Two hundred and fifty years ago today, on the fourth of July, the greatest instrument of modern liberty, natural law and human rights was declared and adopted.

Yet it was not the founding of the United States of America. The republic we know today, governed by its Constitution, did not come into being until more than a decade later. Among the new Constitution's six central purposes, the first one was the establishment of a more perfect union.

Fewer Europeans know this. Before the America and the new Constitution we recognize today, there stood an institution familiar to every EU citizen. America first bound itself into a weaker union, and that union bore burdens strikingly like those the EU carries now. For years its member states could not enforce their common laws, could not speak to the world with one voice, could not defend themselves, and could not secure liberty equally to their people. It was this failure that led the Americans to seek, in its place, a more perfect union.

The parallel with Europe today is impossible to ignore.

The European Union was founded to end the division of this continent, to lay firm foundations for its future, to combat exclusion and discrimination, and to continue building an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, one in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.

Yet as the Union stands today, it cannot fully enforce its own law to protect the blessings of liberty. Member states routinely defy judgments of the Supreme law of the land and the court, and pay little price for it. A citizen cannot seek justice before a federal court without her rights depending on which state she happens to call home. The Union cannot speak to the world with one foreign policy. We cannot vote for a European government of our own choosing, and we cannot elect our own President.

National governments and populists only divide us and strip away our liberties, one border at a time. Yet the age we live in has given us the means to govern ourselves directly, without any middle layer of tyranny, oppression, ignorance, incompetence, corruption or the other evils that have long stood between the citizen and her rights.

The time has come for Europeans to reclaim the unalienable Rights of Life, Safety, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, regardless of race, nationality, language, religion or any other trait. With firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, let Europeans mutually pledge to one another our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor, and pledge them to one another alone, not to the many small governments that divide us.

True greatness comes from what people do for one another, in the fight for liberty and the pursuit of happiness, freed from the friction that one people is so often made to feel against another. It requires no politician, no government. Every citizen can be that greatness herself. The safeguarding of democracy for all, without any form of discrimination, and the supreme rule of law, belongs to everyone. It is not a task to be handed off to Brussels, nor left to the national capitals.

The time has come for Europeans to declare their own more perfect union and their own independence from the governments that divide them, to pursue happiness and the blessings of liberty above all else, and to pledge themselves to one another rather than to nationalist governments and their oppression.

That pledge must reach every people who call this continent home. No government shall diminish a person's rights because they are Belgian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish or Swedish. Nor shall any person hold fewer rights because they are Roma, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Catalan, Basque, Sami, Sorbian, Breton, Frisian, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, Turkish, Armenian, Tatar, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, or of any other Asian, African or Arab heritage, whether Muslim, Christian, atheist, disabled, LGBTQ+, or of any other heritage, language, faith or community that calls Europe home.

One closing thought, and a fact worth remembering. The US Constitution was never meant to endure unchanged for nearly 250 years. It was written to be reviewed and renewed in time, and that review is long overdue. Perhaps Europe's own founding moment is the chance to write something built for its own age, a pledge, Europeans to Europeans, of what has for too long gone unsaid.

Hi everyone, I hope it's OK to share this here. I wrote a blog post about my assessment on how Europe would react if Russia ever tried to invade the Baltics.

“Don’t poke the bear!” Russians and their Western supporters - and fearers - liked to repeat it even before the full-scale invasion. After more than four years of war and crossing every imaginary “red line” without consequences, it has become a meme at this point. The line implies that Russia is a deadly beast that has the power to lash out violently if threatened, capable of killing whoever “pokes” it.

If Russia is a bear, then Europe is a sleeping dragon. It started dozing off after 1945 and militarily and geopolitically speaking went into deep sleep after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 2022 took the dragon totally off-guard, but the dangers weren’t grave enough to make it wake up, it merely entered its REM sleep phase.

I already shared my long take about a possible Russian invasion of the Baltics, but as the topic has the habit of re- and resurfacing, I felt the urge to expand on it.

