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.
You re more likely to see the creation of the Spanish federation than the political union of disparate european interests currently held together via monetary injections
How does Poland manage to be industrially active and growing? Despite having only 10 per cent of the total EU population and not being in a federalist relation with Malta, Cyprus and Portugal?
Partly by not importing Germano-French bureaucratic dysfunction (Papiere, Papiere über alles). Which would only grow more prominent with further integration.
Brute force does not matter nearly as much as quality of governance does. Qing China was a big, helpless monster eaten alive by smaller, more agile competitors.
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.
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.
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.
As an entrepreneur with businesses in both the US and EU, a federation is probably several steps too far from political will. Instead:
- Let banks operate and merge across borders, especially neobanks/fintechs. European banks are easily 10+ yrs ahead of the US in terms of tech and customer service but they lack scale and capital, especially in the credit side of things.
- Credit, again: we need the equivalent of D&B/Fico for Europe: a single credit bureau that can judge creditworthiness of people and organizations. Even the US has solved this through private companies, why can't Europe? Fellow Euros are shocked when I tell them that a 0-day LLC in the US can get $20k in credit card limits almost immediately.
The rest are easy, especially for web/internet companies. But if we have to raise credit/money based on the rules of the biggest (and slowest!) economies, then the EU is fucked.
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.
Not going to happen without an agreed single working language, which can't realistically be anything other than English, and that'll be unacceptable, so the idea is (very sadly) dead on arrival.
No matter the structure there, without affordable gas from a certain neighbor - Europe simply no longer has the capability to be an industrialized block. You can't smelt aluminum with solar nor make fertilizer, chemicals - can run AI data centers with it - sorry. Energy is EVERYTHING. Without it, Europe becomes a tourist Disney Land for the worlds rich.
When I visited Europe, or talk to a European in the US, the first question you always get asked:
"Where are you from?"
This makes me quite uncomfortable, because I'm immediately getting stereotyped based on my parents DNA. (In the US, the question is often "What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?")
I have strong doubts that Europe can actually become a single nation of states. If France doesn't screw it up by demanding to be first among equals, Germany or Poland will probably side with the US who will be against this from happening.
The stagnation in Europe (compared to the US) is due to EU over-regulation and industrial suicide caused by net zero policy.
> [chemicals sector] investments fell from 1.9 megatonnes of capacity in 2024 to 0.3 megatonnes last year, as the sector struggled with high energy prices, suffocating bureaucracy and an expansion of Chinese imports
From 2019 to 2023, the EU recorded over 853,000 manufacturing job losses, with the largest losses in automotive sectors in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Germany.
The European Green Deal was forecast to put up to 11 million jobs “at risk” in various sectors if adjustments weren’t made:
We seem to think that if we destroy our own industry, ship emissions abroad, and marginally reduce global CO2 emissions, we will inspire the rest of the world (i.e. China and India) to follow suit. That's self-evidently ridiculous.
EU national leaders need to stop peacocking in Davos and Brussels, and start listening to their own people, and their own businesses, who are crying out for sensible energy costs, and for red tape and bureaucracy to get out the way of business.
I think supporters of this idea take the citizens' loyalty for granted. Much like the nations within Europe do.
It would be super easy for the EU to charm the European populations into EU loyalty instead of national loyalty. All it would take is to offer good deals to the individual person. To start, a minimum €10 000 per month salary for any citizen taking up military duty. Home ownership to young people who contribute to the federation. And such things, the possibilities are endless.
But we all know that the disdain that the EU leaders and national European leaders have against their own population is bottomless, and that they would rather do anything except building loyalty among their population.
Yeah of course, Europe has already been destroyed by the EU bureaucracy, but lets give them even more powers to implement their dumb ideas even faster, such as... "oh, how about we stopped producing cars by 2030?", or again... "oh, war is bad, guns kills, how about we pass CSR laws that dissuade banks from funding military companies".
The number of times I've read articles about the upcoming "Silicon Valley in Europe" warrants an article running through the last twenty years of the EU getting its act together "any day now".
Just as the US is proving that giving power to federations will make states powerless, Draghi finds it the perfect time to suggest a federation.
