EU must become a 'genuine federation' to avoid deindustrialisation and decline
euronews.com79 points by saubeidl a day ago
79 points by saubeidl a day ago
We definitely need more focus on creating a true single market.
It is difficult to scale across Europe.
Most countries will gladly fall back to "we do how we please in our country, Europe won't tell us what to do!" which is the usual nationalistic rally to which many fall prey not realizing how good it would be to start making small but steady steps into common regulations.
We really need a strong internal market.
We definitely need more focus on creating a true single market.
It’s going to be difficult to achieve this without the establishment of a single official language. That’s where the US gets most of its advantage: a large population of English speakers means a large single market for products in English.
Sure, lots of products (like food) don’t care about language but software and media (literature, music, video games, movies, TV) definitely do. It’s no coincidence that the US dominates the global market for those cultural and technology products.
>> It’s going to be difficult to achieve this without the establishment of a single official language
Swiss confederation solved this while having 4 official languages. Language is not the problem, especially nowadays when everything could be translated in a second.
Ehhh, the story of Swiss multilingualism is more than a bit romanticized. A lot of people under 40 know their region's language, English at a decent level, and at best a barely passable 2nd national language (exception would be those living in the actually bilingual regions).
I think there's a strong case to be made that, while the different Swiss linguistic regions strongly prefer to associate together, in reality they draw a lot from the countries they share their languages & borders with when it comes to business and markets, etc. But between linguistic regions, there is additional friction for sure. If anything, the share competency in English has been a major boon.
Source: been living in Switzerland for 10 years and very interested in its system.
software is a bad example since all the coding is done in english. the translation tools are inexpensive nowadays. bilingual persons have lower rates of dementia so it's not even sure that standardising on one language would be a net benefit. also it's universally accepted that english is one of the more difficult languages to learn. If there was a revival of the movement for a single language then english wouldn't be picked by non native english speakers.
Esperanto for all! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
How much easier is it to learn Esperanto than some broken form of simplified English that gets the message across and then also enables you to speak the native language of 26% of the world GDP?
If my concern is % of GDP I'd rather learn Mandarin.
I tried to learn Mandarin and it's really hard! That's coming from someone who is able to say Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz without a problem.
I feel the perceived difficulty varies from person to person. Personally I found Mandarin much easier to pick up than German or Spanish, since you don't have to worry about conjugation.
This will never happen, or at most, it will be a half-baked clunky "federation" like today. Why? Because you will always say first: "I am Italian" and not "I am European" when introducing yourself. All the dreamy one powerful Europe will never happen because of this. Which makes sense because Europe, by definition, is multiple countries, identities and cultures!
I'm not sure where are you from, but we Europeans do also feel Europeans.
This isn't about countries losing sovereignty over night, but about creating common frameworks and regulations step by step.
This is already a reality in some sectors, e.g. agriculture.
Agriculture sits under exclusive or near-exclusive EU control in the whole EU and the model works (albeit it's not perfect, like no model is). EU promotes countries to produce what they are good at. Thus, it doesn't incentivize Italy to produce cereals much, because Italy does not have the right land to grow cereals and that would not make much sense in economic terms. Instead Italy is incentivized to grow cheese, meat, grapes, olives, etc, things that Italy is good at and sells well.
There's other things on which all countries delegate to EU: trade (tariffs and custom rules), goods standards, aviation safety rules, competition and state aid regulations, etc, etc.
So I would say that EU has been very successful on multiple fronts in harmonizing and taking responsibility for multiple things.
But I'm gonna give you of a simple blocker at EU level: why gdpr or dma/dsa are very EU centralized, ultimately digital and data regulations are still not really delegated and national law takes precedence: this is a very heavy blocker to scale any company that requires any kind of business involving data. As soon as you cross a border you need to know the ins and outs of every single country. So it's not that trivial to build a software service company and have it scale painlessly across Europe.
Examples include: contract law, consumer protection, liability rules, and all courts remain national. Terms of service, refund rules, dispute handling is always country-specific. Expanding beyond your own borders is very expensive. Then you have tax complexity, payment and banking, labor law, data protection (as mentioned)..
> "we do how we please in our country, Europe won't tell us what to do!"
