By Mauro Casarotto |
“It is better to light a lamp than curse the darkness” – a proverb attributed to Confucius
Just a few weeks before Donald Trump’s resettlement in the White House, the global framework that had emerged from the end of the Cold War, after at least two decades of gradual deterioration, reached its final breaking point. Throughout history, a relatively orderly phase has often been followed by one of chaos. We are once again in such a phase.
The twilight of NATO
Already during the election campaign, the Trump administration supported parties and structures in Europe with neo-fascist/neo-Nazi aspirations, or, in some cases, pro-Putin. What these two groups of forces have in common, and thus share with the Trump administration, is the desire to prevent the political and military unity of European countries. This activity of supporting the enemies of European unity became even more frantic after the inauguration of the new mandate.
From the start, for Trump resolving the Russian-Ukrainian meant sidelining NATO partners and humiliating Ukraine, portrayed on global television as responsible for the Russian invasion, completely dependent on arms and systems provided by the USA, and led by a disoriented leadership.
Trump is telling America and the world that Europe and Ukraine are parasites of the USA and that it will be him, one way or another, who will fix the situation. This scenario, which could have been largely predicted by Europeans, exacerbates conflicts with unpredictable outcomes that have been developing on the continent for a long time.
The Arctic question
To this already explosive situation is added the issue of the Arctic, of great strategic and economic importance. Trump has put immense pressure on both Canada, with the request for it to become the 51st state of the USA, and Greenland. The latter is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, which, in addition to being a member of the European Union, is a NATO ally.
Greenland was occupied by U.S. military forces during World War II following the German invasion of Denmark in April 1940. The occupation occurred with some level of agreement with the Danes, whose government was then forced to cooperate with the Nazis. The goal of the occupation was to prevent Greenland from being used as part of the German offensive system in the North Atlantic. Since then, the United States has maintained a significant military presence in the north of the island, the Thule Air Base.
Since the 19th century, Greenland has been the subject of several U.S. proposals to purchase it, renewed again during the first Trump administration. Nothing new, then, except for Trump’s statement that, similarly to what was proposed for Panama, the use of force would not be excluded if the Kingdom of Denmark and the Greenlanders refused to yield.
This threat raises entirely new diplomatic problems. Article 5 of the NATO founding treaty requires all members to provide defensive assistance to a member state that is attacked. It has been invoked only once so far, by the United States, after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
What would happen if the United States were to violate Greenland’s sovereignty? Would Article 5 apply to Danish Crown possessions? Would other NATO countries need to defend it from the Americans?
These threats gain even more significance the higher the level of aggressiveness and recklessness exhibited by the Trump administration in every foreign policy activity. Could it be that Greenland is part of negotiations between Trump and Putin? A green light for the Russian Arctic in exchange for something more in the Black Sea region?
A conflict over Greenland would lead to the immediate political death of NATO, as it effectively would be a war between former allies. But NATO could also be killed independently of this.
Two Further Possible Scenarios. First, a deal between Putin and Trump that could lead to a division of Central-Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, with progressive Russian penetration into NATO territories such as the Baltic States, Romania, or Poland. European countries would likely not accept this evolution, and the very reason for NATO’s existence would disappear, namely the military alliance between Europe and the United States, which historically developed as a deterrence against Russia (the Soviet Union until 1991).
Second, the possibility of Washington’s direct withdrawal from the organization, as already suggested by Trump and Musk. In both cases, the United States could decide to withdraw part of its military presence in Europe and manage/redistribute the remaining presence (currently around 80,000 troops) based on negotiated agreements with individual countries, relying more on those European governments that are less inclined to fight for Ukraine or are openly pro-Putin.
The agreement with individual European countries, bypassing intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union, and NATO, is a fixed strategy of the Trump Administration, and I hope it has been sufficiently demonstrated that it cannot be moderated by any form of “moral suasion” coming from the old continent.
The end of the soft power illusion and the subsequent prospects
For many years, the European Union has been attributed a form of ‘soft power.’ A force that was believed to stem from the vastness and importance of its market area and the presumed universal attractiveness of civil liberties and democratic systems, extended also to countries previously governed by military dictatorships (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and to Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the fragmentation of Yugoslavia.
In the presence of military powers pursuing opposite strategic objectives, that is the exact situation we find ourselves in today, soft power can, to some extent, only find space under the protection of an armed power, such as the United States has been for Europe since 1945.
