written on December 09, 2025

Elon Musk is not happy with the EU fining his X platform and is currently on a tweet rampage complaining about it. Among other things, he wants the whole EU to be abolished. He sadly is hardly the first wealthy American to share their opinions on European politics lately. I’m not a fan of this outside attention but I believe it’s noteworthy and something to pay attention to. In particular because the idea of destroying and ripping apart the EU is not just popular in the US; it’s popular over here too. Something that greatly concerns me.

We Have Genuine Problems

There is definitely a bunch of stuff we might want to fix over here. I have complained about our culture before. Unfortunately, I happen to think that our challenges are not coming from politicians or civil servants, but from us, the people. Europeans don’t like to take risks and are quite pessimistic about the future compared to their US counterparts. Additionally, we Europeans have been trained to feel a lot of guilt over the years, which makes us hesitant to stand up for ourselves. This has led to all kinds of interesting counter-cultural movements in Europe, like years of significant support for unregulated immigration and an unhealthy obsession with the idea of degrowth. Today, though, neither seems quite as popular as it once was.

Morally these things may be defensible, but in practice they have led to Europe losing its competitive edge and eroding social cohesion. The combination of a strong social state and high taxes in particular does not mix well with the kind of immigration we have seen in the last decade: mostly low-skilled people escaping wars. That means certain classes of immigrants are going to be net-negative for a very long time, if not forever, and increasingly society is starting to think about what the implications of that might be.

Yet even all of that is not where our problems lie, and it’s certainly not our presumed lack of free speech. Any conversation on that topic is foolish because it’s too nuanced. Society clearly wants to place some limits to free speech here, but the same is true in the US. In the US we can currently see a significant push-back against “woke ideologies,” and a lot of that push-back involves restricting freedom of expression through different avenues.

America Likes a Weak Europe

The US might try to lecture Europe right now on free speech, but what it should be lecturing us on is our economic model. Europe has too much fragmentation, incredibly strict regulation that harms innovation, ineffective capital markets, and a massive dependency on both the United States and China. If the US were to cut us off from their cloud providers, we would not be able to operate anything over here. If China were to stop shipping us chips, we would be in deep trouble too (we have seen this).

This is painful because the US is historically a great example when it comes to freedom of information, direct democracy at the state level, and rather low corruption. These are all areas where we’re not faring well, at least not consistently, and we should be lectured. Fundamentally, the US approach to capitalism is about as good as it’s going to get. If there was any doubt that alternative approaches might have worked out better, at this point there’s very little evidence in favor of that. Yet because of increased loss of civil liberties in the US, many Europeans now see everything that the US is doing as bad. A grave mistake.

Both China and the US are quite happy with the dependency we have on them and with us falling short of our potential. Europe’s attempt at dealing with the dependency so far has been to regulate and tax US corporations more heavily. That’s not a good strategy. The solution must be to become competitive again so that we can redirect that tax revenue to local companies instead. The Digital Services Act is a good example: we’re punishing Apple and forcing them to open up their platform, but we have no company that can take advantage of that opening.

Europe is Europe’s Biggest Problem

If you read my blog here, you might remember my musings about the lack of clarity of what a foreigner is in Europe. The reality is that Europe has been deeply integrated for a long time now as a result of how the EU works — but still not at the same level as the US. I think this is still the biggest problem. People point to languages as the challenge, but underneath the hood, the countries are still fighting each other. Austria wants to protect its local stores from larger competition in Germany and its carpenters from the cheaper ones coming from Slovenia. You can replace Austria with any other EU country and you will find the same thing.

The EU might not be perfect, but it’s hard to imagine that abolishing it would solve any problem given how national states have shown to behave. The moment the EU fell away, we would be warming up all border struggles again. We have already seen similar issues pop up in Northern Ireland after the UK left.

And we just have so much bureaucracy, so many non-functioning social systems, and such a tremendous amount of incoming governmental debt to support our flailing pension schemes. We need growth more than any other bloc, and we have such a low probability of actually accomplishing that.

Given how the EU is structured, it’s also acting as the punching bag for the failure of the nation states to come to agreements. It’s not that EU bureaucrats are telling Europeans to take in immigrants, to enact chat control or to enact cookie banners or attached plastic caps. Those are all initiatives that come from one or more member states. But the EU in the end will always take the blame because even local politicians that voted in support of some of these things can easily point towards “Brussels” as having created a problem.

The United States of Europe

A Europe in pieces does not sound appealing to me at all, and that’s because I can look at what China and the US have.