This is like people who will be pointing on weak, indecisive Europe. But when somebody suggests that we should get rid of unanimous voting so one country can't sabotage everybody else, suddenly those people love weak and indecisive Europe and won't give their veto right. Wanting their cake and eating it too...
By that standards, an EU army would have gone to war in Irak in 2003, dragging french soldiers and the french aircraft carrier despite them being right from the very start.
Sure, but how many "correct" decisions are not made or drag on forever because of vetos?
Allowing veto power to single participants is often crippling for institutions in practice, because you allow every political adversary (internal and external) to freely pick the weakest link whenever he wants to sabotage or paralyze decisionmaking.
This already happens in practice with the EU, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a textbook example of how such a mechanism essentially doomed the whole thing.
Absolutely. One should just talk with people in the military about procurement. Europe wastes a lot of money and opportunity by having so much duplicated efforts. The innovation and manufacturing power in the EU is absolutely not the problem. But the lack of coordination means that countries inevitably favor local industry, resulting in overly expensive and incompatible systems, with gaps everywhere. There needs to be a central authority that is able to lead a defense program.
Just one example: I am hearing far too often that France is overly protecting their own interests and as such can't reach important deals with Germany about sharing burdens and profits. So it results in duplicated, incompatible systems. Germany is generally more open to share benefits and intel with other countries.
Such deal-making can drag on for decades, to only fall out. For industries to scale, they need long term planning and a guaranteed pipeline of orders. I am talking about ships, planes, MBT's, air defence, missile tech--not riffles.
It is a shame, because both countries are powerhouses in engineering. Also, this costs EU taxpayers billions of dollars, and perhaps their safety even.
> resulting in overly expensive and incompatible systems
This can occur even with a more integrated market. The problem is that military suppliers deliberately make as many things 'sole source' as possible so they can be the only supplier and hence charge even higher rates. I'm don't mean the big items like tanks and planes, but the little consumable stuff like lubrication oils, fasteners, gears, etc. that are made to be non-compatible with other systems on purpose. Harder to fix because of the usual corporation-military-lobbying feedback loops and because it requires standards which can be technically intensive to develop.
Good point, but sure, I didn't say it would solve all problems with humanity. But at least it would be a giant step forward from the lose-lose situation.
If there is one body on earth that is able to cut with standards and regulation through enterprises, it is the EU I think, so even that is not hopeless. But large capital flows through the mil.industry comes with risks, yes.
Agreed, they do have to start somewhere. I'm not trying to put out the 'if the solution isn't completely perfect, then we should do nothing' type argument. Only that compatibility/interoperability is a much deeper problem that stems from financial incentive not just for military application but civilian ones as well. Just look at printer ink. But the EU did standardize phone chargers, so its possible to some extent.
The EU seems very willing to pass a law to end widespread corporate silliness, at least more than the USA, and it's a breath of fresh air when it happens!
And this is where standardization and regulation should show up. It can start from details like only standardized bolts and screws with standardized heads are allowed to be used all the way to jet engine must have exactly these dimensions and these inputs and outputs in these positions so it is possible to use same jet engine in Rafale, Eurofighter or Gripen.
They have this to some degree in NATO, the problem is that you have to allow for some exceptions. For example, a design requires a special bolt head because the standard one just won't work. No standard can be absolute and still allow for innovation. Military suppliers just milk this loop-hole and claim they need an exception even when they don't. Being able to evaluate when an exception is warranted and when the design could be altered to accommodate a standard would require enormous technical oversight.
It is totally and obviously untrue that the only way to solve whatever issue of the day is federalisation. Especially regarding desindustrialisation, if you look at what's happening in the world and the development of, say, East Asian and South East Asian countries (or even Europe's own industrialisation), or desindustralisation in the US, this becomes an obviously ridiculous claim.
There is no "need" to for a "central authority to lead defence programs", either. That is a political view to justify integration. Integration is the goal, not a tool to an end and justifications are sought afterwards.
This is a long running campaign of disinformation to manufacture consent and convince people that there is no other way, there is no choice, and we're seeing that dissent is less and less tolerated. Not too long ago being against EU integration was simply an opinion among others, usually seen as being patriotic, now people immediately face accusations of extremism, being "far right", being "Russian shills", you name it, basically it is becoming wrongthink.