Most public debate on the topic envisions Moscow pressuring the region in order to force Europe to stop further aid to Ukraine. Despite it being understandably a more concrete and pressing threat, this - in my opinion - is much less likely than the scenario I will outline.

A limited incursion or bombing campaign against EU and NATO territories would have a much less decisive benefit for Russia, while it would still mobilize increased European support for Ukraine. The lesson the continent would learn from it wouldn’t be that Russia is strong and we should just give in, but that Russia is a threat that needs to be dealt with, and the best way to do so is by arming Ukraine and boosting defence spending.

Let’s imagine a scenario that puts Russia in the best realistic position.

US President Trump or Vance manages to cut a deal with Putin. Russia agrees to a ceasefire on the current line in exchange for US withdrawal from the Baltics and Poland, easing of sanctions, and the normalisation of relations. While this would create widespread anxieties in Eastern Europe, a renewed crisis in EU-US relationships, and further weaken NATO by decisively putting Washington’s security guarantees in question, the continent can finally breathe a sigh of relief. The war is over, Russia managed to accept that they cannot take Ukraine, and has no more reason to threaten Europe, right?

But what if Putin didn’t see it that way? What if instead of demobilizing he would rapidly reconstitute his forces from Ukraine to Belarus and Russia’s north-western borders with the Baltics? He might conclude that with NATO castrated, a friendly administration in Washington, and a Europe still in its early phase of rearmament, this is the right moment to strike and change European security architecture favourable to Moscow.

What would be his goal? The pretext might be something between the good old “protection of Russian minorities”, and the “creation of a humanitarian corridor” to Kaliningrad. His true objective would likely be to force NATO troops to fully withdraw from the region, giving the organisation a final blow, while also weakening EU unity and cohesion, creating a divided continent. This would create a reality where Russia is the de facto “security guarantor” of Eastern Europe, and use this as leverage to influence its politics. Basically, the return of the Eastern Bloc as a buffer.

Putin’s base thesis is that the “West” and its democracies are in inevitable decline. Europeans are not ready for war, and there is little to no societal resolve to defend the Baltics. Sort of “he only needs to kick the door in, and the whole system would collapse”.

How would this play out?

Let’s assume Moscow gave an ultimatum for European capitals to withdraw their forces from the Baltics while amassing its troops near the border. How would these countries react? It is possible that they might start negotiations with Russia, but it’s extremely unlikely that they would comply. The best Putin could achieve would be the status quo, and the blocking of extra troops fearing escalation. 

Then day one comes, Russian forces cross the EU border in a full-scale invasion of all three Baltic states. Putin gives another long speech watched by the entire world where he threatens to use nukes and immediate long-range strikes on Berlin, Paris, London, and anyone who is willing to engage the Russian military.

This might cause an immediate political crisis in European capitals. Perhaps many would call for an urgent troop withdrawal from the Baltics, and assuming that Russia manages to avoid killing their soldiers already stationed there, it could avoid creating an immediate rally around the flag effect. Fear might override the resolve in the vast majority of European societies. It is already a big if, but dangerously plausible enough to run with the assumption.

However, there are nations that would not be deterred, and immediately treat any kind of incursion or attack on the Baltics as an attack on themselves. This would certainly include Poland, Finland, Sweden, and crucially Ukraine. No matter what other countries do, they would do everything possible to make sure that Russia cannot reach its objectives. It would be an existential issue for them from day one.

Similarly, EU institutions would unavoidably treat it as an attack on the whole Union. Brussels cannot accept a hostile country invading any part of its territory. It would create a deadly precedent that delegitimises its entire raison d'être as a guarantor of peace.

Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Finnish, and Swedish officials occupy key positions in Brussels, and they would do everything in their power to push for a collective response. Let’s not forget that an Estonian, Kaja Kallas serves as the EU's chief diplomat. She guides the Union's common foreign and security policy and external action. She would immediately use her full political capital to make sure the EU will be mobilized to protect her country.

All in all, there would be enormous pressure from multiple directions that pushes EU institutions and member states to respond decisively.

