. External representation. These are the domains where a small state alone achieves nothing against a world of empires. These are also the domains where Europe today does not act as one. Exactly overlapping.
And Swiss consolidation did not happen overnight. 1848 the federal state was proclaimed. 1850 the single currency arrived and the cantonal internal tariffs were abolished. 1851 brought unified postal service and telegraph. 1854 brought federal infrastructure projects. 1859 abolished mercenary service, a step towards having one army instead of several. 1874 the constitution was revised and federal powers extended. Twenty-seven years of gradual consolidation, not one big bang. This is a pattern that can work for the EU if we decide on it.
The point is: federation is not a synonym for centralised superstate. It is a structural decision about which level gets which competencies. Switzerland has shown for 177 years how you combine this with deep internal diversity. When I say I want Europe to become a federal state, the Swiss pattern is what I aim for, not the American.
What this would concretely mean for Austria
Abstract is easy. Let me try concrete: what would change for Austria under a European federal state.
The Bundesheer. Today: formally neutral, de-facto in NATO’s Partnership for Peace since 1995, participates in PESCO, joined EU sanctions against Russia in 2022, not equipped enough for serious territorial defence, not NATO-interoperable enough to meaningfully contribute to coalition operations. Budget 4.2 billion euros per year. Too little for standalone defence, enough as a serious contribution to a European force if the structures fit.
Under a federal state: the Bundesheer is absorbed into a European military. Not in addition, as replacement. The 4.2 billion still flows, but into an armaments system that is twelvefold more efficient because no European state is building its own tank line. Austrian officers have careers in European structures. Austrian territory is federal territory, not national-military, but precisely therefore defended collectively, not dependent only on Austrian force capacity. Mutual defence guaranteed not by a treaty but by constitutional structure.
Neutrality. Austria formally proclaimed neutrality in 1955 as a condition of the State Treaty. The Neutralitätsgesetz prohibits joining military alliances and hosting foreign military bases. Formally in force. Practically perforated since 1995: EU membership including CFSP, PESCO participation, EU Article 42(7) TEU mutual defence clause, participation in sanctions against Russia. Our neutrality has been ritual, not reality, for thirty years. Switzerland, with its older tradition of armed neutrality, broke its own in February 2022 by joining EU sanctions against Russia. We are formally more neutral than Switzerland. In practice, not.
Under a federal state: neutrality is honestly retired. No more dirty little secret that we belong to the Western security architecture while pretending to float above it. The SPÖ will find this emotionally hard. The ÖVP will be grateful. The population will be against it in polls at first, and then, as the alternative becomes clearly “dependent on American goodwill and Russian tolerance”, in favour. That is a shift that needs time. It is overdue.
Asylum and migration. The current Dublin Regulation loads the burden disproportionately on border states. Italy, Greece, Spain first, Austria occasionally as a transit state. Every migration wave becomes a national escalation spiral, because no one feels responsible. Redistribution among member states does not work, because it is based on voluntary solidarity and no one is voluntarily solidary.
Under a federal state: federal asylum authority, federal funding, federal jurisdiction. Like the US, where no individual state runs its own immigration policy because it would obviously not work. The asylum decision is made by a common federal body. Housing and integration costs are distributed across all member states, based on population and economic capacity, not based on accident of which border a person crossed. This does not solve the political question of how many people to accept. That is a majority decision. But it does solve the structural injustice that border states carry all of it.
Economy and tech sovereignty. Austria is a small, export-dependent economy. A unified capital market, a Letta-28 regime, digital sovereignty, European scale: these are not abstractions for us, they are directly economically relevant. Austrian startups need the European market as a real market, not as 27 regulatory systems to navigate. If the digital euro is available in Austria from 2029 the way cash is, our payment system stops hanging on Visa and Mastercard. When the Capital Markets Union is finally complete, the Vienna stock exchange becomes proportionally smaller, but the European capital market as a whole offers Austrian companies a scale-up environment that Vienna alone never could.