Even here on HN, I have been recently accused of being a socketpuppet account, of being effectively a Russian shill (or is it Chinese?), of being an extremist, an idiot, an "alt right troll", my comments expressing a counter-opinion have been flagged... people are losing their minds.
The US federalised a long time ago. It is not the counterexample you think it is. If it were still a bunch of little states, it would be irrelevant.
There are many nice pragmatic ideas. But which king will give away the throne for greater good? For example Germany is federation with 16 states and 16 administrations. The country could shrink to two administration areas like South and North and become 8 times more efficient. Never gonna happen! To have this on continental level is even more never gonna happen probability.
So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption.
How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?
Sure, federalism produces some overhead and inefficiencies. But it also has many benefits. Especially to avoid too much power in one hand but also others. E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better and adapt the other systems (if you actually do that is another question).
People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Just merging all into one is just a recipe to fail epically.
Afaik, the bulk of the US' federal centralization of commerce is based on the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution [0], which based on reading (and more so on precedent) grants the US federal legislature the ability to regulate commerce between states. As most commerce crosses state boundaries, this de facto allows the federal legislature to define and enforce regulatory standards.
In practice, it's more nuanced and subject to continual back-and-forth arguing. E.g. California and Texas trying to decide their own standards, by virtue of their economic size, then hashing it out with the federal government in court.
I'm not sure what the EU regulatory cornerstone equivalent of the Commerce Clause would be.
> So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption.
The division is on purpose, to divide power and make it harder for a second Hitler to rise again. And the calculations are no assumption, it's a common topic in Germany how much additional time and money this all costs.
> How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?
Why do you assume they are different? Or better?
> E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better
You can also have this without federalism, without maintaining a dozen different administrations which are all doing the same in different flavour.
> People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states.
Compared to Europe, people in the USA are not that different per state. At least not on the level where individual administration is necessary. The different groups are mainly independent of the state they are living in.
> The country could shrink to two administration areas like South and North and become 8 times more efficient
In Germany, we call unsubstantiated calculations like this "Milchmädchenrechnung" (milkmaid calculation).
It's not unsubstantiated. The federalism is a well known expensive hindrace for any progress. Everyone doing their own shit also means everyone has to fight it out with everyone on how they work together. There are good reasons for this, but the price is also obvious.
Is it, though? What’s so different between Thuringia and Saxony that they both need separate administrations?
Why is it, that when you move between states, your tax office needs to print out your records, send them to your new state's office, only for some poor soul to type them into their system because each state uses a different system without any common exchange format? Make it make sense!
I work around German bureaucracy, and the loss of efficiency is real. Every state creates its own bureaucracy and its own software. Different people, departments and offices that rarely combine efforts, barely talk to each other, and never share data.
I was told that this decentralisation of power was a deliberate effort after Nazism, but as far as I know such issues were endemic in the Nazi government and military. Germany really is a union of small states, and perhaps never fully changed that.
This is slowly changing though. There is a visible effort to build software and processes at the federal level.
Every country in the EU was created through warfare. Germany only unified because Prussia had the guns.
And the compromise was the Federation of Germany.
Basically all centralization of political power in human history has been accomplished by force. See Rome, Persia, Germany, USSR, etc. etc. etc. Even the USA's transition from a union of united States to The United States occurred under force of arms.
Sadly, this centralization of political power has been a disaster for mankind IMO.
Even as we've transitioned from monarchies to democracies over the last few centuries, the trend has largely resulted in the replacement of actual, determinative choices with merely having a millionth of a share of a choice. Not a determinative choice, but a say.
Consider the holy roman empire, for example. [0]
Under this scheme of decentralization, people had an actual choice of their government. Say you were a merchant in Mühlhausen circa 1700, and you found yourself in opposition to your local government. You could simply move a short distance to a different area and be beholdened to an entirely different government. You'd have 50 choices within 100 miles! While it's true that the HRE was all under the administration of one government, but it was extremely weak. It lacked, for example, the ability to levy direct taxes. After unification in 1870, the same merchant would've had to move much further to escape his government, and his options had been diminished by 95%. After European unification, he would have to travel to another continent!
