Europe is a civilization that never condensed into a single body politic.
The temptation to treat “Europe” as if it could become a nation like the United States returns after every crisis, dressed in new institutional proposals and noble rhetoric. But statehood is not a function of slogans, market rules, or administrative harmonization. It requires a people that has entered a social pact transferring ultimate authority to a common sovereign, and a founding episode that renders that transfer both legitimate and durable. Europe has neither. What it does have is a lineage of federalist ideas, a lattice of intergovernmental bargains and a deep cultural inheritance. Valuable, but not equivalent to a State.
Carlo Cattaneo is the most useful (and most misread) starting point.
In his political writings, he treats Europe’s multiplicity of municipalities, regions, languages and historical paths as the source of its strength. Federalism, for Cattaneo, is not a corridor to a single, centralized superstate but a pact among vigorous local autonomies that retain constitutional dignity, fiscal capacity and political initiative. Compressing Europe’s polycentric reality into a unitary sovereignty confuses civilization with administration and risks suffocating the very institutions that produce European creativity. Modern institutional analysis echoes this: polycentric orders outperform centralized ones when preferences and identities are irreducibly diverse. Europe fits that description exactly.
A Europe that functions is a Europe that remains plural.
Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan is uncompromising: political order arises when individuals, fearing insecurity, authorize a sovereign by a social pact that is foundational and final.
Agreements among princes and governments can coordinate behavior and generate impressive administrative structures, but they do not create sovereignty. Sovereignty appears when a population internalizes the legitimacy of one ultimate command capable of deciding on security, war, and law without appeal to a higher authority.
The United States had two crucibles that made such internalization conceivable: the Revolution and the Civil War, which converted a legal union into a nation able to override state nullification by force and right.
Europe’s wars, by contrast, repeatedly reaffirmed the supremacy of states. Even the cataclysm of 1914–1945 yielded national reconstructions, external security guarantees and a dense web of treaties. While those treaties improved cooperation, they did not transform Europeans into a single “people” authorizing a single “sword.”
Montesquieu’s theory of liberty presupposes a differentiated architecture of power in which distinct institutions can check and balance one another because they each draw legitimacy from the same political community.
Separation of powers is not a wiring diagram; it is a sociological achievement. In genuine federations, vertical and horizontal separations are anchored in a shared demos (from Greek - the collective subject of democracy) that can punish overreach and reward responsibility across levels and branches.
Europe lacks that anchor. Executive initiative is bureaucratic rather than electorally accountable in the way a government is to a people; legislative authority is divided between a chamber of states and a chamber whose elections citizens do not experience as choosing a sovereign legislature; judicial authority arbitrates treaties rather than interprets a single, unchallenged constitution born of a popular act. The system achieves equilibrium, but not the kind of balance Montesquieu envisioned.
Without a single demos, checks become negotiations and balances become vetoes.
Gianfranco Miglio gave the most austere formulation: every real state originates in a decisive conflict that fixes borders, defines enemies and friends, and concentrates decision-making in a recognized center.
Where there is no such founding event, there is no irreversible transfer of allegiance; there are only contracts, and contracts are rescindable. By Miglio’s measure, Europe is a pactum foederis, a treaty-built order that can deepen cooperation in prosperity and unravel under pressure. Its legitimacy is derivative of its members’ consent, not originary in a continental act of will. This is why proposals for “finality” oscillate between invisibility in normal times and impossibility in crises: the system lacks a mandate to command sacrifices in the name of a singular political identity.
While loyalty, taxation, and the right to kill and die in war remain national, the center is juridical rather than sovereign.
1) Not enough real links across borders
To become one political people, Europeans would need thick, everyday connections that cross countries: living, marrying, working, consuming media, and serving together.
Right now, most bonds stay inside each nation. That means ideas, trust, and obligations don’t spread well across borders. If the network doesn’t carry loyalty far enough, you can run a shared market, but you can’t ask everyone to pay the same bill or fight the same war.
2) Too many issues, too many vetoes
Big countries stay stable because they squash lots of arguments into one or two simple political fights everyone understands.
Europe does the opposite: it stacks different fights on top of each other (money, energy, migration, defense, law, language), and nearly every government gets a brake pedal. When choices are that complicated and everyone can say no, you don’t get a sovereign that decides. You get endless bargaining or rule-by-committee.
3) No shared rituals that create “we”
Nations don’t run on paper; they run on common knowledge. School canons, national holidays, conscription, one news moment everyone watches, one tax day everyone curses. Those shared rituals tell people who “we” are and what we owe each other when it hurts.