Today, everything has changed. In the best-case scenario, the United States will no longer provide a defense system for Europe. In the worst case, the United States will no longer be an ally. In the darkest scenario, Trump and Putin will not only negotiate an agreement but form a full-fledged alliance.
European countries have only two options: to immediately and seriously address their own security system or to choose which power to become vassals of, accepting the rules imposed by the master and hoping for its benevolence. And in that case, democracy and rights will be few and far between.
The first of the two options appears realistic only through the union of efforts from individual countries. Demographics tell us this, and the functioning of economies of scale suggest it. It is also a matter of practicality, as, at least initially, in order to have a sufficient mass available to avoid being completely crushed by the hard power pressing from both the west and the east, there is no other path than to combine the limited resources of many.
And it is precisely at this point that, assuming European countries do not choose to become vassals, the dilemma, the bifurcation in history, arises. The first possibility is that the European army forms as an alliance capable of replacing NATO should it dissolve. In practical terms, this would be a unified command but without a common foreign policy, and therefore it could split again once the emergency period ends or in the event of strategic divergences between the various partners. Alternatively, it could take shape as the permanent armed forces of a sovereign European state, with its own foreign policy and, therefore, a deterrent of considerably greater effectiveness. In practice, this decisively raises the issue of common European sovereignty.
Why the intergovernmental European Union cannot be sovereign
And here comes the problem. States are structures. Not only of course, but also—and perhaps above all—structures. There are dozens of states in Europe. This is, in itself, a positive element, as this variety represents and values the breadth of cultures, traditions, languages, and institutions in our continent. But Europe is not a sovereign state. A sovereign European state still does not exist.
This structural absence does not only penalize the defense sector but any area where it is necessary to organize and present to the rest of the world a strategic and programmatic vision and order: environmental protection, the fight against climate change, a single currency, management of migratory flows, and emergency situations such as pandemics, to name a few.
The European Union is not a sovereign state. This is because the European Union was not founded as a federal state (examples: United States of America, Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland) but as a set of intergovernmental institutions regulated by international treaties among the member states.
In intergovernmental institutions, the final decision-makers are the heads of government of individual states. In the case of the European Union, we are talking about the European Council (composed of the heads of government of member states) and the Commission (whose members are chosen and allocated among the various governments).
The European Parliament does not have legislative initiative power. To pass a law, the consent of both the Council and the Commission is needed, that is, the heads of government and their appointees. And most importantly, and this is the gravest issue, there is no separation between the role of the heads of government of individual states and the administrators of the Union, as it is precisely the members of the governments of individual states who are the final decision-makers!
The heads of government, when they meet in the European Council, theoretically have a legal obligation, established by the treaties, to focus solely on the common interests of all states and citizens of the Union. However, it is evident that they systematically disregard this theoretical obligation, as they are, in fact, tied to national interests and the local mandate they have received from the citizens of their states through elections in their respective countries.
This dual mandate—national interest and common European interest administered by the same people—is at the heart of a gigantic and unhealthy conflict of interest, a conflict inherent and insurmountable in all intergovernmental organizations, and yes, certainly also in the UN.
This is why, in properly structured federal states, there is a parliament with full legislative initiative power, with a lower house that represents all the citizens of the federation, plus an upper house that represents the individual member states, and a federal government, whose mandate is separate from that of the administrators of the individual states. A politician cannot be the leader of a single member state and at the same time the leader of the unified federal state! Just as a single condominium owner cannot be the administrator of the entire building, or a city’s football team cannot organize the entire championship, which is organized by the national football federation to which all clubs belong. The examples with private federations are very convenient. Even if we forget, federal organizations are everywhere and form very solid functional structures capable of connecting different units with one another.
Returning to public federations, and specifically those between states, when they are correctly structured, there is a division between the powers of the federal state and those reteined by the participating states. A barrier is thus created between the federal level and that of the individual participants, which cannot be arbitrarily crossed by the former at the expense of the latter. This is to prevent forced assimilation. Because it is clear that each community, among its aspirations, seeks to preserve its own peculiarities, culture, traditions, institutions, and entrust the federal body with looking after only those common interests that the individual states can no longer manage on their own or that it is more convenient and efficient to manage together. As is obviously the case with defense.
In a federal state, these rules are enshrined in a federal constitution. The constitution generates a federal state, while intergovernmental treaties, even if they can generate institutions like the European Parliament or the UN General Assembly, do not generate any state, nor any sovereign federal level. Instead, they generate a pathological accumulation of conflicting national interests.