While democracy has given us control of our governments in theory, in practice the "choice" it offers is much less empowering than the determinative choice afforded by decentralization. The larger our political entities grow, the more diluted our "say" and the fewer full choices are available to us. In the United States, we have less than 1/100,000,000th of a share of the choice in our chief executive!
While democracy is obviously preferable to Aristocracy/Monarchy/Tyranny, on it's own it is still only a marginal improvement. At worst, you can still end up with 49.9% of people living under a government they oppose. Decentralization solves this lingering problem, because it allows people to self-sort in and out of countries they don't like, allowing for people who truly despise their governments to choose themselves a new government.
In the absence of such a safety valve, people are forced into a zero-sum struggle for power. It is rule or be ruled. Dominate or be dominated. We're seeing this in the United States right now. We're not at each other's throats because we hate each other. Not even because we hate each other's politics in the abstract. We're at each other's throats because neither side is content to be ruled by the other.
The same reason that centralized entities only arise by force is the same reason they fall apart in the end. People don't want them. They don't want to be dominated.
Centralization of political power forces people into an inescapable struggle for power. It is the enemy of peace and tranquility, and a blight on humanity.
I believe your view of what democracy is tainted by what USA democracy looks like.
Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.
How do you account for the increased competitiveness of economies of scale in a globalized economy with free international trade in your recommendation?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "economies of scale", which is normally a benefit of mass production.
It's true that centralization of political power can bring economic benefits, but the economic benefits stem from the elimination of economic/trade friction, not directly from the centralization of power per se. Which is to say that (most of) these economic benefits can be had without incurring the non-economic costs of political centralization.
The federation in Germany is one lesson from the Nazis. Centralised power makes it easier for fascism or totalitarian governments to emerge. Recent example is the US with the instrument of executive orders. So it is deliberately designed to keep Germany small.
> the European Union risks subordination, division and deindustrialision all at once
Whose fault is that? Who is constantly forcing regulations which hurt EU industries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal#Job_losses...
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/16/eu-carmakers-t...
Instead of fixing the problems they have created they are now placing taxes on imported heavy goods.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/01/eus-carbon-bor...
The regulations mentioned there are not necessarily wrong though. Decarbonisation and renewables are no longer purely environmental concerns, they are key objectives for the European security strategy to remove dependence on foreign tyrants and dictators. These jobs would have disappeared sooner or later anyways. But lots of new ones will be created in these new industries. The EU is merely getting dragged down by the established traditional fossil industry that wants to delay the transition as long as possible to squeeze every cent out of the market while they can. But this is bad for literally everyone involved in the long term. The only thing that is benefiting are next-quarter based exec bonuses. If Europe actually allowed for a disruptive startup environment (which unfortunately has its own set of safety issues), these companies would have been handed their lunch by now.
There are countries in the EU with sizeable coal reserves like Poland, Germany or Czech Republic. Current policies force them to abandon it and switch to natural gas which needs to be imported.
They could also build wind- and solar parks. They should, actually.
We do and the more renewables are present in the mix, the more expensive electricity gets. Despite using LED lights...
Oh my god there's European versions of the West Virginia "more coal jobs" grifters.
> remove dependence on foreign tyrants
Ahh, thats why the EU is moving to LNG, now I get it!
> why the EU is moving to LNG
Is it? News for this resident of the EU. What exactly are you referencing?
Most states in the EU are focusing on renewables one way or another, are you talking about a specific country here or?
Renewables are a thing for the upper-class. I am refering to plain old heating in winter, which is being switched over from russian gas to american lng. Great achievement!
At the time it made sense, we believed the US to be an ally, like in the past. Obviously not true anymore so yeah, a mistake that needs to be corrected.
And no, renewables aren't for the upper class, the sun is free for everyone with panels, and panels can be bought relatively cheap today.
Having a place you can legally install panels is for the upper class. Do you own a house?
Got a balcony in your German apartment? Then you can use solar panels.
https://www.dw.com/en/boom-small-solar-devices-plugged-into-...
I'm sure it depends on the country, but in my country (Spain) you can literally go and buy solar panels in the local hardware store and install them without permits, even for renters given you don't destroy anything. And besides that, most owners (as a renter) are OK with you installing solar panels.
Never owned a place, had solar panels installed in the last three places I lived in, the first two were apartments, currently renting a house. None of the owners had problems with us installing solar panels.
