Thursday, December 18, 2025

Proliferating Blocs: The E.U. and Mercosur

Words matter; they may not break bones, but they can wreak havoc if they are used carelessly or ideologically. Political labels can stick, and, if inaccurate, they can result in people having an incorrect impression of what something or someone is, politically. The war that began in North America in 1861, for example, has typically been labeled as a civil war, but it may be more accurately labeled as the C.S.A.-U.S.A. War because the Confederate States of America did not want to take over the U.S.A.; it was not as if the C.S.A.’s goal was to conquer and government the U.S.A. Having established itself as a functioning political entity even though U.S. President Lincoln refused to acknowledge the political existence of the C.S.A., that union could be said to have existed and been at war with the U.S.A. from 1861-1865. Two unions of states were at war with each other; it was not as if the Union Army was at war with individual seceded states. The C.S.A. had a government apart from the state governments. So “the war between the states” is an inaccurate label because it denies the existence of the two unions. But the common label of a civil war is also problematic because two political factions were not fighting each other for control of the U.S.A. If this criticism seems unusual and even perhaps rather strange, the reason may be because the victor’s labeling of the war has been so overwhelming. My point is that this does not mean that the labeling is accurate just because it has been widely accepted. Similarly, the labeling by E.U. officials (including the E.U.’s ambassador to the U.S.) of the European Union as a bloc is not accurate. 

That the label has been meant to placate anti-federalist Euroskeptics, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, so they don’t further weaken the Union renders the actual, self-inflicted weakening as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Furthermore, that the E.U.’s self-inflicted weakening-by-label has fit the militaristic agenda of Russia’s President Putin and the isolationist agenda of the American President Trump like a glove seems not to have disturbed the E.U.’s political elite. That the E.U. has never been an informal trading “bloc” of sovereign countries like the Mercosur trading bloc in South America is seems not to have bothered the European labelers, including the enabling media.

For example, reporting on a speech by E.U. President Von der Leyen’s to the Parliament, European journalists referred to both the E.U. and the coordination on trade by four countries in South America as “blocs,” as if the two were of the same political type or genre. For instance, Euronews reported that with regard to the E.U. helping Ukraine withstand Putin’s continuing invasion and signing a trade deal with the four countries in America, at “stake is the 27-member bloc’s credibility to shape its foreign policy and trade agenda.”[1] But it is the E.U.’s foreign policy and its trade agenda, not the aggregate of all of the states’ foreign policies and trade agendas, and this difference is backed up by the E.U. having an executive, legislative, and judicial branch of its own, albeit with state participation in the European Council and the Council of Ministers. Blocs do not have governmental branches. The label of bloc does, however, fit “the South American Mercosur bloc” of four countries because that bloc is simply an alignment of trade policies.[2] There was not Mercosur executive, legislature, and supreme court, no Mercosur social policy, and not even a Mercosur federal system wherein governmental sovereignty is split between states and a federal level. The false equivalence of the European Union and Mercosur is a grave insult to Europe, and yet it has repeatedly been self-inflicted by the European political elite itself.

I contend that the E.U. has been a formidable accomplishment, not a perfect union, but far beyond what a bloc is and can muster, and that the potential of that union of states should therefore not be held back by a dominative label intended placate an anti-federalist minority. The costs of continuing to treat the E.U. as equivalent to a trading bloc of countries in South America may seem bearable, but President Von der Leyen’s point that the E.U. was then at a critical inflection-point concerning Europe’s security and independence, global image, and international standing means that the E.U. could no longer afford to label itself as a bloc as if were just another Mercosur group of countries.

For on the very same day as Von der Leyen was delivering a speech to the European Parliament, Russian President Putin was telling a gathering of his military brass, “European swine wanted to feast on the collapse of Russia” and—interestingly in echoing comments only recently made by the American President, Donald Trump—in referring to Europe and the E.U. in particular, “Today it turns out there is no civilisation there, only complete degradation.”[3] Swine degrading European civilization. Ouch! Unfortunately, Russian tanks, bombs, and troops in Ukraine combined with Putin’s rejection of the proposed American compromise because it does not give Russia all the territory is wants in Ukraine render the punch behind the insult more serious than mere words. It is ironic that words spoken outside of the E.U. have made the Europeans’ own use of their word, “bloc,” more costly because what bloc could expect itself to issue its own debt to help Ukraine militarily? What bloc can have a federal foreign policy? What bloc can do more than rely on state militias for a defense? Simply in degrading these expectations, the European political elite continued to shoot itself in its collective foot as Putin continued to apply his political theory that military might makes right in Europe.

The E.U. is neither a regional UN nor a trading bloc of sovereign countries, nor even an international organization. All of these claims are the result of ideological resentment and political expediency. These two vices in the E.U. are like water to a fish. That the member-states ceded some of their governmental sovereignty to be exclusive and even shared competencies of the European Union effectively relegates such false equivalencies to the dust bin, so it is strange that they persisted at least through 2025. In fact, the staying power of the principle of unanimity in place of qualified-majority voting on some major issues may stem from the continuing misunderstanding that the E.U. is merely a bloc.

So, labels do matter, and they can get in the way. This is especially problematic in hard times, for European integration in the E.U. has largely happened only times of crisis. The rhetoric of presidents Trump and Putin alone justifies President Von der Leyen’s statement, “Yesterday’s peace is gone. We have no time to indulge in nostalgia. What matters is how we confront today.”[4] Describing the E.U. as a bloc of member-states does not even qualify as nostalgia because the E.U. has never been a bloc; the self-defeating label sprang out of anti-Americanism (lest the E.U. be held to be equivalent to the U.S. as an empire-scale federal system characterized definitively by dual sovereignty) and the political fear of the domestic, yes, domestic, opposition of anti-federalist Euroskeptics that is ironically strengthened in its version of political reality by the label itself. Self-inflicted weakness in a partisan ideological battle hardly attracts support.