There is talk about creating a federal Europe, where the EU would have more power than they do now. I’m not convinced this is a good idea.
The Treaty of Lisbon was the final major amendment to the Charter of the European Union. It was passed in 2007 and while it sounds like a big deal most of it is pretty boring. It restructures the legal structure of the EU into one legal person, modifies the powers of parliament and the European Council, includes a mutual protection pact, implements a citizen’s initiative, and a withdrawal procedure which allowed Brexit. All in all it is a good treaty, but honestly as laws go its one of the more boring ones out there.
There are talks about a federal Europe bringing its countries closer together. But what part of EU law will this engage? There is no need to move health care or education up to a federal level. Defense could perhaps be moved up. I can see the advantages of a unified foreign policy sometimes, but its a double edged sword. A unified defense policy as well turns into a double-edged sword. I don’t know what the advantage of a unified defense policy would bring. They already have interoperability and a mutual protection pact. What advantage would bringing defense under a single European Union command bring? This is not clear to me.
So the benefits of a federal Europe will not be seen in health care, defense, or education. These are the largest roles which governments play a part. They already have the benefits of being able to travel, live, and work between countries freely with no red tape. I think the structure of the European Union is fine how it is.
Unification is a doubled edged sword. If Europeans elected thoughtful and considerate leaders it could lift up the poorer countries in the European Union.
Likewise, if they elected leaders with less noble ideals they could easily end up pushing down the wealthier parts of the bloc without any substantial benefit.
Unifying large amounts of countries for trade and travel almost always comes with substantial benefits. Fiscal unions however are far more complicated beasts to deal with. I do not see any benefit to unifying health care programs at such a massive scale. We find that size is obviously not a major factor. Iceland has fewer than a half million citizens, and Japan is the second largest developed democracy in the world yet they spend about the same amount on health care per capita. Education sees almost no benefit to scale.
We can compare to the United States as well to see how such a massive fiscal union across disparate regions doesn’t make a lot of sense. It becomes extremely difficult for states to implement reasonable laws such as universal health care because the federal government sucks up so much tax revenue, while the large Southern bloc of states blocks a lot of laws which would be beneficial to the country. This is while we see a clear trend that Democratic led states do significantly better than Republican led states on almost every metric.
My argument is simple. There is no benefit to large fiscal unions. It would be better to bring fiscal programs down to the state level where for democratic states would see no reduction in quality of life and actually save money by no longer funding Southern corruption. States which are worse off would then need to take on these programs and improve their procedures and no longer depend on being bailed out by wealthy democratic led states. This gets us to the same desired endpoint of fiscal union without the potential downsides of a bad government.
So I think the European Union right now has the ideal structure for such a large and diverse group of democracies. I don’t know how to improve on it. Some laws which hold back innovation perhaps, though this gets complicated. My advice to Europe is keep the system you have. It provides a large amount of benefits with few downsides.
A federal Europe however is probably a bad idea.