Civil rights and democratic accountability. The most common objection to more Brussels is: “But then the Commission has even more power and nobody controls it.” The argument takes the status quo seriously, but it does not take seriously that the current arrangement is not meaningfully controlled by anyone either. The Commission is indirectly legitimated, the European Council is powerful but democratically opaque, the European Parliament has no right of initiative. A federal state with a directly elected executive, a parliament with real powers, and a strong European Court of Justice is not less democratic than what we have now. It is more. Because it becomes accountable.
Culture, education, language, local politics. All of this stays with Austria. The way education stays with the cantons in Switzerland, the way culture stays largely with the Länder in Germany. Nobody wants Brussels to regulate the Vienna Opera Ball or standardise the Austrian school curriculum. Most people confuse this out of reflexive fear: federation does not mean abolishing Austria. Federation means Austria stays Austria in everything that makes Austria, and becomes part of something larger in everything where Austria alone is too small.
The serious objections
I believe in this, but I am not naive. There are three objections to a European federal state that I take seriously and have to actually answer. If I do not, this is a manifesto, not an argument.
First: Germany dominates. The sociologist Wolfgang Streeck calls the EU a “liberal empire”: a hegemonic centre (Germany) imposing austerity conditions on the peripheries (Southern Europe), effectively gutting their democratic sovereignty. The classic case is Greece 2015, where the Troika forced a course on the country that no Greek government wanted to implement. If that is the implicit EU dynamic, Streeck argues, federation does not fix it. It formalises it.
I take that seriously. The diagnosis is correct. But Streeck’s conclusion does not follow. Germany dominates the EU today through informal bilateral pressure, through its economic size, through ECB policy. That is power without democratic accountability to the people who suffer under it. A federation would formalise this dominance and precisely thereby make it accountable. Majority voting, a Council of States with small-state protection like Switzerland’s, a directly elected federal executive, a constitutional court with real powers. What Streeck wants instead is loose cooperation among sovereign small states. That is what we have. The result is Greece 2015. The argument is correct; the alternative Streeck proposes is the current status quo.
Second: democratic deficit. Andrew Moravcsik, a Princeton political scientist, has made the reverse argument: the EU is already democratic enough, because the Commission is carried by democratically elected national governments in the Council. That works for regulatory tasks, but it breaks for existential strategic decisions. Negotiation among 27 democracies works for trade rules. It does not work when Russia invades and Hungary blocks.
Dieter Grimm, a German constitutional law scholar, put this in a deeper form: democracy requires a demos, a political community that understands itself as such. Europe does not have one. Europeans identify primarily nationally. No demos, no democracy, therefore no federation.
That is empirically true and still not the argument it wants to be. Switzerland since 1848 has run a federal state with four languages, different religious traditions, deep cantonal identities, and a Sonderbund war in 1847 fought right before federation. The Swiss demos developed with the federal state, not before it. Italian national identity emerged after unification, not before. German, after 1871. Identity is built by institutions, not before them. I personally see myself as more European than Austrian. That is anecdotal, but it illustrates the point: the demos emerges when the structures allow it. Whether it emerges fast enough is open. But the claim that it does not exist at all is refuted daily by the millions of Europeans who study, work, build relationships, and move between cities in different countries as a matter of course.
Third: Brexit as a warning. This is the most serious populist critique of federation, and it does not just come from the FPÖ, Lega, Rassemblement National, AfD: if even an EU member with opt-outs and its own currency leaves the union, what happens once we take the step to federation? A federation would trigger further Brexits and eventually destabilise the EU as a whole.
This is a serious concern. Three counterpoints.
First, Brexit was overdetermined by British pathologies that do not exist elsewhere in this combination: thirty years of EU-hostile tabloid press, a post-imperial self-image of sovereignty, a political class that sold every EU decision as Brussels diktat. On top of that an island identity, a separate common-law system, a separate currency. The structural conditions for a second Brexit exist nowhere else in Europe in this constellation.
