EU is not USA
Essay on the inevitable unclarity of the European Union / 2003

“Transforming the European Union into a single state, with one army, one constitution and one foreign policy is the crucial challenge of the age” Joschka Fisher, former German foreign minister and Vice Chancellor under Gerhard Schröder.

For the first time in the history of the EU, political leaders, opinion makers and normal European citizens dream aloud about a possible European state, with a constitution, an army and maybe even with a European president - a sort of ‘United States of Europe. There seems to exist a sort of banal fantasy that the transformation of the EU into a real nation-state would, as in a fairytale, transform this crippled caterpillar into a magnificent butterfly. It is true of course that with the extension of the Union into 27 member states, the present management, already notorious for it’s inefficiency, is no longer tenable. The foreign policy of the Union, that saddening spectacle so often resembling pure farce, needs to gain in seriousness. But if this automatically means that the Union should transform itself into a classical nation state, remains to be proven. The biggest problem with the Union is that it’s greatest quality is also it’s biggest weakness. It is the EU’s lack of identity and the horizontality of it’s structure that gives it the capacity to deal with complexity and difference better than any single nation-state. However these are the same qualities that render Europe famously inefficient (divided as it often is in the face of major events) and that could be at the origin of it’s future dissolution.    
   

laurent liefooghe architectuur
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