The EU

Twenty-seven states, one currency, four freedoms — and a permanent argument about how much further to go.

The brief

The European Union began life in 1951 as the European Coal and Steel Community — six countries pooling control over the raw materials of war, on the theory, voiced by Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, that two world wars had been quite enough and that integration should make a Franco-German war "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible." Three-quarters of a century later, in 2026, twenty-seven countries share a single currency (most of them), no internal borders (most of them), a parliament that passes binding laws with the Council on proposals from the Commission, a court that interprets EU law and enforces its primacy over conflicting national law, and a single market of 450 million people that is the world's second-largest economy and a global regulatory standard-setter. There is no historical precedent for the depth of voluntary integration the EU has achieved.

The European project has always been politically thin and economically thick — long on regulatory harmonization, short on cultural common identity, with no demos to match its institutions. Integration deepened in stages: the 1957 Treaty of Rome built a common market, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty created the EU proper and committed it to a single currency, and the euro entered circulation in 2002. It expanded eastward after 1989 to embrace the formerly Communist states, growing from twelve to twenty-eight members between 1995 and 2013. Successive treaties revised its voting rules, but never removed the tension between a wider union and collective decision-making. It weathered the 2010 sovereign-debt crisis — barely, with severe damage to Greece, where bailout conditions cut output by a quarter and exposed the flaw of a monetary union without a fiscal union to match it. It lost the United Kingdom in 2020, the first member state to leave; and it is now confronting the question of whether to admit Ukraine in some form, and what to do about Russia on its eastern frontier. The persistent internal argument is between deepeners (those who want stronger central institutions, fiscal transfers, joint debt, an EU army) and broadeners (those who want more members but fewer common policies) — a tension structurally hard to resolve, because every enlargement makes consensus among more vetoes harder, and every deepening demands sovereignty that member states guard jealously. Brexit gave the deepeners ammunition; the post-2022 security shock accelerated forms of integration stuck for decades — joint borrowing on the NextGenerationEU model (itself a 2020 pandemic instrument, and the first at that scale), coordinated arms procurement, energy decoupling from Russia.

Why nowThe EU is currently the world's largest experiment in post-national governance, and it is being stress-tested by Russian aggression on its border, by American retrenchment after Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025 and openly questioned NATO's guarantee, by demographic decline and an aging workforce, and by economic competition from both the US and China that has left it with no homegrown platform giant. Whether it consolidates into a real geopolitical actor or fragments back into a free-trade zone — pulled apart by nationalist movements from Hungary to France — is one of the most important questions in the architecture of the next decade.