Intergovernmental systems are valid tools for managing certain international agreements with specific, limited objectives, sometimes even limited in time, such as in the case of building a bridge that connects two banks of the same river with different sovereignties or an exchange program between students from universities in countries that want to share their cultures. Intergovernmental systems, however, are a disastrous solution for countries that want to form a cohesive political union without time limits, and in the following sections we will better explain the reasons for this.
Why the intergovernmental European Union is not reformable and we must choose a different scenario
Premise: Now, I know it is emotionally very difficult and uncomfortable for those people who have placed their trust in the European Union institutions for years or even entire lifetimes, seeing their horizon in them, to realize and accept that this system has been poorly designed and born with very serious structural flaws. That one by one, all chickens come home to roost and a radical structural change is needed. This is a particularly conflicting step for activists who are engaged in promoting the vision of European unity. I want to clarify that it is not the values that the European Union represents that are being questioned here; it is certainly not the blue flags with stars, the “Ode to Joy” anthem, and the overarching vision. On values, there may certainly be some divergences that will remain part of cultural and political debates for who knows how long, as is the case in any plural community. Here, we are discussing institutional and administrative structures and what a collective, the peoples of Europe, must do to adapt to the reality of their time and the needs of the future. First and foremost, the issue of ending armed conflicts, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the protection of the natural environment, which are the vital issues for the entire planet.
The narrative, alternative to that of soft power, which speaks of the “democratic deficit” of the European Union, is also overly optimistic. Given the premises we have made, in the European Union: 1) there is no separation of powers between those retained by the member states and those attributed to the Union level, and 2) there is no separation between the executive and legislative powers.
Therefore, the European Union is structured as an oligarchy of heads of government, where citizens have a right to be heard but, in practice, very weak control powers, both directly (through the democratically elected Parliament) and via their representatives.
So, beyond the proclamation of the values to be pursued, the European Union is not a democratic structure. It preaches democracy in its charters of rights and duties and in its directives, yet its own structure does not practice it.
Political structures—such as states or federations of states—are the ordered space within which the law is meant to be exercised and within which various policies, as objectives and projects of the communities living within those structures, can be implemented. The structure is the common home. If it is solid, it benefits everyone, regardless of the sometimes discordant aspirations of its various inhabitants.
The intergovernmental European Union can never become a democratic structure simply because it adopts libertarian or inclusive policies, even assuming it has enough strength to do so in today’s world of hard power. It can only become democratic by counterbalancing the oligarchy of heads of government, that is, by eliminating the intergovernmental method, counterbalancing the power of the heads of government with the power of an autonomous federal government level, and introducing a strict balance and separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
When designing this architecture not for a single community, but for several dozen states with different languages, cultures, and systems, it is necessary to apply with determination and rigor four key concepts from the best federal organizations:
- Identification of common interests (limited in number, precise) that are the raison d’être of the federation and the only areas within which the federal government’s prerogatives can be exercised.
- A federal constitution that establishes a federal state, sovereign within the limits set out in the previous point.
- Separation of federal powers: legislative, executive, and judicial must be autonomous from one another and separate from the powers of the individual member states.
- Equality of members, meaning that the states adhere to the same identical conditions and cannot negotiate any exclusionary clauses or clauses of preferential treatment.
On the latter point, a line must be drawn in contrast to the practice of the European Union, which, in order to attract more states, has progressively created anarchy in the access rules: the so-called ‘opt-outs’, negotiable clauses in treaties that derogate from the general rules.
Opt-outs create odious disparities between states and European citizens. We have situations like Poland, which is exempt from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, or Denmark (and previously the United Kingdom) exempt from adopting the Euro, or countries like Sweden and the Czech Republic that decided not to join the single currency despite being obligated by treaties, or states like Ireland and Cyprus that do not adhere to the Schengen agreements. A true chaos of rules and exceptions that citizens fail to understand, coming from those institutions that should unite them and treat them equally.
The veto right
Having made these necessary premises, we can finally discuss the abolition of the veto right of individual states in the Council of the European Union, a true mantra for the defenders of the intergovernmental European Union. These people are convinced that the EU’s architecture is essentially fine as it is and that the EU’s paralysis is due to the impossibility of so many heads of government reaching unanimous agreements, as required by the treaties in all the most important decisions.
