Why does the EU exist?

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This is the script for my video posted on July 14, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

The European Union is something we kind of take for granted today, but it hasn’t always existed. Before 1993, there was no EU. European countries had spent decades stitching together trade deals and shared institutions, but every country still had its own currency, and a giant tangle of geopolitical dynamics made European affairs incredibly complicated. So why did the EU actually come into being, and how do those reasons still affect geopolitics today?

In the aftermath of WWII, Europe faced extreme food insecurity and a continent that had been ravaged by war for decades, and one root of this was the rivalry between France and Germany.

From 1870 to 1939, France and Germany went to war three times, in the Franco-Prussian War and then both world wars.

In 1950 French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman made a provocative government proposal now known as the Schuman Declaration that suggested placing French and West German coal and steel production under a single shared authority.

This is often credited with laying the foundation for modern European integration because the initiative directly led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, or ECSC, the first step toward the EU. The idea was that it would make a war between France and Germany impossible because coal and steel were the raw materials required for war to take place.

The declaration also stated that Europe would not be made all at once, or according to a single plan, and that is exactly how the EU’s creation played out, through a series of concrete and technical steps to create interdependence.

The Schuman Declaration was an incredibly sensitive proposal, but the ground had been prepared for it. The US's Marshall Plan to help Europe recover after the war required states to coordinate and cooperate to receive aid money, so European governments were already in the habit of working together. The declaration also reassured France that German industry could be rebuilt to resist the spread of communism while not posing a greater risk to them.

Interestingly, there was a failed alternative to the EU called the European Defense Community, or EDC, proposed in 1950 and ultimately killed in 1954. After the Korean War made West German rearmament urgent, there was a treaty signed to construct a supranational European army that would contain German soldiers inside a European structure. But the French National Assembly killed it by refusing to ratify, even though they themselves had proposed it. West Germany was instead rearmed through NATO and a smaller alliance called the Western European Union, giving it more sovereignty than the EDC would have granted, and this is a big part of why the EU became an economic project first: the military path had failed, so integration retreated to economics.

The EU took about forty years to fully coalesce, building on top of the ECSC. The 1957 Treaties of Rome created the European Economic Community, or EEC, as well as Euratom, the European Atomic Energy Community.

Under the EEC, Germany got tariff-free access to industrial goods via the customs union, while France got a Common Agricultural Policy to protect its farmers, and this industrial-for-agricultural tradeoff was the lifeblood of Franco-German cooperation.

Of course, in 1965, French President Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of EEC meetings entirely. The surface dispute was about farm funding, but the deeper fight was over a planned transition from unanimous voting to qualified majority voting, which would have given other countries the ability to override France's wishes. This Empty Chair Crisis, as it’s now known, ended in 1966 with the Luxembourg Compromise, an informal agreement that when very important interests of a member state are at stake, the Council would seek a unanimous solution. This is the origin of the EU’s modern habit of pursuing unanimity, and its members’ veto habit.

De Gaulle vetoed British entry to the EEC twice, calling it a colossal Atlantic Community under American dependence and leadership, with distinct dynamics from continental Europe, but Britain joined in 1973 after de Gaulle left power.

In 1986, the EEC’s Single European Act formally relaunched integration efforts and set a goal of completing the single market by the end of 1992, and in November 1993 the Maastricht Treaty came into force, creating the EU, EU citizenship, and the path to a single shared currency that launched in 1999.

From there, the EU has only grown. Today it has 27 member states across the continent, and all of these dynamics continue to affect it.

The EU was built as an anti-war, rules-based, economics-first community that outsourced hard military power to NATO and the US. But with European leaders increasingly doubting they can rely on the US in the context of the war in Ukraine, the EU has entered an unprecedented era of rearmament, defense spending, and military coordination.

The culture of unanimity that I mentioned has created serious problems, with Hungary under Viktor Orban as the perfect example of how a single state can disrupt the entire union. Until Orban was voted out in April of 2026, Hungary repeatedly used or threatened to use its veto power over Russian sanctions and Ukraine aid. In fact, Hungary has issued nearly half of the 48 vetoes made since 2011. Meanwhile, the EU is considering expanding to Ukraine, Moldova, and much of the Western Balkans, creating an even larger surface area for this kind of disruption.

The founding bargain of French and German involvement also means that France and Germany are really the driving forces for major EU moves, and that engine has experienced dangerous misfires. One example is the Future Combat Air System, a joint fighter jet designed to replace French, German, and Spanish aircraft. France needs a jet that can carry nuclear weapons and launch from an aircraft carrier, while Germany doesn't, and after nine years of fighting over requirements and which company controls the work, France and Germany cancelled the manned fighter outright in June of 2026. The two have also clashed over trade deals, the use of frozen Russian assets, and joint European borrowing proposals.

The euro is also problematic because it’s a common currency operating without a common treasury. Deeper fiscal and political union was politically impossible in the 1990s, but the result is a strange split: a central bank controls the currency while twenty separate governments control their own taxing and spending, so no single actor is in control of the European economy. Some argue that the euro cannot survive long-term without some kind of true fiscal union, but this would necessarily create a political union as well in a way the EU has never experienced.

Historically, when the EU faces a crisis, its members have tended to grow closer and the union has come out more integrated. But each crisis produces a partial solution without a master plan, because no one is actually in charge when everyone's in charge. This could be especially catastrophic in the context of military action. No member wants to be dominated by the others, but the reality is that for the EU to survive in unprecedented times, let alone hold strong, it’s going to have to come to terms with its past.

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