Can the EU be a superpower without being a superstate?

The Conference on the Future of Europe, an exercise in direct democracy at the European level, held its concluding event at the start of this week. Perhaps you didn't see it, perhaps you have no idea what the Conference even was. Unless you have a passion for Macron's speeches on the EU or for interpretive dance (no, I'm not joking), you likely didn't miss much.

Whether the speeches or the proposals brought together by a convention of European citizens will amount to much will depend on what EU affairs always depends on: the willingness of national governments to go along with it. And much as you can be swept up in Macron's passion, there are always doubters. 

But in watching proceedings, I was reminded of a recent statement from a Polish MEP, Radosław Sikorski. Giving his thoughts on the Conference, Sikorski hit back at those who want the EU to be strong enough to deliver solutions to all our current challenges (fighting climate change, fighting Putin) but who, at the same time, want to roll back European integration (making the EU much less effective or even totally absent in these same areas). After expressing his desire for an EU that can 'send [Putin] to hell', Sikorski delivered an interesting line: 'we need not a superstate, but a superpower'.

As a riposte to those who decry every attempt to make the EU more effective and more helpful for its citizens as a subterfuge to create a 'superstate', it's certainly effective. After all, most people probably agree that a 'superstate' is bad - it conjures up images of stifling bureaucracy, massive centralisation and a loss of national identity. But most people probably also agree that a 'superpower' is good - it's all the usual benefits of power, but even better. Sikorski's slogan is catchy, if nothing else.

But does it actually mean anything? Can you indeed have a superpower without a superstate? And what do either of these terms mean anyway? Such were the thoughts in my head this week and if they intrigue you too, then hopefully this piece should provide some answers.

Undoubtedly the most important term to settle here is the idea of a 'superstate'. Not only is it the more controversial of the two terms, but its main use in debate is as a pejorative - it's simply there to say the EU is bad or will be bad. Such terms are always hard to approach objectively because they are not objective - their sole purpose is to push a particular, subjective angle. In practice, the superstate concept is used by nationalists and eurosceptics to describe any degree of European integration that they deem to be excessive. By definition, no one supports that because no one supports something they think is excessive. If you did not think a proposal for more integration was excessive, chances are you wouldn't use the term in the first place. So the 'superstate' stands alone and is something of a straw man argument. 

But we can still approach this problem from another direction. If the 'superstate' idea is a question of major political integration combined with at least some degree of centralisation, then we can reframe our question: can the EU be a superpower without full political union? And, on a related note: what is the minimum amount of integration that the EU needs in order to become a superpower?

My feeling is that your answer to either of these questions will depend on what you mean by a superpower, neatly bringing us to the second part of Sikorski's original statement. 

Typically speaking, although you can be a superpower in many different fields, the one that has mattered above all others is military capacity. We recognise superpowers as those entities (states, empires, alliances) which can do two things. First, they can project much more military power than potential adversaries. Second, they can do so simultaneously across different parts of the world. The latter point is key as, without it, even an exceptionally strong military will only be a regional power (this is partly why it seems too early to call China a superpower, even if its military does outmatch its neighbours). 

With that in mind, how does the EU stack up? Well, there's really no doubt the EU today falls well short. Quite aside from anything else, it has no real military power to call its own. Any and all military action is controlled and directed by the individual national governments. While some EU 'Battlegroups' do exist, they are small and aren't used anyway. Plans to create a 5000-strong new 'rapid reaction force' will likely meet the same fate. You might be able to muster some soldiers together onto a parade ground - EU flag patches on their arms - but it's almost impossible to imagine them being deployed in any combat capacity. If an EU state wants to get involved in a conflict, it will do so with its own military force (as has been obvious from any number of recent conflits, whether in the European neighbourhood or further afield). 

In the 1990s, the Belgian Foreign Minister said the EU was a 'military worm'. 30 years later, it's hard to argue that much has changed. 

Now, that's not all he said. He also qualified the EU as an 'economic giant' and it is in this vein that some people will say that the EU is an 'economic superpower'. The EU is after all the second biggest economy in the world and the biggest trade partner for a wide variety of countries. Its economic influence is self-evident, allowing it to keep neighbours locked into a regulatory orbit (e.g. the UK, Turkey). The need to bring the EU on board for sanctions against Russia also flowed from this global economic strength. 

Nonetheless, to this argument I would say: yes, but the very fact you need an adjective to qualify it is the problem with the idea of an 'economic superpower'. A true superpower is a superpower tout court. It cannot be a superpower in only one area. This is because if economic power is your only real lever, then it is very likely that you will run up against at least some major adversaries who can resist your vision of the world - adversaries who could only be dissuaded by military power. 