Second, the 4% GDP loss after eight years is now documented, and polling since 2022 consistently shows a majority of Britons considering Brexit a mistake. In 2016 leaving was a wager without precedent. In 2026 it is a concrete case with measurable costs. If the next populist party tries to sell “Italexit” or “Frexit”, it runs against a very concrete price tag.
Third, and most importantly: what did not happen. When the UK left, 27 other states stayed, even though the populist temptation politically exists in nearly all of them. No one followed. That is a strong revealed preference. A federation would deepen the staying option.
Brexit is not an argument against integration, but evidence that half integration is brittle. The real choice is between shared and meaningless sovereignty.
How this actually happens
The standard reflex against federation is: “That would need treaty changes, unanimity, referenda, you cannot do it”. That is half right. A full treaty revision is hard. But federation is not a single big bang. It is a direction, and on this direction there are several tools that do not all have the same threshold.
First: we have already built a lot. The euro is a currency-federal structure covering 20 of 27 member states. Schengen is an internal-borders-federal structure covering 26 countries. The customs union is an external-trade-federal structure covering all 27. Frontex has had 10,000 of its own border guards since 2019, operating as a federal executive for external border protection. PESCO, the permanent structured defence cooperation, has been running since 2017 with 25 of 27 member states (Austria among them). Next Generation EU, the 750-billion-euro recovery instrument from 2020, was the first significant piece of EU common debt. It will be repaid from EU own resources until 2058. That is federal-scale fiscal policy in practice, even if it does not formally use the word.
So we do not start from zero. We already have fragments of a federation. The question is how we finish building.
Second: passerelle clauses. The Treaty of Lisbon contains mechanisms that let specific policy areas move from unanimity to qualified majority voting without a formal treaty amendment requiring national ratification. The general passerelle clause in Article 48(7) TEU requires: European Council unanimous, plus European Parliament absolute majority, plus no national parliament objecting within six months. Article 31 TEU allows the same for parts of the Common Foreign and Security Policy. If we want to resolve the Hungarian blockage without running a full constitutional debate, this is the route. Yes, the passerelle itself requires unanimity to activate. But once activated, qualified majority applies permanently in that area.
Third: enhanced cooperation. Enhanced cooperation allows at least nine member states to deepen integration within EU structures, without the others. Schengen started this way with five countries and has grown to 26. PESCO is enhanced cooperation on defence. The euro is in effect enhanced cooperation on currency. If a federal core emerges within the EU, this is the mechanism: the willing first, the others later.
Fourth: the constitutional convention. The European Parliament formally called for a constitutional convention for treaty revision in June 2022, after the Conference on the Future of Europe produced 49 concrete reform proposals through citizens’ panels in 2021-2022. Among them: abolition of unanimity in specific policy areas, direct election of the Commission President, transnational lists in EP elections. Member states, especially the smaller ones unwilling to surrender their veto, ignored this. But the demand stands. At the next crisis that makes treaty reform plausible, it will be raised again.
Fifth: crisis as catalyst. This is the uncomfortable part. Federation historically happens when the external environment forces it. Switzerland in 1848 was constituted out of the Sonderbund war, in the middle of the European revolutionary year. The US made the jump from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution in 1787 because the confederal structure had collapsed under trade disputes and debt. Both federations were crisis-born. The EU is currently facing a combination of crises not seen since 1957: the 2022 Russian invasion, 2025 US tariffs and NATO retreat under Trump 2.0, Hungarian blockages, widening economic gap to the US and China, tech dependence. Somewhere in the next five to fifteen years, one of these crises will be acute enough to make treaty reform politically plausible. We should not wait for it. But we should not exclude it either.