Europe has symbols, programs, and meetings. It doesn’t have the high-intensity, synchronized stuff that makes strangers act like one public when it matters. Without that, you won’t get consent for serious costs.
So what?
Enlarging the club (Baltics, maybe Ukraine) can be smart strategically, but it stretches a treaty system, not a nation. It adds more borders inside the network, more vetoes in the room, and more cultures to synchronize. Good for a concert of states; bad for forging a single state.
This dynamic is most visible in the way Europe handles geography.
After 1991, the Baltic republics re-entered Western institutions. Their accession makes strategic sense and is normatively defensible. But treating it as proof of an underlying European political unity confuses policy with ontology. These accessions increased diversity and added veto players without creating the deep, cross-border social ties or common rituals that would make continental obligations feel legitimate.
The proposed accession of Ukraine, a territory shaped by shifting imperial peripheries, religious divides, and competing national projects, would likely amplify these dynamics.
Enlargement can project norms, lock in reforms, and reposition borders. It cannot, by itself, mint a demos or generate the cultural synchrony required for a social pact.
The American comparison clarifies rather than flatters.
The United States became a state-nation by combining a single vernacular public sphere, a vast internal market linked by a frontier that eroded parochialisms, and two foundational conflicts that converted legal text into lived sovereignty. Federalism there allocates competences inside a polity everyone recognizes as ultimate.
Europe presents stacked pluralities that no frontier will dissolve: multiple languages with distinct media ecosystems, school systems that sustain national memories, religious and secular traditions anchored in different historical trajectories, and a record of wars that hardened identities.
A European Philadelphia or Gettysburg would require either a transformative convention that Europeans have never authorized or a civil war no one should desire.
In the nuclear age, the classic state-making mechanism of total war is neither available nor desirable at continental scale. The realistic horizon is a concert of states, not a state of Europe.
Cattaneo shows why bottom-up pluralism is Europe’s natural mode.
Hobbes explains that only a social pact authorizing a single sovereign creates the capacity to command life-and-death decisions.
Montesquieu reminds us that institutional balance presupposes a people capable of recognizing all branches as their own.
Miglio concludes that without a founding conflict or an equivalent act of irreversible commitment, the order remains contractual and revocable.
The three lay constraints above supply the mechanisms by which this outcome reproduces itself: cross-border ties remain too thin, collective choice too fragmented, and rituals too weakly synchronized to scale obligation beyond the nation. Europe’s postwar experiment has tamed interstate rivalry, stabilized currencies, expanded markets, and encouraged legal convergence. It did not, and by its own premises could not, transform Europeans into one political people.
Brussels loves to sell fairy tales. One of the most grotesque is the idea of a European army. As if pooling a few battalions under a blue flag could conjure the one thing Europe never had: a demos willing to fight and die for it.
Armies are not just uniforms and procurement contracts. They are instruments of sovereignty. They demand loyalty that goes beyond paychecks. They require soldiers who march into fire not for abstractions, but for a people they recognize as their own. No one in Europe feels that way about “Europe.” A Pole will fight for Poland, a Frenchman for France, an Italian for Italy. Even NATO works only because it is backed by a state — the United States — with its own demos and its own Leviathan. Strip that away, and Europe’s “army” is a parade without a cause.
This is the fatal truth: sovereignty is not about markets, regulations, or institutions. It is about the monopoly of violence — the right to ask men to kill and be killed. And Europe has no claim on that loyalty. The very suggestion that Germans, Greeks, Finns, and Spaniards would line up to die for “Europe” is a joke.
Every war, every crisis, every enlargement proves the same thing: Europe is a civilization, not a polity. To treat it as a state is to confuse cooperation with sovereignty, treaties with constitutions, paper with blood. Ursula will go on preaching her sermons, Brussels will go on writing its directives, and commentators will go on recycling the tired phrase “United States of Europe.” But the illusion remains exactly that — an illusion.
The future of Europe is plural: a concert of states, a civilization of deep roots, a market with immense reach. That is real. The fantasy of a sovereign Europe is not. And mistaking the two is the most dangerous nonsense of all.
The temptation to treat “Europe” as if it could become a nation like the United States returns after every crisis, dressed in new institutional proposals and noble rhetoric. But statehood is not a function of slogans, market rules, or administrative harmonization. It requires a people that has entered a social pact transferring ultimate authority to a common sovereign, and a founding episode that renders that transfer both legitimate and durable. Europe has neither. What it does have is a lineage of federalist ideas, a lattice of intergovernmental bargains and a deep cultural inheritance. Valuable, but not equivalent to a State.
