Bigger, messier, tougher  – POLITICO

Paul Taylor is a contributing editor at POLITICO. 

PARIS — A few weeks ago, a graduate student challenged me to imagine the European Union in 2035. 

Most of the time, we aren’t even sure how the next summit will turn out, or whether the bloc’s east-west and north-south divides will be bridged or papered over one more time. If a week is a long time in politics, 12 years is an eternity — and a crystal ball is no scientific instrument. 

Yet, some features of that future Europe are discernible today. 

For one, the EU will have more, not fewer, members by the mid-2030s — possibly as many as 36 compared to today’s 27.  

It will be a bigger, messier yet tougher EU, shaped — as always — by unexpected events, and the bloc will struggle to defend its interests and values in a world of great power rivalry. 

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, geopolitics has become the strongest driving force raising pressure on Brussels and Western European capitals when it comes to removing long-standing roadblocks to the EU’s further enlargement. Political pressure to admit all the countries to the west of the new Iron Curtain — including Ukraine, Moldova and six Western Balkan aspirants — will likely be overwhelming, provided they make the required reforms.  

Turkey, on the other hand, is unlikely to have joined by 2035, or probably ever — even if a successor to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were more pro-European and democratic.  

Since the United Kingdom’s fateful vote to leave the EU in 2016, however, no other country has toyed with withdrawing. On the contrary, Brexit has been a salutary lesson to most Europeans that life is warmer and more prosperous inside than on the outside — especially with a revisionist Russia banging on the gates.  

Even the most outspoken populist Euroskeptic politicians in France, Italy, Poland, Hungary and the Netherlands have stopped advocating for an exit now, as they would rather stay and obstruct, or simply disobey, or reshape. 

Second, the EU of 2035 will predictably still be operating under the same Treaty of Lisbon, and very probably dealing with the same debilitating requirement for unanimity in decision-making on foreign policy, taxation and the common budget. Given the need for referendums in many countries to ratify any new charter, treaty change is simply too politically risky. 

To be sure, France and Germany – the EU’s historic leaders — have stated that in order to prevent ever more vetoes from paralyzing decision-making, a shift to qualified majority voting on issues such as sanctions and tax will be a condition for further enlargement. While that could theoretically be done under the current treaty, however, most small- and medium-sized countries are determined to retain their veto power — whether to protect competitive advantages like low corporate taxes, or to avoid subservience to what some fear would become a German or Franco-German empire.

Ultimately, I don’t believe either France or Germany would dare block Ukraine’s path to membership if it enthusiastically embraced EU-mandated reforms after the war. However, along with other member countries, they will press for long transition periods before new members can gain the full benefits of membership, whether that be in terms of EU funds, farm subsidies, the free movement of workers or, possibly, veto rights and their own commissioner.  

Think-tanks have produced clever designs for a possible staged accession in this vein, including a probation period during which newcomers wouldn’t have full voting powers — something that they argue could be written into their accession treaties. But, crucially, no such legal procedure currently exists, and it would take unanimous agreement from current members to agree one. 

“I suspect the EU will open a different track for membership, with more gradual admission,” Lykke Friis, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former Danish minister, told POLITICO.  

Of course, a larger EU without institutional reform could be a recipe for weakness or paralysis, but the bloc does have the flexibility to adapt and advance, skirting its own constraining rules if necessary. For instance, in its response to COVID-19, the EU broke long-standing taboos with joint purchases of vaccines and collective borrowing to fund economic recovery; and now, for the first time, it’s using a common fund outside the EU budget to reimburse members for arms shipped to Ukraine.  

As a “war economy” will require wartime joint financing, with common debt issuance for defense, these precedents should clear the way for joint purchases of arms and ammunition for Ukraine, as well as joint weapons procurement for EU countries to meet the urgent need to bolster NATO’s defenses against an angry and vengeful Russia. 

Additionally, the EU will have transitioned from free-trading globalization to a more protective and selective economic model well before 2035, diversifying its supply chains for energy, minerals and semiconductors away from China and Russia, and vetting investments on security grounds. 

The Continent will still need the United States as its guardian nuclear superpower, however, but when it comes to providing conventional armed forces, it will have to fend for itself more, and take more responsibility for its neighborhood as Washington focuses on China. 

Such piecemeal integration in response to crises such as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is far more likely than either a federal leap forward or a nationalist unraveling of a Europe built over seven decades of common legal, economic and political construction. 

Poland and Hungary may still pose a challenge to the EU’s shared values down the line, with their steady erosion of judicial independence, media freedom, civil society and civil rights. The jury is out on whether EU financial pressure can reverse those trends. But the two Central European outliers are unlikely to drag the rest of the EU toward the type of looser organization of nation-states that Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki recently championed.  

On the other hand, a more unwieldy EU could very well spur a vanguard of countries to move ahead with closer integration. 

“We could get an EU of different speeds, or variable geometry. There will probably be an informal core group with Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland, depending on the political situation in Poland. The Commission will still be at the center because it makes legislative proposals and can act in crises,” Friis said.

Such a core group already exists, as not all EU countries are members of the euro zone or the Schengen zone of open border travel, and by 2035, there may well be a nucleus of countries working more closely together on defense integration. 

Loukas Tsoukalis, an academic expert on European integration and the former head of the Commission’s in-house think tank, worries that the EU will become marginalized in an era of global strategic rivalry among great powers — unless, that is, it becomes an economic and political adult itself. 

Tsoukalis’s latest book, “Europe’s Coming of Age,” is a call to arms pleading for the EU to make the transition from soft to hard power, from being mostly an economic and regulatory actor to becoming a political and military player. 

“Becoming an adult requires an internationalization of the euro, more integrated taxation, a world leading climate policy and a common defense,” Tsoukalis told POLITICO. “That’s most unlikely to happen with an EU of 27, even less so with an EU of 35 or 36. So, we’ll have to rely on coalitions of the willing and able. Inevitably, that will have to be led by France and Germany.” 

However, the increasing fragmentation of European political systems, with weaker governments, growing social inequality and fractious, eruptive public opinion, poses a severe challenge to a more coherent EU. And in 2035, Europe will be an aging continent with chronic labor shortages that will inhibit growth and economic dynamism. 

Thus, whether the EU will be able to sustain the “Brussels effect” of extending its regulatory reach globally thanks to the power of its single market remains uncertain in the coming less-globalized era of economic blocs dominated by U.S.-China rivalry. The EU’s ability to impose its norms and standards on digital giants and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, in which none of the leading global players is European looks even less plausible. 

Finally, some issues will probably be too intractable for the bloc to overcome its differences — even by 2035. For example, it’s a fair bet that member countries will still be fighting over immigration and asylum policies 12 years hence, even as their need for migrant workers grows ever more pressing. 

On a personal note, after more than six years as a contributing editor, this is my final column for POLITICO. Thank you for all your interest and feedback during this time. We will continue the conversation about Europe’s future.