So, in short: the EU has some superpower-like strengths but alone they are insufficient to be an actual superpower, and the lack of any real military strength is the most obvious obstacle to that status.

This leads us to the obvious follow-up (and so a step closer to finding an answer to our original question): what would it take for the EU to become a military power?

Inevitably, if you ask this question, someone will tell you that what's needed is a European army. Between the recent conclusion of the Conference on the Future of Europe and Russia's war in Ukraine, it's an idea that is once again everywhere. 

We could write a whole other blog post about the practical requirements for a European army and whether it's a good idea right now (or ever), but for the purposes of this debate, we can quite easily put it aside. Even if you believe it would be the best thing since sliced bread, I think it's obvious that most people would look at your proposal for a sizeable armed forces mustered under the EU flag and go: 'yep, that's a superstate'. So if 'superpower without superstate' is our aim, then a European army is off the table.

Instead, if we want to get creative with this, there are essentially two problems we have to solve: capacity and command. Or, how big is your military and who gives it orders?

The first problem is the easiest to solve. While military capacity in the EU is lacking today, this is simply a political choice. Either you spend public money on your armed forces or you don't. 

As it happens, one of the consequences of the war against Ukraine has been that European countries have started to pump more cash into their defence capacities. In recent months, Germany, Finland, Romania, Sweden, Latvia and the Netherlands have all announced hikes in defence spending, while France is sticking to an already established upward trajectory. There's still a decade of austerity to undo in many of these cases, but the political momentum has swung behind greater spending on armed forces in Europe. 

How much spending will need to increase by in order to deliver a truly superpower-level combined military strength is another question. So long as Europe's militaries remain separate, there's an inevitable degree of waste and duplication that will absorb some of this extra taxpayer funding. So to match American capacity, for example, Europe would likely need to spend more as a whole to overcome this inefficiency. Greater joint European defence procurement (still outside of 'superstate' territory in my view) would help deal with this and reduce difficult choices between new schools and new tanks. In any case, if EU citizens and their governments want to get their hands on more military equipment and hire more soldiers, not only can they do so but they are rich enough to build up their combined strength to an impressive size. 

So on capacity, we can certainly tick the superpower box without the need for superstate integration. But what about command?

This is where it gets tricky. To make this work, we need to have some way for a political leader or institution to give Europe's militaries the order to jointly engage in a conflict, but without straying into superstate territory (e.g. an EU President). Faced with these limits, the only way forward is likely a system where all the national leaders would need to unanimously approve this order (as is already the case in existing EU foreign policy decisions, like sanctions). 

Where this solution falls down, of course, is that national vetoes can really clog up the pipes of the EU machine. You may have all the power in the world, but if you aren't able to use it because one country of 10 million people says no, then what is your power actually good for? 

Majority voting, meanwhile, is off the table because one, this is probably superstate territory again, and two, as it stands no one is going to agree to switch to majority voting for something as major as military conflict. In order to move over to majority voting for this kind of decision, you would need a complete overhaul of the EU system and a new approach to where legitimacy comes from in the EU. 

This then brings us to the basic conclusion of this whole piece. Yes the EU can become a superpower by expanding its military strength, and it can do so without taking on 'superstate' qualities. But the real obstacle will be to develop a shared strategic culture and greater overlap between national conceptions of what is in everyone's best interests. Otherwise, the EU will be left exposed to constant national vetoes - and even a military giant will not be much to fear if its hands and feet are always tied up. 

To my mind, such a route to superpower status is possible, but not likely. Ultimately you cannot let big decisions be left up to everyone agreeing all the time - no powerful democracies have ever worked this way. It's an approach that would leave the EU as more of an equivalent to the Holy Roman Empire than to the United States. It seems more probably that national governments would simply not bother setting up this system in the first place.

Now as I laid out at the start, 'superstate' is mainly used as a pejorative term rather than an objective description of a political and societal method of organisation, so the takeaway here shouldn't be that the EU needs to take on superstate qualities. But I would finish by saying that I'm sceptical you can reach superpower status with any collection of people on this Earth while trying to shortcut the hard work of political unity. Your real effective strength and your method of decision-making are simply too bound up together to separate the two. In other words, military superpower status can only come after political integration - whether in the case of Europe or anywhere else.

Can the EU become more powerful without massive leaps in integration? Sure. Can it become a superpower? I don't think so.