Federalism as plural vitality, not centralization by stealth
Carlo Cattaneo is the most useful (and most misread) starting point.
In his political writings, he treats Europe’s multiplicity of municipalities, regions, languages and historical paths as the source of its strength. Federalism, for Cattaneo, is not a corridor to a single, centralized superstate but a pact among vigorous local autonomies that retain constitutional dignity, fiscal capacity and political initiative. Compressing Europe’s polycentric reality into a unitary sovereignty confuses civilization with administration and risks suffocating the very institutions that produce European creativity. Modern institutional analysis echoes this: polycentric orders outperform centralized ones when preferences and identities are irreducibly diverse. Europe fits that description exactly.
A Europe that functions is a Europe that remains plural.
Treaties among rulers are not a social pact among peoples
Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan is uncompromising: political order arises when individuals, fearing insecurity, authorize a sovereign by a social pact that is foundational and final.
Agreements among princes and governments can coordinate behavior and generate impressive administrative structures, but they do not create sovereignty. Sovereignty appears when a population internalizes the legitimacy of one ultimate command capable of deciding on security, war, and law without appeal to a higher authority.
The United States had two crucibles that made such internalization conceivable: the Revolution and the Civil War, which converted a legal union into a nation able to override state nullification by force and right.
Europe’s wars, by contrast, repeatedly reaffirmed the supremacy of states. Even the cataclysm of 1914–1945 yielded national reconstructions, external security guarantees and a dense web of treaties. While those treaties improved cooperation, they did not transform Europeans into a single “people” authorizing a single “sword.”
No separation of powers without a demos to balance them
Montesquieu’s theory of liberty presupposes a differentiated architecture of power in which distinct institutions can check and balance one another because they each draw legitimacy from the same political community.
Separation of powers is not a wiring diagram; it is a sociological achievement. In genuine federations, vertical and horizontal separations are anchored in a shared demos (from Greek - the collective subject of democracy) that can punish overreach and reward responsibility across levels and branches.
Europe lacks that anchor. Executive initiative is bureaucratic rather than electorally accountable in the way a government is to a people; legislative authority is divided between a chamber of states and a chamber whose elections citizens do not experience as choosing a sovereign legislature; judicial authority arbitrates treaties rather than interprets a single, unchallenged constitution born of a popular act. The system achieves equilibrium, but not the kind of balance Montesquieu envisioned.
Without a single demos, checks become negotiations and balances become vetoes.
No founding conflict, no state; pacts are reversible by design
Gianfranco Miglio gave the most austere formulation: every real state originates in a decisive conflict that fixes borders, defines enemies and friends, and concentrates decision-making in a recognized center.
Where there is no such founding event, there is no irreversible transfer of allegiance; there are only contracts, and contracts are rescindable. By Miglio’s measure, Europe is a pactum foederis, a treaty-built order that can deepen cooperation in prosperity and unravel under pressure. Its legitimacy is derivative of its members’ consent, not originary in a continental act of will. This is why proposals for “finality” oscillate between invisibility in normal times and impossibility in crises: the system lacks a mandate to command sacrifices in the name of a singular political identity.
While loyalty, taxation, and the right to kill and die in war remain national, the center is juridical rather than sovereign.
Why a single “political Europe” can’t gel
1) Not enough real links across borders
To become one political people, Europeans would need thick, everyday connections that cross countries: living, marrying, working, consuming media, and serving together.
Right now, most bonds stay inside each nation. That means ideas, trust, and obligations don’t spread well across borders. If the network doesn’t carry loyalty far enough, you can run a shared market, but you can’t ask everyone to pay the same bill or fight the same war.
2) Too many issues, too many vetoes
Big countries stay stable because they squash lots of arguments into one or two simple political fights everyone understands.
Europe does the opposite: it stacks different fights on top of each other (money, energy, migration, defense, law, language), and nearly every government gets a brake pedal. When choices are that complicated and everyone can say no, you don’t get a sovereign that decides. You get endless bargaining or rule-by-committee.
3) No shared rituals that create “we”
Nations don’t run on paper; they run on common knowledge. School canons, national holidays, conscription, one news moment everyone watches, one tax day everyone curses. Those shared rituals tell people who “we” are and what we owe each other when it hurts.
