Having recently been presented
with an E.U. citizen denying the E.U. has citizens even as he admitted that he
could vote for a candidate to represent him in the European Parliament, I had
my faith in human rationality restored the following day in reading of a poll
of E.U. citizens on whether additional states should be added to the Union;
ideology, even of the tribal sort, need not distort rationality beyond
recognition. Even in the reporting of such a poll, however, the Euroskeptic, or
states’ rights, ideology left its imprint. Even such an auxiliary presence is a
sign of the headwind that has been facing the E.U. since its founding.
Euronews reported on 28
October, 2025 that 56% of E.U. citizens approved of adding new states. “Young
Europeans in particular support enlargement. 67% of 15-24 year olds are in
favour, ahead of 25-39 year olds at 63%.”[1]
If the young adults maintain their optimism in the decades to come, we could
expect the power of the Euroskeptic, states’ rights (i.e., anti-federalist)
ideology to lessen over time. This in turn could allow the E.U. to accumulate
enough additional enumerated powers, or exclusive and even shared competencies,
so the benefits of united action could be realized more fully, especially in
the domains of foreign policy and defense. As of 2025, it has been as if state
officials had tied one arm behind the E.U.’s back even regarding existing
federal competencies. The poll indicates that this could change.
The poll can also be taken as
an argument for a more vigorous education prior to university and trade school,
for the support for enlargement “comes to a large extent from young people and
educated people.”[2] To
be sure, an educated person could argue that because of the unwillingness of
enough state governments to delegate additionally competencies (or even just
strength those that the E.U. already had), the veto mechanism enjoyed by each
state should be more restricted before additional states are annexed to
the Union. It is possible, for example, to up the double majorities from 55% to
60% on major pieces of federal legislation, in place of keeping the
veto-mechanism in place. Even at 27 states, unanimity is unrealistic; it could
therefore be unrealistic to expect unanimous agreement with there being even
more states in the Union.
The force behind retaining the
veto-mechanism in the European Council and the Council of the E.U. is none
other than the Euroskeptic, or states’ rights ideology that is just fine with
allowing even small states to block proposed legislation even if it is in the
interest of the Union as a whole. In the twentieth century, that ideology
manifests as strident nationalism, which of course gave rise to war on more
than one occasion. Unfortunately, old ideologies die hard even in the face of
the fact of political development, such as that of several states forming a
federal union of states. Such a development, especially after several decades,
inherent relativizes otherwise unmitigated pro-state-oriented ideology.
That ideology is to some
extend built into the poll, according to which “the most supportive Member
States are Sweden (79%), Denmark (75%) and Lithuania (74%). Conversely, Austria
(45%), the Czech Republic (43%) and France (43%) are the least supportive” of
enlargement.[3]
Although admittedly much daylight exists between 79% and 43%, and pro-E.U.
advertising could be directed by the Commission to run in local media in the
least supportive states on the basis of this way of dividing up the results,
reporting by state is itself a reinforcement of the state-centric, Euroskeptic
ideology that has held the federal legislative and executive branches back even
from being able to fully exercise its enumerated powers, or competencies.
On May 1, 2025 at Yale, I met
the E.U.’s ambassador to the U.S. after her talk. I pointed out that the media
in the E.U. labeling the Union as a mere bloc as if the E.U. were only active
in one power-domain and were temporary, was subtly undermining the E.U. itself
and fortifying the Euroskeptics. To my surprise, she agreed with me, but my
feedback had zero impact. She told me
that just admitting even that the E.U. has a federal structure would enrage
powerful Euroskeptic officials in some states, such as Hungary. As a result,
however, more uneducated Europeans could be expected to conflate the “bloc”
with international organizations such as NATO and the UN, and the poll supports
this point. Why expand something as weak as a bloc?
On October 24, 2025, an Oxford professor of political economy spoke at Harvard’s Center for European Studies. Whereas Yale’s Center acknowledges and so includes talks on the E.U. being intergovernmental relations only, Harvard’s political economists have been stuck in the political economy paradigm of Europe prior to the founding of the E.U. in the early 1990s. So, the professor from Oxford presented a European poll in which both the E.U. itself and the related impact of European cultural integration from the states being in a federal system were ignored. Instead, he (or the discussant) insisted that Denmark and Sweden are so different with respect to how the poor view public policy that is oriented to reducing economic inequality, even though both northern states are Scandinavian and have relatively low economic inequality, whereas every rural American is a libertarian against constraints on rising economic inequality. In other words, the interstate cultural differences are magnified when it comes to the E.U., while such interstate (mostly non-linguistic-based) differences in the U.S. are virtually ignored as if one cultural attitude spans across a continent. The European states’ rights, or nationalistic, ideology can be so exaggerated that cognition is twisted even in the minds of scholars! Unfortunately, the E.U. itself has been paying the price for this ideological denial; it is not just an artifact of ideology under the subterfuge of scholarship. Ironically, as long as the E.U. continues to pay the price from being reckoned by enough uneducated European citizens as merely a bloc (or even as nonexistent), enlargement by the accession of additional states without basic reform of the federal system would be likely to compound paralysis rather than increase the Union’s strength.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