Now, it is evident that making decisions in a veto system, as is already the case in the United Nations and generally in any intergovernmental organization, is a deteriorated form of public administration. Anyone who wants the unity of European states cannot be in favor of the veto right, but that is not the point.
The point is that abolishing the veto right does not have the power to transform a set of intergovernmental institutions into a sovereign federal state. Rather, it would have the power to disintegrate the European Union even more quickly than it is already happening. In fact, the number of Brexits would multiply, primarily promoted by those governments that want to be vassals of Putin or Trump (or both).
These governments are protective of the veto right and could not accept its abolition, as the veto right is the factor that allows them to have exactly the amount of European Union they desire, serving the selfish interests of their national priorities, if not the interests of their party or their clans.
This is how perverse the dual mandate typical of all large intergovernmental organizations is. As long as these governments remain inside, the veto right remains; if they start to pull their countries out, the disintegration of the Union, which began with Brexit in 2016, would resume (see also my article on Europe Today from December 24, 2019: Brexit’s Trauma and Europe Trapped Between Opposing Conservatism).
If the remaining governments were to agree to a reduction in the number of states in the Union in exchange for the abolition of the veto right, this would still not resolve any institutional problems. This is because, once the emergency phase, in which it is easier to find a certain level of cohesion, such as in the case of a European army, is over, the heads of government would once again prioritize national interests over common interests.
If you do not address the structural problem, the underlying defects will continue to fuel the processes of deterioration until the collapse of the structure.
The European Federation is not being, but must be
Contrary to what almost all Europeanists claim, the federation does not arise out of unconditional love for the current system of the European Union, nor does it come through an attempt to reform the treaties by adding further pieces of the intergovernmental system to an already failing intergovernmental structure. In fact, this would be repeating the same mistake over and over again: not wanting to create a federal constitution… perhaps out of fear of losing something or maybe because of the inability to convince public opinion?
The European Federation is not in the realm of being, what is already available to us. It is not a 2.0 evolution of the intergovernmental system. It is something else. The European Federation is still in the realm of must be, what does not yet exist but which necessity demands and will must pursue.
The federation arises as a recognized consequence of historical necessity, as an act of will and political revolution, and never, ever, as a reedition of the same forms that, by not structurally resolving the conflicts between nation-states, have confined Europe in an illusory enclosure of weakness and irrelevance on the global stage. A weakness that, to demolish another illusion, that of the “eighty years of peace,” has contributed to fueling the belief among autocrats, both near and far, that they could keep our continent divided and in conflict. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t eighty years of peace. It was forty-five years of the Cold War, during which the economy of Western Europe thrived, creating many illusions, and thirty-five years of stagnation and immobility, marked by conflicts in Eastern Europe, which were attempted to be resolved by expanding the intergovernmental system eastward and ignoring the fact that this system needed to be changed as a prerequisite for the stabilization of enlargement.
European Defense
We now come to the issue of European defense. Here, too, it is necessary to bring to light the real dilemma, which is not so much about which people and nationalities should command a European army, but rather about what political structure should organize and direct it.
It is indeed possible to form a common army that is the sum of various units from each state under the orders of a joint command. This solution was adopted by the Allies during the Second World War. After the emergency period ended, national armies would split, as the reason for their union would have ceased. This means that we would end up with more heavily armed nation-states, potentially in conflict with each other, increasing the risks for everyone.
In a federal state, the armed forces are unique (not common!) and have the task of defending the borders of the federal union. Individual states may retain, if provided for by the constitution, the ability to manage national police and militias without heavy armaments to maintain public order, as a support role to the federal armed forces and in the event of natural disasters.
A unified army functions as a perpetual de-escalation of potential conflicts between the member states.
It is clear that a unified military means a common foreign policy, a unified intelligence system, and a single defense industry plan. All of these elements could never be managed stably by an institution like the Council of the European Union, which — with or without the veto power — is tainted by national interests embodied in the cancer of the dual mandate.
The question that should spontaneously arise is: why don’t we already have all of this? Yet, in Europe, at the end of the Second World War, there were broad premises for making better choices, federal choices.