Europe has symbols, programs, and meetings. It doesn’t have the high-intensity, synchronized stuff that makes strangers act like one public when it matters. Without that, you won’t get consent for serious costs.
So what?
Enlarging the club (Baltics, maybe Ukraine) can be smart strategically, but it stretches a treaty system, not a nation. It adds more borders inside the network, more vetoes in the room, and more cultures to synchronize. Good for a concert of states; bad for forging a single state.
Expansion as substitute for unity: the Baltic and Ukrainian cases
This dynamic is most visible in the way Europe handles geography.
After 1991, the Baltic republics re-entered Western institutions. Their accession makes strategic sense and is normatively defensible. But treating it as proof of an underlying European political unity confuses policy with ontology. These accessions increased diversity and added veto players without creating the deep, cross-border social ties or common rituals that would make continental obligations feel legitimate.
The proposed accession of Ukraine, a territory shaped by shifting imperial peripheries, religious divides, and competing national projects, would likely amplify these dynamics.
Enlargement can project norms, lock in reforms, and reposition borders. It cannot, by itself, mint a demos or generate the cultural synchrony required for a social pact.
Why Europe cannot become the United States
The American comparison clarifies rather than flatters.
The United States became a state-nation by combining a single vernacular public sphere, a vast internal market linked by a frontier that eroded parochialisms, and two foundational conflicts that converted legal text into lived sovereignty. Federalism there allocates competences inside a polity everyone recognizes as ultimate.
Europe presents stacked pluralities that no frontier will dissolve: multiple languages with distinct media ecosystems, school systems that sustain national memories, religious and secular traditions anchored in different historical trajectories, and a record of wars that hardened identities.
A European Philadelphia or Gettysburg would require either a transformative convention that Europeans have never authorized or a civil war no one should desire.
In the nuclear age, the classic state-making mechanism of total war is neither available nor desirable at continental scale. The realistic horizon is a concert of states, not a state of Europe.
The social pact that never happened
Cattaneo shows why bottom-up pluralism is Europe’s natural mode.
Hobbes explains that only a social pact authorizing a single sovereign creates the capacity to command life-and-death decisions.
Montesquieu reminds us that institutional balance presupposes a people capable of recognizing all branches as their own.
Miglio concludes that without a founding conflict or an equivalent act of irreversible commitment, the order remains contractual and revocable.
The three lay constraints above supply the mechanisms by which this outcome reproduces itself: cross-border ties remain too thin, collective choice too fragmented, and rituals too weakly synchronized to scale obligation beyond the nation. Europe’s postwar experiment has tamed interstate rivalry, stabilized currencies, expanded markets, and encouraged legal convergence. It did not, and by its own premises could not, transform Europeans into one political people.
Conclusion: civilization, yes; single polity, no
Brussels loves to sell fairy tales. One of the most grotesque is the idea of a European army. As if pooling a few battalions under a blue flag could conjure the one thing Europe never had: a demos willing to fight and die for it.
Armies are not just uniforms and procurement contracts. They are instruments of sovereignty. They demand loyalty that goes beyond paychecks. They require soldiers who march into fire not for abstractions, but for a people they recognize as their own. No one in Europe feels that way about “Europe.” A Pole will fight for Poland, a Frenchman for France, an Italian for Italy. Even NATO works only because it is backed by a state — the United States — with its own demos and its own Leviathan. Strip that away, and Europe’s “army” is a parade without a cause.
This is the fatal truth: sovereignty is not about markets, regulations, or institutions. It is about the monopoly of violence — the right to ask men to kill and be killed. And Europe has no claim on that loyalty. The very suggestion that Germans, Greeks, Finns, and Spaniards would line up to die for “Europe” is a joke.
Every war, every crisis, every enlargement proves the same thing: Europe is a civilization, not a polity. To treat it as a state is to confuse cooperation with sovereignty, treaties with constitutions, paper with blood. Ursula will go on preaching her sermons, Brussels will go on writing its directives, and commentators will go on recycling the tired phrase “United States of Europe.” But the illusion remains exactly that — an illusion.
The future of Europe is plural: a concert of states, a civilization of deep roots, a market with immense reach. That is real. The fantasy of a sovereign Europe is not. And mistaking the two is the most dangerous nonsense of all.
References
- Carlo Cattaneo, Scritti politici (1858).
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).
- Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (1748).
- Gianfranco Miglio, Lezioni di politica (1992); Il progetto federale (1993).
- Comparative/state-formation context: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (1990); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983).