We all knew this would eventually be the proposed path. The EU politicians and staffers obviously have a vested interest in saying yes. It means the EU will stop having to fight for ratification. It also means centralized planning and less fine-grained adjustments for local needs. As always.
This is not more power to the people or "we're stronger together." This is a simple attempt at an opportunistic power grab. Please don't let it happen here too.
EU is a rare coalition in history, carefully implemented but still an expirement. There are three types of members: low (south/east), middle (north/west) and Germany. Basically money is flowing in producing Germany and then back to the consuming lows. The middles are neutral to money flow.
This vital rotation is expected to continue in the future albeit with slower speed. The recent collaborations with South America and India aim to help this flow go on.
The current US policy is making a great favor to Europe as they cause a uniting instinct against a common danger. There is no need for same language and same most common surname 'Smith' to span 5000km.
27 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 48.8 ms ] threadIt 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.
As a european I have exited the continent, sold all my properties and will never return to this place ever again.
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...
Partly by not importing Germano-French bureaucratic dysfunction (Papiere, Papiere über alles). Which would only grow more prominent with further integration.
Brute force does not matter nearly as much as quality of governance does. Qing China was a big, helpless monster eaten alive by smaller, more agile competitors.
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.
- Let banks operate and merge across borders, especially neobanks/fintechs. European banks are easily 10+ yrs ahead of the US in terms of tech and customer service but they lack scale and capital, especially in the credit side of things.
- Credit, again: we need the equivalent of D&B/Fico for Europe: a single credit bureau that can judge creditworthiness of people and organizations. Even the US has solved this through private companies, why can't Europe? Fellow Euros are shocked when I tell them that a 0-day LLC in the US can get $20k in credit card limits almost immediately.
The rest are easy, especially for web/internet companies. But if we have to raise credit/money based on the rules of the biggest (and slowest!) economies, then the EU is fucked.
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.
"Where are you from?"
This makes me quite uncomfortable, because I'm immediately getting stereotyped based on my parents DNA. (In the US, the question is often "What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?")
I have strong doubts that Europe can actually become a single nation of states. If France doesn't screw it up by demanding to be first among equals, Germany or Poland will probably side with the US who will be against this from happening.
> [chemicals sector] investments fell from 1.9 megatonnes of capacity in 2024 to 0.3 megatonnes last year, as the sector struggled with high energy prices, suffocating bureaucracy and an expansion of Chinese imports
https://www.ft.com/content/6d7dee96-4d6f-431c-a229-b78f9298f...
From 2019 to 2023, the EU recorded over 853,000 manufacturing job losses, with the largest losses in automotive sectors in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Germany.
The European Green Deal was forecast to put up to 11 million jobs “at risk” in various sectors if adjustments weren’t made:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal#Job_losses...
We seem to think that if we destroy our own industry, ship emissions abroad, and marginally reduce global CO2 emissions, we will inspire the rest of the world (i.e. China and India) to follow suit. That's self-evidently ridiculous.
EU national leaders need to stop peacocking in Davos and Brussels, and start listening to their own people, and their own businesses, who are crying out for sensible energy costs, and for red tape and bureaucracy to get out the way of business.
Even the Dutch Nazi party split over it.
It would be super easy for the EU to charm the European populations into EU loyalty instead of national loyalty. All it would take is to offer good deals to the individual person. To start, a minimum €10 000 per month salary for any citizen taking up military duty. Home ownership to young people who contribute to the federation. And such things, the possibilities are endless.
But we all know that the disdain that the EU leaders and national European leaders have against their own population is bottomless, and that they would rather do anything except building loyalty among their population.
We all knew this would eventually be the proposed path. The EU politicians and staffers obviously have a vested interest in saying yes. It means the EU will stop having to fight for ratification. It also means centralized planning and less fine-grained adjustments for local needs. As always.
This is not more power to the people or "we're stronger together." This is a simple attempt at an opportunistic power grab. Please don't let it happen here too.
This vital rotation is expected to continue in the future albeit with slower speed. The recent collaborations with South America and India aim to help this flow go on.
The current US policy is making a great favor to Europe as they cause a uniting instinct against a common danger. There is no need for same language and same most common surname 'Smith' to span 5000km.