The realistic sequence, as I see it: 2025 to 2030 brings the activation of the passerelle for parts of the CFSP, the digital euro is issued, Wero establishes itself as European payment infrastructure, the defence industry consolidates under the European Defence Fund and the 150-billion-euro loans-for-arms fund agreed in 2025. 2030 to 2040: a constitutional convention is convened, enhanced cooperation among the willing for deeper fiscal integration, a European military grows organically out of PESCO, the Capital Markets Union is completed. 2040 and beyond: a full federal treaty, probably in response to a concrete crisis that has no other resolution.
Maybe that is too optimistic. But it is not “never”. It is a sequence built on processes already running. That is the difference between utopia and direction.
An old idea
Before closing, a short historical panorama. The idea of a united Europe is not a Macron invention, not a Schuman invention, not even a twentieth-century invention. It reaches far back and has been articulated repeatedly in different languages.
Victor Hugo said at the 1849 Paris Peace Congress: “A day will come when we will see the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching their hands to each other across the seas.” He planted a tree during his exile on Guernsey and said that when the tree was mature, the United States of Europe would exist. The tree is still standing. In 1867 in Geneva, Hugo, Giuseppe Garibaldi, John Stuart Mill, and Mikhail Bakunin together signed an appeal for a European federation at the League of Peace and Freedom Congress. Bakunin: “To achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace, only one path lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe.”
An Austrian belongs to the key twentieth-century figures of this line: Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-Europa movement in Vienna in 1923. His vision of a united Europe was later picked up in France and Italy, but it began in Vienna. Altiero Spinelli wrote the Ventotene Manifesto in 1941 while imprisoned by Mussolini, the founding document of postwar federalism. From this line comes Robert Schuman’s declaration of 1950, which founded the European Community. From this line comes Jean Monnet, the architect of practical European unification.
In the present: Jürgen Habermas has argued for a European constitutional patriotism for over twenty years. Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian prime minister, is one of the most visible federalist voices in the EP. Mario Draghi, former ECB President and Italian prime minister, said in a major speech at European Parliamentary Week in Brussels in February 2025: “The EU must operate more and more as if we were one state.” Emmanuel Macron gave Sorbonne speeches in 2017 and 2024 calling for federation in everything but name. Enrico Letta delivered the 2024 report Much More Than a Market with concrete federation-adjacent proposals. The German coalition agreement of 2021 explicitly included European federalism as a goal. And DerStandard, one of Austria’s larger newspapers, publishes forum pieces titled “Is it time for a United States of Europe?”.
Modern movements: the Union of European Federalists, founded in 1946, still active. Volt Europa, a pan-European party with MEPs in the European Parliament. Since Trump 2.0, all of this has gained momentum.
A 175-year-old line, not a fringe reflex, back in the political mainstream for the first time since Schuman. I am writing nothing here that Victor Hugo did not formulate better in 1849.
What remains
The poster does not hang in any schools anymore. Or maybe it does, I don’t know, maybe it has been replaced with other motifs, maybe my memory is just cheating me.
What was on it was never a state of the world. It was a direction: children reaching their hands across a globe, different skin colours, no background that placed one nation above the others. That was never the case. That was what was meant.
I am not eight anymore. I know today that the adults who put up the poster did not know how far from the picture we still were either. That does not change the fact that the direction was the right one. Since 2016 we have been moving away from it, that is the state of things. The question is whether it stays that way, or whether we decide to correct the direction.
My bet is we will. Not because the signs right now look promising, they look terrible. But because the alternative, continued fragmentation, eventually becomes unbearable even in the smallest nations. At some point a generation decides to come together, because everything else is crushing it. I want to be part of that generation. I think I will live to see it.
And at some point, maybe in ten years, maybe in twenty, a poster hangs again in a classroom somewhere in Europe. Maybe drawn differently, maybe with a few more countries, but the same idea. And a child stands in front of it, eight years old, and learns that this is how it is meant to be.
That is not a forecast. It is a stance. And if you have read this far, you are welcome to share it.
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