Will the EU turn into a Defense Union?

Daily Thoughts 3 Mar 2025

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On 18 May 2020, President Emmanuel Macron and Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel proposed a €500 billion EU fund to help the member states of the Union to recover from the Covid-shock. In negotiations, the “Recovery Fund” ballooned to €750 billion (technically to over €800 billion), and required the acceptance of national parliaments of all 27 member states. While the Fund passed all other parliaments with flying colors, it was only narrowly accepted by the Finnish Parliament a year later.

I organized a mutiny against the Fund in Finland, which almost overthrew the Commission proposal. If the vote would have been a month earlier, the Fund had probably failed here, but when this started to look possible, the ‘Big guns’ of National Coalition Party (Kokoomus), who hold the key position in the vote, stepped in and forced majority of MPs of the party to support the proposal.

I organized and led the mutiny, because the Recovery Fund broke many of the rules of the EU, and threatened to turn the it into a federal (transfer) union. Later we heard that our mutiny, and the near-failing of the Fund to Finland, had come as a shock to the EU leadership. Our mutiny may end up playing a role in what’s about to come.

Just before the war in Ukraine started, I warned on its dire consequences in a 10-point worst-case scenario. Essentially, just the last two have not materialized. I also started to speculate that the EU would use the crisis in Ukraine to change the EU into a “Defense Union”. A year later, I published my thinking in a rather speculative piece. Now, we may have seen the first steps towards this abomination.