The biggest issue confronting Europe today is moving forwards with the EU project. Studies focusing on the EU as well as public discourse concentrate disproportionately on the flaws of this supranational construct, giving the impression of constant crisis. This incentivizes the counterfactual reasoning that post-World War II social and economic progress would have been possible in the absence of the EU. What is worrying about our present situation is not the increased fragmentation of views on what Europe could become but the growing acceptance (and increasing familiarity) of things as they have always been. EU integration is a simultaneous process of creation and destruction that slowly erases the sovereignty of the nation state. This rattled the old European order and is met with resistance from the nation state. And yet twenty-first-century challenges cannot be addressed with nineteenth-century institutions, meaning nation states first and foremost. An increasingly complex global environment presses to stride forwards with the remodeling of the European institutional system.

The new prominence of the EU in political discourse seems to suggest that this is a project in peril of disintegration. The argument is that building a monetary system that makes sense in Finland just as much as it would in Greece is too difficult. It is that rule of law means different things in Hungary and in the Netherlands. And it is that “Russian connections” spell gas pipelines in Germany and existential threats in Estonia. However, the need to give some kind of unifying meaning to rules and concepts was always inevitable. It is fanciful to assume that there would be no resistance from national and local interpretations to unifying European rules. “Building Europe” can only happen at the expense of national sovereignty. Much like the popular movie line from Highlander: in the end, there can be only one. Either the EU or the nation state will predominate. My goal here is to sketch the opportunities for a more solidified EU offered by current challenges.

Embrace coalition building

The May 2019 European Parliament elections gave the EU a more fragmented legislative body. The center-right European People's Party (EPP) and the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost their combined majority for the first time even if they remain the two largest parties.