As the days and weeks pass, it will become clear to everyone that the Baltics are not going to surrender, its population is ready to fight, and Finland, Sweden, and Poland will not back down either. Europeans would start seeing Russian bombardments and killings in EU territory. They couldn’t just ignore that nations they share decades long alliances and a common Union with are getting murdered.

These nations have not only been friendly for as long as they can remember, but essentially family. In Germany alone there are two million Poles. Many of them already have German family members, and all of them have German colleagues and acquaintances. This is true for other parts of Western Europe as well and other nations involved. 

The citizens alone would put a massive pressure on European capitals, but probably not the main one. I find it certain that Denmark, Norway, and the UK would shortly join the war as well. Geography and national identities would pull them in if NATO Article 5 wasn’t binding enough. This would create another wave of pressure on individual Europe states. As more and more countries join unilaterally, they would also start pushing everyone else for support. It would create a domino effect that couldn’t stop in Copenhagen or London.

The EU proved it time and time again that it can pull itself together to find money and political will to deal with a crisis. This was showcased clearly during the pandemic and then the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s impossible to imagine that Brussels would not treat this at the very least as seriously as those two instances. 

Just for the pandemic recovery fund the Union managed to come up with €750 billion, and provided $226 billion in financial, military, humanitarian, and refugee assistance to Ukraine. €100s of billions would immediately be allocated for the war and eventually it would likely reach into the trillions mark. Russia’s roughly €165 billion military spending would immediately be put to shame.

This is where the dragon would awaken. The only reason Europe was sleeping on defence was due to its conviction that the US would protect it, and Russia would not be a threat anyway. Both of these assumptions would collapse immediately.

There would be arguments, disagreements, and not everybody would provide the same level of support. Perhaps Spain, Portugal, or Greece would not be willing to send troops (they did participate in the war in Afghanistan though, one might assume that the Baltics would be a more important cause), but they would certainly send other assistance, and would not be able to justify inaction.

History teaches us that an external attack often leads to centralization and unification. The European identity’s foundation myth is based on a story like this. The Battle of Thermopylae that united the Greeks against the Persians. More than two millennia later Bismarck showed us that a talented political operator can even provoke an external attack to create a push for unification. Europe already has the pieces scattered for this unification to happen.

Ukraine

In this situation, it would be foolish to imagine them sitting on their hands. The first place the EU would turn to would be Kyiv. They have the experience, the will to fight, and they are the only ones capable of fighting the drone war of the 21st century. Ukraine would be flooded with orders for drones and demand to train European drone pilots.

Kyiv would also eagerly take the opportunity to reopen the frontline to take back its territory. Since Russia is threatening the entire continent, now Europe would be incentivised to encourage them to do so to distract Moscow.

Eventually, Ukraine would be the real winner of this war. It would lock in European support like nothing else could, and retaking its full territories would become a likely prospect. It would clearly showcase that the continent needs them, and would give a giant boost to its EU membership aspirations.

A European Army

A European Army already enjoys popular support across the EU. All it needs is a final push.

The European Union (without Norway and the UK) has 450 million people. More than three times as many as Russia, and an economy ten times larger. Even if we are pessimistic, this would mean millions - but more likely tens of millions - of people who are ready to take up arms to defend the continent, and an economic base that can easily support them.

Perhaps the initial phases might go poorly - however knowing how the Russian army fared in Ukraine and how prepared the immediately involved countries are, this is at least doubtful -, but Europe could sustain a war much longer than Russia can, simply by the size of its economy and population.

The longer the war would go on the worse the outcome would be for Moscow. Europe would eventually organise its defence, train and equip the millions of people ready to fight, create a coherent fighting force, and learn how to wage war.

At the same time this would create an emotionally powerful story for Europe. We fight and bleed together to defend our continent and our democracies against tyranny and barbarism. This civilisational founding myth would make the EU a potential global superpower akin to the US and China. What we lack in comparison to these giants is unity. The economy and potential already exists, and a clear external threat would create that urgency for unity.

