Erik Jones / Nov 2025
Image: Shutterstock
The European Union can fail, but it doesn’t have to. That is the message that you read across Emmanual Macron’s 2024 Sorbonne speech, in Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on ‘competitiveness’, and in Draghi’s speeches in Rimini and Brussels last August and September. The argument about failure is primarily a call to action. Both the speeches and the report are long on detail about what Europeans need to do and why they need to do it. What they leave open is what failure would look like and why it would happen.
That omission is important for the success of the argument. Without a clear sense of the dynamics at work, people have a hard time taking any claim about Europe’s mortality seriously. Everyone can see that the world is becoming a more dangerous place and that autocratic leaders are becoming more prominent. They can also see that globalization has not lived up to its promise, that politics is becoming more contentious, and that the European Union is getting harder to manage. But none of that suggests ‘mortality’ or explains why Europe can only survive if it takes on a huge transformative agenda that includes both an overhaul of institutions and regulations, and the enlargement of the EU to the countries of Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. If anything, conventional wisdom would suggest that such a huge array of challenges requires a mix of consolidation and prioritization. Europe should hunker down and go back to basics if it is under threat. No matter how intuitive, such thinking is not only wrong but dangerous.
Deeper understanding required
What Europeans need is a causal argument that explains why conventional wisdom is misguided. What is it that makes Europe mortal? The answer lies both in the way individuals and states perceive their self-interest, and in the way they misperceive their collective interest. The story is a familiar one. ‘Europe’ – whether we are talking about the European Union, the Organization for European Security Cooperation, NATO, or the whole collection of institutions that bring Europeans together for collective action – produces things people want. That is why those organizations exist! Just think about the opportunities for trade and investment in the single market, the price stability in the single currency, the freedom of movement, the security, and the predictability that comes from the rule of law. These are all things people want both inside and outside Europe.
That attractiveness is what makes ‘Europe’ – in all its guises – such a success. People want to work in Europe and so contribute to Europe’s economy, they want to invest in Europe and contribute to its innovation, they want to partner with Europe and contribute to its security, and they want to reshape their own systems to be more like Europe so that they can have an easier time getting access to what Europe has to offer. This attractiveness lies at the core of European soft power, but it also lies at the core of European prosperity, security, and all the rest.
The other side of soft power
Europe’s attractiveness also creates competition for Europeans who hope to enjoy the benefits of their own success. Non-European migrants, firms, and investors seek to maximize what they can get out of Europe’s economy even as they make important contributions to European economic performance. That is the logic of self-interest. Think Adam Smith. The same is true for those countries that adapt to European norms and standards to gain easier access to European markets, for Europe’s security partners who seek to sell their equipment to European governments or to draw upon European support for other endeavours, and for those non-governmental actors who seek to leverage European influence to pursue worthy causes elsewhere.
There is nothing ‘wrong’ with this kind of self-interested engagement with Europe. It is expected insofar as people are everywhere the same in their pursuit of self-interest, including Europeans. Hence, even within Europe people from different countries, regions, and local communities approach ‘Europe’ in the same way. Competition for the benefits that Europe offers is hardly limited to non-Europeans; on the contrary, competition for those benefits is even more acute among Europeans.
From soft power to resilience
The challenge for Europeans is to manage that competition in such a way as to ensure that ‘Europe’ – however it is organized – can continue to produce those attractive goods in a sustainable way. This is where the self-interest and collective interest part company. Few people understand what ‘sustainability’ means in this context, even assuming they have a clear sense of who the ‘collective’ is, and almost no-one can perceive the needs of the collective as easily as they can recognize their own self-interest.
That disconnect between self-interest and collective interest is why ‘Europe’ is mortal or prone to collapse – to borrow from Jared Diamond’s popular book. It is also why the change in international circumstances is so important. Those changes have put greater strain on the different forms of ‘Europe’ both internally and externally. Europeans want more from Europe even as non-Europeans want greater access. If these overlapping demands continue to increase, Europe – however it is organised – will inevitably fail to live up to expectations. It will get overwhelmed with demand for benefits and resources, and it will struggle even to maintain its current position. Once pushed hard enough to meet the competing claims of individuals, firms, and governments both inside and outside the continent, ‘Europe’ will collapse.
From resilience to institutional reform and enlargement
The solution for Europeans is two-fold. First, conventional wisdom is correct that Europeans need to focus on delivering what is most essential and doing so in the most effective manner possible. They also need to exercise greater self-discipline and coordination to minimize the strain. This is where ‘simplification’ moves to the centre of the agenda, as does concern for moderation and moral hazard. But Europeans also need to come up with new ways of making and implementing decisions so that they waste less energy getting organized and focus more attention on producing the things they need as productively and efficiently as they can. This is where simplification and innovation meet institutional reform.
The second part of the solution is more counterintuitive. Europeans need to get more support from people who do not formally belong to institutionalised forms of Europe in their efforts. Those who do not belong to existing member states already have access to Europe, and they benefit from that access. The goal is to get those people from outside Europe's institutions to exercise the same self-discipline and coordination that Europeans require from themselves. This is where enlargement comes on the agenda – again, no matter how Europe is organized. Not all institutional forms of Europe need to expand, and no institution is likely to go beyond the geographic expression of Europe, but each faces the pressure coming from the same underlying forces. Whether that expansion takes the form of formal enlargement or evolves in terms of new forms of partnership what matters is that Europeans find support to ensure they have access to the resources they need and security from those who would take away that access.
This is a familiar story in an unfamiliar context
Getting leaner and getting larger is how political communities learn to adapt to the challenge of sustainability. If there was a criticism of Diamond’s argument, it was that he underestimated the resilience of political and social organizations. And ‘Europe’ has great capacity for resilience. But the point about mortality still holds and the causal mechanism that underpins it is hauntingly familiar. You can see the same disconnect between self-interest and collective interest in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that emerges around limited natural resources like water, fish stocks, or forests. You can also see the same response in terms of reorganizing how communities work together and how they connect from one community to another. This is how Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics. And you can see the potential for failure – because sometimes communities do not act quickly or decisively enough.
This perception of Europe will be unfamiliar to most people. Few academics or politicians have tried to analyse ‘Europe’ as a structure for organizing collective action around common-pool resources (to borrow Ostrom’s language), and few people would recognize what they were saying even if they did. The academic jargon surrounding Ostrom’s work is daunting. Nevertheless, the reality is easily communicated. Europe is mortal for the same reason it is successful – because ‘Europe’ is an attractive organisation. The challenge now is to match that attractiveness with strong enough institutions and partners to ensure Europe is resilient. That is the central message that comes not just from Draghi’s report, but also from the reports written by Enrico Letta and Sauli Niinistö. European politicians need to help the people understand that the challenges facing Europe are familiar and that Europeans know how to handle this. That is the other message that comes clearly out of the writings and speeches of Macron and Draghi. They are right to insist. Because the alternative of allowing everyone to help or fend for themselves is not a viable option.
This essay is based on the newly published short book by Veronica Anghel and Erik Jones. ‘From Club to Commons: Enlargement, Reform and Sustainability in European Integration’. That book is open access and freely available in electronic form. At crucial periods in its development, the EU protects and reinforces its essential projects -- the Single Market, the Euro, security -- with increasingly intrusive and encompassing governance institutions. At such moments, deepening and widening, reform and enlargement are necessary for the sustainability of European success. ‘From Club to Commons’ shows why.
