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Europe is not a state, and that is a problem — mainly an economic problem. The strength of the euro is compromised by this. It is far easier to imagine Europe breaking apart than to imagine the United States doing so — and today, that disintegration feels like a messy but genuine possibility.
The modern state — that is, the nation-state — is a specific historical product. As Martin van Creveld argues in The Rise and Decline of the State, the modern state represents a process of becoming: the unfolding of a novel and particular political and sociocultural arrangement that is distinctly European in origin. Euro-America remains, to this day, the paradigmatic home of the nation-state.
The United States embodies a further evolution of this political form: it possesses a supra-state federal structure layered over individual states. In a world where progress is measured by GDP growth, this could be read as the logical development of the entity that claims sovereignty and a monopoly over legislation and legitimate violence.
This concept of sovereignty rests on the idea that a nation, embodied by the state, is the only author and agent of its own will and destiny. It derives from what Eckard Bolsinger, in The Autonomy of the Political, calls the will to representation — a useful abstraction. This will to representation, both popular and collective, does not require active participation; rather, it draws its power precisely from being an abstraction.
As Bolsinger argues, for this will to representation — the foundation of state sovereignty — to come into being, to become ontologically conceivable, it must presuppose a break from an enslaving agency, a tyranny, or a similarly dominating evil. Historically and paradigmatically, the American and French revolutions exemplify such a break. They made the state, as the embodiment of popular will, the master of its own collective destiny.
This would imply that violence is the direct route to state sovereignty. Yet this violence must not be arbitrary or illegitimate; it must be sanctioned. Only when violence is constituted through a politico-juridical order can it be accepted as legitimate by the international community.
These were some of the principles derived from the Peace of Westphalia. Within a nation’s borders, there is no higher order than that of the state. It is the law of the land; it cannot be countermanded, and no one can appeal to a higher law. As Gianfranco Poggi observes in The Development of the Modern State, only a successful act of violence against an oppressing agent — declared the “will of the people” through a constitution — can overthrow that law.
The act of violence that frees the nation from the tyrant becomes the nation’s birth — its foundational myth. In Spain, it was the so-called Reconquista; in France, the French Revolution; in Italy, the Risorgimento. This act legitimizes the ensuing state, which, once constituted, claims the entirety of the political space — nay, the entirety of the existential space — for we assume that no one can live outside citizenship, and to be a citizen is to identify the self with the state as the sovereign representation of one’s own nation.
The European Union would like Europe to become a state. That was the essence of the Pleven Plan, which proposed both political union and a defense pact. This proved too ambitious, so early architects such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman charted a gradual path — from economic to political integration.
They were the public, acknowledged faces promoting the idea of a European Union as a safeguard against another European civil war. What they did not foresee was that, for Europe to become a nation-state, violence would again be required. Today it is widely acknowledged that other powerful forces pushed toward the same goal, albeit for different reasons.
The United States, through the CIA, was one of them. The American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) was founded in 1948 as a privately run, covertly funded organization to promote European federalism and counter Communism. Declassified records show that between 1949 and 1960, U.S. intelligence provided roughly $4 million to the European Movement. Some claim that, in 1958, over half (53.5%) of its funding came from ACUE. For Washington, the primary objective was to unify Europe against the Soviet Union — and, secondarily, to answer Kissinger’s famous question: “Who do I call in Europe?”
Another powerful influence behind the EU’s creation was the Bilderberg Group. Founded in 1955 to foster transatlantic dialogue, the now not-so-secretive organization is a household name among global elites. Minutes from its early meetings confirm that plans for a European monetary union were on its agenda from the start. Étienne Davignon, former EU commissioner, later acknowledged in an interview with EUobserver that the group played a pivotal role in creating a unified currency — the euro.
But the euro suffers from an ontological problem — one that all the above actors have sought, and failed, to resolve: it represents a sovereignty that constitutionally does not exist. After the Treaties of Rome in 1957 (establishing the European Economic Community) and Maastricht in 1992 (creating the European Union), the next logical step should have been a European constitution to provide political legitimacy. Europeans, however, rejected it — twice. European elites tried to bypass the rejection through the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), but the constitutional void remains.
Because the European Union is not a state, it cannot claim to be the supreme law of the land — nor can it demand the ultimate civic sacrifice. It also lacks the authority to levy taxes, since fiscal sovereignty remains with national governments — the only entities that can claim to embody the popular will constituted in the state. This is dangerous. Without the ability to tax or to enforce its law as ultimate, the EU remains vulnerable.
The project of the European Union — and, above all, the euro — can only be completed once Europe becomes a single state. The collapse of the Union would mean the collapse of the currency. And the disappearance of the euro would pose serious challenges; it would shake the global financial system. Would the euro retain value without a sovereign European Central Bank? Certainly not. What of nations holding reserves in euros — about 20% of global totals — or the interlinked European banking system, denominated in euros? The scale of the disruption defies easy calculation.
The threat to the EU project, however, comes as much from within as from without. In order to maintain the economic project that is the European Union, and with the ultimate goal of creating a single state, the EU has introduced policies that erode the foundations of its member nations.
Influenced by postmodern theories of the “liquid individual,” European elites underestimated the power of the nation-state to fashion the subjectivity of its citizens. For an individual to be invested in the nation and accept the state as the embodiment of its own sovereignty, they must think of the nation as an extended family. An attack on the nation thus feels like an attack on the self.
The European Union attacks the nation because, in order to become a state, it must eliminate the legitimacy of other, smaller states. Citizens, sensing this, have grown alienated from the EU project — as evidenced by persistently low turnout in European elections. They fail to see how “what is good for Europe” benefits them personally. And they correctly perceive that those wielding real power — the European Commission and the European Central Bank — are unelected and unaccountable. Opportunistic politicians exploit this resentment through nationalistic narratives.
To confront this, Europe’s elites can only move forward toward the European state. There can be no looking back, as the logic of state formation acquires its own inertia. In this case, the logic of the state is the logic of the euro. The European Union is an economic project that needs a state, and it will do anything to achieve one — because otherwise, it will vanish.
To reach that end, it has two instruments: war and the ECB’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). A full war against Russia is unnecessary; the appearance of one suffices. But if war does occur, it will forge a “European will” stronger than any treaty. The outcome of the conflict is almost irrelevant — the key is that an idea of Europe emerges from it with a sense of having been liberated from a tyrant. That moment would justify a constitution, which would in turn empower a parliament to tax, transcending national governments.
Creating the conditions for that event seems to be the only rationale that explains the current war narrative pushed by European elites. The crisis born of war, real or imagined, would also be the perfect opportunity to introduce the ECB’s digital currency, for which the stage is set with the digital IDs. At that point, the European state would have fully emerged — and the euro, finally, would be safe.