In 1941, with the famous ‘Ventotene Manifesto’, the Italians Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi, and Eugenio Colorni called for the creation of a federation based on constitutional principles, referencing models such as the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, which established the United States of America, and the 1848 Swiss Constitution. The constitution had already been advocated between 1938-1940 by the federalists of the ‘Federal Union’ movement, which had a significant influence in the British world. Despite these enlightening debates before and during the Second World War, once the conflict ended, European politicians preferred the route of treaties and the intergovernmental method. This was despite the fact that at the heart of Europe, we already had the Swiss federal constitution (which also emerged after an internal war), and in 1949 the German state was re-founded, under the impulse of the victorious powers of the war, as a federal state.
The Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, which is the birth certificate of the European Union, mentions the perspective of a ‘European federation’ twice but never the words ‘federal constitution’. Instead, it entrusted the construction of the union to the heads of government through the use of treaties and intergovernmental institutions. The declaration was suggested to Robert Schuman, then French foreign minister, by Jean Monnet, who could not have been unaware of the federal structure of the United States of America, having been appointed during the Second World War to manage relations between France and the USA, especially on crucial matters concerning arms supply.
In June 1940, it was also Monnet, who had carefully studied the federalists of the British Federal Union, who suggested to De Gaulle and Churchill the idea of uniting their two countries in an Anglo-French federation. At that moment, France was on the brink of being defeated by the Nazi invader, and the goal was to demonstrate to the French that the British would not abandon them, offering a horizon for continuing to fight.
Unfortunately, things turned out differently, and France surrendered, but we can be certain that between 1938 and the early 1950s, European political leaders had all the knowledge necessary to build a federation on constitutional grounds (for more details, refer to Leo Klinkers’ article published by Europe Today,”A Tale of Culpable Political Negligence” (https://www.europetodaymagazine.eu/2025/02/19/a-tale-of-culpable-political-negligence/ ).
Perhaps this was the result of a gradual vision fueled by good intentions, but we cannot ignore the fact that, over the following 70 years, we had an endless series of Schuman Declarations, deliberate political choices to continue working with intergovernmental treaties rather than adopting a federal constitution.
The situation even reached a linguistic fraud when, in 2005, the ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’ was proposed, later rejected by referendums in the Netherlands and France. This treaty was fundamentally a reorganization of previous treaties: it did not establish a European federal state, nor did it eliminate the dual mandate in any way. Yet, the drafters misled European citizens by calling it a ‘constitution’.
I am sure the readers will agree that it is a serious matter for a political class to use misleading terms that confuse citizens and undermine their understanding of the laws and institutions that should govern them. Whether this was intentional or unintentional, it is still serious. It should have been corrected immediately then, and it needs to be corrected now, albeit with great delay.
If Not Now, When?
Even the crisis of COVID-19 has been squandered, and the opportunity to correct the mistakes made in the 1950s has been missed. During that moment of grave difficulty and uncertainty, the European Union persisted in organizing a “Conference on the Future of Europe” (April 2021 – May 2022), where the words “federation” and “constitution” were completely ignored. There was much talk about policies, policies, and more policies, but never about the need for a radical structural change.
Now that the Trump cyclone has hit us, a large part of the leadership class in our countries, instead of reflecting on past mistakes and moving swiftly toward the only solution that can change the situation and repair Europe’s international position, is wasting time whining and convulsively panicking. A much smaller minority seems truly willing to consider the ‘must-be’ scenario we discussed earlier. While we wait for the first group to wake up from their sleepwalking, we turn to the second group, asking them to take on the burden of foresight and courage that the first group has abandoned.
In the same days that intergovernmental Europe was holding its conference, Faef – Federal Alliance of European Federalists, the organization that we, along with other European citizens, founded in 2018, launched an alternative Citizens’ Convention. It involved citizens from various European countries, who, together with constitutional law experts, drafted a text for the Constitution of the “Federated States of Europe” with only ten articles.
The goal of this constitution, with a much simpler and more straightforward structure than the Lisbon Treaty, is to implement federalism in Europe, to provide a founding document that is not coldly diplomatic or bureaucratic, which citizens can understand, remember in its essential lines, and recognize themselves in. It aims to address the democratic deficit by introducing elements that allow citizens to participate in governance and prevent and control abuses of power (separation of powers, direct democracy, deliberative democracy, oversight bodies). The Constitution for the Federated States of Europe (https://www.faef.eu/en_gb/#tve-jump-17425915282) is a political proposal available to all European citizens, offering Europe and its people a perspective that they have only dreamed of until now, one that their culture has already envisioned but that their political leaders have never dared to pursue.
Mauro Casarotto, Secretary General of the Federal Alliance of European Federalists