What China and the US have that Europe lacks is a strong national identity. Both countries have recognized that strength comes from unity. China in particular is fighting any kind of regionalism tooth and nail. The US has accomplished this through the pledge of allegiance, a civil war, the Department of Education pushing a common narrative in schools, and historically putting post offices and infrastructure everywhere. Europe has none of that. More importantly, Europeans don’t even want it. There is a mistaken belief that we can just become these tiny states again and be fine.

If Europe wants to be competitive, it seems unlikely that this can be accomplished without becoming a unified superpower. Yet there is no belief in Europe that this can or should happen, and the other superpowers have little interest in seeing it happen either.

What Would Fixing Actually Look Like?

If I had to propose something constructive, it would be this: Europe needs to stop pretending it can be 27 different countries with 27 different economic policies while also being a single market. The half-measures are killing us. We have a common currency in the Eurozone but no common fiscal policy. We have freedom of movement but wildly different social systems. We have common regulations but fragmented enforcement. 27 labor laws, 27 different legal systems, tax codes, complex VAT rules and so on.

The Draghi report from last year laid out many of these issues quite clearly: Europe needs massive investment in technology and infrastructure. It needs a genuine single market for services, not just goods. It needs capital markets that can actually fund startups at scale. None of this is news to anyone paying attention.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: none of this will happen without Europeans accepting that more integration is the answer, not less. And right now, the political momentum is in the opposite direction. Every country wants the benefits of the EU without the obligations. Every country wants to protect its own industries while accessing everyone else’s markets.

One of the arguments against deeper integration is that Europe hinges on some quite unrelated issues. For instance, the EU is seen as non-democratic, but some of the criticism just does not sit right with me. Sure, I too would welcome more democracy in the EU, but at the same time, the system really is not undemocratic today. Take things like chat control: the reason this thing does not die, is because some member states and their elected representatives are pushing for it.

What stands in the way is that the member countries and their people don’t actually want to strengthen the EU further. The “lack of democracy” is very much intentional and the exact outcome you get if you want to keep the power with the national states.

Foreign Billionaires and European Sovereignty

So back to where we started: should the EU be abolished as Musk suggests? I think this is a profoundly unserious proposal from someone who has little understanding of European history and even less interest in learning. The EU exists because two world wars taught Europeans that nationalism without checks leads to catastrophe. It exists because small countries recognized they have more leverage negotiating as a bloc than individually.

I also take a lot of issue with the idea that European politics should be driven by foreign interests. Neither Russians nor Americans have any good reason for why they should be having so much interest in European politics. They are not living here; we are.

Would Europe be more “free” without the EU? Perhaps in some narrow regulatory sense. But it would also be weaker, more divided, and more susceptible to manipulation by larger powers — including the United States. I also find it somewhat rich that American tech billionaires are calling for the dissolution of the EU while they are greatly benefiting from the open market it provides. Their companies extract enormous value from the European market, more than even local companies are able to.

The real question isn’t whether Europe should have less regulation or more freedom. It’s whether we Europeans can find the political will to actually complete the project we started. A genuine federation with real fiscal transfers, a common defense policy, and a unified foreign policy would be a superpower. What we have now is a compromise that satisfies nobody and leaves us vulnerable to exactly the kind of pressure Musk and other oligarchs represent.

A Different Path

Europe doesn’t need fixing in the way the loud present-day critics suggest. It doesn’t need to become more like America or abandon its social model entirely. What it needs is to decide what it actually wants to be. The current state of perpetual ambiguity is unsustainable.

It also should not lose its values. Europeans might no longer be quite as hot on the human rights that the EU provides, and they might no longer want to have the same level of immigration. Yet simultaneously, Europeans are presented with a reality that needs all of these things. We’re all highly dependent on movement of labour, and that includes people from abroad. Unfortunately, the wars of the last decade have dominated any migration discourse, and that has created ground for populists to thrive. Any skilled tech migrant is running into the same walls as everyone else, which has made it less and less appealing to come.

Or perhaps we’ll continue muddling through, which historically has been Europe’s preferred approach. It’s not inspiring, but it’s also not going to be the catastrophe the internet would have you believe either.

Is there reason to be optimistic? On a long enough timeline the graph goes up and to the right. We might be going through some rough patches, but structurally the whole thing here is still pretty solid. And it’s not as if the rest of the world is cruising along smoothly: the US, China, and Russia are each dealing with their own crises. That shouldn’t serve as an excuse, but it does offer context. As bleak as things can feel, we’re not alone in having challenges, but ours are uniquely ours and we will face them. One way or another.

This entry was tagged europe, politics and thoughts

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