Tag / european-union

by Erik Jones

The European Union as an Innovation in Politics

People look at the European Union and complain that it is not like a nation state. The EU is slow-moving, indecisive, and lacking in conviction. Look at the weakness of the EU’s response to the atrocities in Gaza, its ineffectiveness in standing up to the United States, and its inability to replace American support for Ukraine. Even the EU’s commitment to climate action appears to be wavering.

Such complaints ignore that the EU is not like a nation state for good reason. The European project exists to temper the behaviour of nation states. It is designed to smooth over the contradictions in liberal democracy and, in doing so, make those democracies both more resilient and more legitimate. And the EU is unique. Only Europeans benefit from that political innovation. The United States does not. Neither does Brazil, Russia, India, China, or South Africa.

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by Erik Jones

Europe and the Choice between Drift and Mastery

The President of the European Commission hosted an event to mark the one-year anniversary of the report on European competitiveness drafted by former Italian Prime Minister and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi last September. The message coming out of that meeting both from the European Commission President and from Draghi was that European policymakers need to do their homework. Too many items from the Draghi agenda remain unimplemented or only partly addressed. Too much more needs to be accomplished. And time is of the essence. The world is only becoming more volatile, more uncertain, and more dangerous. Europeans cannot afford to wait in preparing for this changed geopolitical environment, otherwise they will suffer the consequences. ‘Europe’ may even fail as a political project.

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