The United States of Europe: Why Greenland is a Wake-Up Call for European Federalization
The United States of Europe was Winston Churchill’s visionary proposal to unify Europe after World War II. He argued European nations must become a single, powerful state “freely joined for mutual convenience in a federal system” to protect European interests in a world dominated by the United States and the U.S.S.R.
As European territorial sovereignty faces renewed threats, Churchill’s prescience is clear. Recent pressure by U.S. President Donald Trump to annex Greenland underscores the European Union’s structural inability to act with a single foreign policy voice. Europe must federalize into a centralized political authority capable of acting as a single sovereign unit, formulating a unified foreign policy and projecting coordinated military and economic power to deter external coercion.
When Churchill introduced his radical idea in 1946, memories of Nazi tyranny were fresh in the minds of the European people. Concerns that a fascist government may rise to control a unified regime outweighed calls for federalization. To allay these fears, leaders favored a confederate system, designed to economically integrate Europe so that war would be mutually destructive for all states. The European Coal and Steel Community achieved this purpose by placing key war industries under joint control, facilitating Franco-German reconciliation after WW2. Its descendant, the European Union (EU), continues this mission today, integrating European economies without uniting the continent under one government.
In a federation, such as the modern U.S. and Russian Federation, power is divided between a strong central government and regional states. In contrast, confederate systems like the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation and the EU give maximum sovereignty to their states and have a weak central government. As a consequence of its loose confederate composition, the EU cannot set a general foreign policy. The union does have the Common Foreign and Security Policy tool, which can project a union-wide foreign policy position, but prospective postures require unanimous assent and can be vetoed by a single state.
Each EU member state retains effective sovereignty over its own foreign relations—a feature which diminishes the union’s collective-action power. In the case of Greenland, Hungary declined to condemn Trump’s threats, undermining the EU’s power to oppose Trump as a unified bloc. Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó contended the crisis is a “bilateral matter” between the U.S. and Denmark, and that the EU should not intervene. Szijjártó’s framing of the issue is precisely the logic that fragments the union’s foreign policy.
The EU’s collective power is reduced when member states engage with other countries independently. Trump bypassed the EU to cultivate a close relationship with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and often advocates for Hungary’s resistance to directives that oppose U.S. interests. External actors pursuing bilateral agreements with member states furthers the EU’s vulnerability to division. The union’s susceptibility to the “divide and conquer” tactic undermines coordinated foreign policy and leaves individual countries negotiating alone, stripped of the leverage that comes from acting as part of a unified bloc. Trump’s selective engagement reveals how the confederate system enables external powers to coerce weaker states one by one instead of confronting a unified front.
Trump’s strategy of cutting bilateral deals with select governments, such as Hungary, enables him to threaten military force and levy punitive tariffs against European states that support Greenland without facing unified, credible countermeasures. Even in the face of the EU’s Article 42(7) mutual-defense clause and Anti-Coercion Instrument—a “trade bazooka” of retaliatory economic measures—Trump calculates that individual national governments will hesitate to bear the costs of retaliation for the sake of collective EU positions. Article 42(7) lacks deterrent credibility because it depends on discretionary national contributions rather than automatic, centralized military enforcement. The Anti-Coercion Instrument’s credibility is weakened by the political and economic costs member states must individually bear when retaliation risks asymmetric exposure. As with the Common Foreign and Security Policy tool, these mechanisms are ostensibly powerful but practically ineffective.
Similar to the EU, the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation was unable to mount a unified response to external threats. Individual states were too weak to expel British troops from the Northwest Territory and counter British trade restrictions in the Caribbean independently. The adoption of the Constitution reversed these constraints by centralizing core sovereign powers, transforming the U.S. into a coherent actor capable of deterring threats and speaking with one voice on the world stage. A federal Europe could deter threats similar to Trump’s on Greenland by making clear that coercion against one part of Europe would be met with an immediate and unified response from the entire union.
However, the cultural differences among the American states were minimal compared to European diversity, posing a significant obstacle to federalization. Croatian Ambassador to the U.S. Pjer Šimunović, when asked at the Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies in February 2026 whether he believed European federalization was feasible, answered that disparate cultures and deeply entrenched national histories would impede such an effort. Critics of European federalization adhere to this argument—citizens identify more with their nation than the EU, and thus would not support a federal government.
However, many advocates of federalization, such as former president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, view diversity as a strength rather than an obstacle. He argues diversity, when coordinated through common institutions—such as a European federation would provide—increases resilience, innovation, and global influence rather than undermining unity. For example, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the European Union coordinated sanctions, energy diversification, and joint financial support despite divergent national energy dependencies. In a 2026 speech at KU Levens, Draghi warned Europe “risks becoming subordinated, divided, and de-industrialized” in the face of Chinese and American power. Beyond foreign policy, these superpowers fracture European cohesion by pursuing bilateral investment agreements with individual member states, leaving the EU both geopolitically weaker and economically divided. To counter this division, Draghi declared Europe must overcome its cultural differences to “become one power” by moving from “confederation to federation.”
The Greenland crisis and fragmented European response demonstrate the EU must rise to the challenges of the modern world order by federalizing to become a geographic superpower able to deter threats from powerful states such as the U.S. As Churchill proclaimed 80 years ago, European leaders must “let Europe arise” by becoming a single, cohesive geopolitical unit—or accept that external actors will continue to probe its divisions and treat European territory as negotiable.