Summary

Moscow cannot just attack the Baltics and get away with it, but Putin might see it very differently. Just like Saddam Hussein didn’t learn from his disastrous war against Iran and still started another disastrous war against Kuwait in just two years, we cannot rule out Putin doing the same.

Similar incentives might be at play as well: more than one million men at arms need a purpose or they might become a domestic threat. He might think it is better to wage another war than to demobilize and face the economic and societal consequences.

Europe’s most important task for the coming years is to make sure that the Kremlin understand what would happen if they invaded. We must prepare for war so we never have to fight it. We must do everything to deter Russia regardless of what the US is doing. Moscow must hear the message clearly: don’t wake up the dragon!

A federal Europe, a unified financial system and jumping on AI investment is a life or death matter for Europeans in the near future.

The fragmented Europe cannot compete in this field and would disintegrate even further as the AI race between China and US goes heated.

There is a real potential of the aging European populations with tons of debt having pretty much all their businesses "outclasssed" in every way within the common decade.

The projection I posted shows the grim possibilities awaiting Europe.

Eurosceptics who appeal to their "nationalism" needs to understand that the alternative of EU federalization is constant and severe decline of welfare and relevance of their "nation".

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

Let’s face it: Brussels is a relic of a different era. It was chosen as a compromise between the original Western European members because picking Paris, Berlin, or Rome would have triggered fears of one country overpowering the others. Back then, European integration was primarily a peace project to tie France and Germany together. But the world has changed. The EU is no longer just a peace treaty, but a true political union and geopolitical actor. The geopolitical axis of Europe has shifted eastward. For citizens in Central and Eastern Europe, Brussels feels incredibly distant. If Europe wants to step up, federalize, and become a true global actor, we need a capital that reflects the entire union, not just the original Western core.

In a future United States of Europe, what city should be the new capital?

[removed]

I have been thinking for years about Europeaness and eurofederalism, and whilst I have been a eurofederalist for quite some time, I hadn't quite put my finger on my identity. I considered how being Romanian weighs into this, and at first I just said: European first, Romanian second. But after some thought, I would like to remove my Romanian identity at some point. When I die, I would like it to be known that I have died as a European for example. Many would find it extreme, but I would rather consider myself at the frontier of European identity, as I was born in the second month of Romania joining the EU - I am part of the European generation. Not one of the eurospectics of my generation wants to leave the EU, and they feel connected to other Europeans at a certain level. For this reason, I belive that the EU's existence is slowly giving way to a European identity (not that it has never existed, but it has not never been so widely expressed) which is becoming stronger and stronger in young people. Erasmus is the greatest national-identity builder ever created, and it must be amplified, as it has created a strong core of Europeanism in most good high schools and universities, and at this point, few people in the education system have ever talked negatively about them. Europe is not a new idea, but saying "I am European first" is, and, one day, it shall be what the majority will say. I go even further and I say "I am European." because I love Europe, and I truly believe Europe deserves its own voice. Europe must be ruled by Europeans, not by the Americans, not by the Russians, nor by the Chinese. It must be ruled in the interests of Europeans, not in the interests of Meta or Google. Lastly, Europe must be built for the human. If America's unique trait is profit, China's is industry, then Europe's is the individual.

Another thing. If we think of a EU federation as a state uniting the European peoples, then it would be more accurate to say: Long live the Union! rather than - Long live Europe! - but this is just a random shower thought.

Anyways, this is all I wanted to say.

Right so let’s say that tomorrow the EU and UK come to their senses and rejoin under the old deal. Would you as an EU citizen be alright with that option?

I could see the op-out of the Euro cause issues with Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden. As they all must adopt the euro at some point. Denmark is the only country that has a full op-out like the UK did.

Also would stay out of Schengen, therefore also keeping Ireland out. Meaning a lack of full EU cooperation with coverage on external borders. As the UK and Ireland would control their own borders and passport checks for EU and non EU citizens.

What are your opinions on this?