43 - The enduring promise of the EU

Summary

Europe's biggest achievement may be that it always found ways to overcome collective action problems at the local and the continent level and address the problems confronting the population. From the Roman Empire to the nation state as the optimal governance unit, to the creation of the EU, Europeans have been at the forefront of political and social innovation. These institutions served as vessels for expressing societal demands and formulating policies that ultimately solved – in whole or in part – thorny issues such as economic inequality, social immobility, or the tragedy of the commons.

Reassessing Europe's threats

Today's public debates about the future of the EU focus mostly on nativist or far-right parties, immigrants and refugees, and the rise of populism. All trend lines run into the negative. Truth be told, these problems currently do operate against further EU integration, but they are easily and consistently overstated. A clear-eyed look at the data finds hardly any nativist or far-right party in government in the EU and the number of refugees and immigrants in Europe is rather small and politically manageable. Populism's threat to liberal democracy appears to be operative in one case only. A sober assessment of Europe suggests that the state of the Union is strong. Much as they have for the postwar decades, Europeans continue to achieve many of their core political and economic goals through the EU and solely because of the EU.

For the issues that Europeans find threatening, and that loom ever larger in the future, the EU presents a unique set of institutions and skilled professionals for combating them. Namely, climate change, automation of labor and its implications, and population aging with whatever that means for pension systems and the welfare state as we know it. The EU has decades of experience in dealing with transborder issues that affect all states, and that cannot be resolved successfully by any one of them individually. Regional integration allows the EU to become an agenda setter on a global scale and influence norms and behaviors on a wide range of issues.