Europe faces its first major conflict since integration began, posing profound questions about unity, security, and the future of its social dimension.
For the first time since the beginning of European integration, Europe can be said to be at war. But could this conflict, paradoxically, prove to be a blessing for “Social Europe”?
An intriguing argument supporting this optimistic view can be found in Uniting States, a book published in 2011 by the American political scientist Joseph Parent. His analysis spans five cases: the United States, the Swiss Confederation, Bolivar’s Gran Colombia, the 19th-century Nordic federation between Sweden and Norway, and the European Union. Why did the US and Switzerland succeed in forming stable federal states, whereas Gran Colombia and Scandinavia failed? Parent offers a simple answer: fighting a common enemy without the protection of a greater power is the key condition.
What, then, of the European Union? In what was then the foreseeable future (2011), Parent did not hold much hope:
In the short run, the outlook is favourable that no state will endanger Europe. It seems probable that the prolonged period of great power peace will continue […]. This may be good for the world but not for European unification.
Nevertheless, he did identify one potential catalyst:
If the desire for unification is more than a velleity, plans for an ever-closer union should key on external threat. […] The most likely source of danger is Russia.
Fifteen years later, this possibility has become reality. But in Parent’s framework, an external threat alone is insufficient. A union must also lack a protector. He observed:
The blessing of the Atlantic security community has been a curse for European unification, sapping the need for unification. Only when America’s continental commitment grows intrusive or inadequate can Europe unify.
With Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, and with America’s “continental commitment” seemingly on the path to becoming more negative than positive, this second condition, too, appears more real than ever.
The notion that the current war could be a blessing for European integration, and hence for Social Europe, might sound like a radical idea to many. Perhaps less so, however, to those who recall the famous thesis attributed to the social historian Charles Tilly: “Just as the state makes war, war makes the state”.
When the war-making state must rely on the taxation and conscription of its citizens, it is not merely that war makes the state; it also gradually helps forge the democratic state – not precisely the social state yet, but a significant step in that direction. So, if we desire European integration to progress and the associated prospects for Social Europe to flourish, should the EU join Ukraine in a full-scale war with Russia, devoid of America’s protective umbrella? Is that what we ought to hope for?
War as a Calamity
Of course not. It is true that, if cleverly leveraged by European leaders to bolster military integration rather than simply swell national arsenals, this war might yield the welcome by-product of creating a Communauté européenne de défense bis – a long-delayed realisation of what Jean Monnet envisioned in the early 1950s. But whether or not it ultimately favours European integration, this war is, unequivocally, a calamity. It is a calamity, first and foremost, for the belligerents themselves, who daily endeavour to kill, wound, and destroy as much of each other as possible. It is also a calamity for the whole of Europe and, indeed, for all of humankind.
The most fundamental reason why this European war constitutes a worldwide calamity is perhaps not the most obvious one. To avert irreversible, damaging climate change, humanity must avoid a tragedy of the global commons; we must prevent self-serving, nation-level rationality from precipitating a collective disaster. In the absence of a world state, forestalling this disaster demands mutual trust and collaboration, including with the world’s largest country by landmass. A slow healing process will be necessary to restore such trust between today’s belligerents and their allies. The longer the war persists, the later this essential healing process can commence.
In 1914, when it initiated the First World War, Europe (including Russia) housed nearly 25 percent of the world population and colonised half of the remainder. Today, Europe has thankfully shed its colonies but has, less thankfully, shrunk to represent just 9 percent of the global population. Now that climate change presents humankind with a challenge more widespread, more permanent, and more formidable than any war has ever posed, tiny, shrinking Europe owes it to the rest of the world to strive to end its new war as early as possible.
Given that a full victory for one side and the capitulation of the other is either inconceivable or unacceptable, we must pin our hopes on the imminent conclusion of a reasonably decent compromise, preferably one not undermined by amateurish diplomacy. It will not be a “just peace” in the sense that each side receives what it believes it is morally entitled to. But it must be a lasting peace, and therefore a peace founded upon a mutually face-saving compromise – one that paves the way for a security architecture enabling every European country, East and West, to feel safe. Such an architecture must extinguish, as much as possible, what the Greek historian Thucydides memorably identified as the fundamental cause of all wars: fear.
Social Europe: Victim of the War
In the meantime, it is needless to say that this war, and the EU’s deepening involvement in it, represents no good news at all for Social Europe. Sadly, the priority suddenly accorded to military security unavoidably downgrades the concern for socio-economic security. With increased spending on defence, combined with the expected contribution to the mounting cost of rebuilding Ukraine, the “peace dividend” potentially usable for ambitious social policies has been effectively crushed.
As US President Eisenhower eloquently stated shortly after taking office in his “Cross of Iron” speech (16 April 1953): “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Indeed, all across Europe, there are loud calls for reducing social spending in order to fund increased military expenditure. When and where this proves politically impossible in the short term, governments simply postpone the pressure on social budgets, either by further widening deficits with the EU’s blessing or by making long-term purchasing commitments generous enough to induce capitalist firms to invest heavily in arms production.
In this inhospitable context, how can we advocate for Social Europe in a manner that is more than anxiously defensive? Now that “competitiveness” is back in fashion at least as much as when the EU was striving to become the world’s “most competitive knowledge-based economy”, one indispensable component of that fight consists in arguing that well-designed social policies generate major returns in terms of human capital, and therefore productivity and competitiveness. Social protection represents productive investment – especially, but not only, when it targets the young; especially, but not only, when coupled with training; especially, but not only, when it is universal, with basic economic security provided through a universal basic income rather than means-tested, dependency-creating social assistance.
However, it is equally crucial not to reduce social policy merely to the handmaiden of competitiveness. To a large extent, competitiveness is achieved through the unleashing of the four freedoms of the single market – exhilarating for the “movers”, yet often terrifying for the “stay-at-homes”. Competitiveness achieved in this manner is one of the root causes of the national-populist backlash against the European Union. If this backlash is to be effectively addressed, Europe must be, and must be perceived to be, protecting and not only liberating, caring for all its citizens and not only shaking things up.
Consequently, the disruptive impact of the competitiveness-boosting four freedoms must be contained. In a somewhat dissonant passage of her presidential programme, Ursula von der Leyen promised to “ensure that all citizens have an effective right to stay in the place they call home” and to provide what is needed “to help build what a community needs to thrive”. If this objective is to be taken seriously, Social Europe must be designed in a way that does not always serve competitiveness but sometimes dares to temper it.
Migration-Proof Social Europe
Such taming of internal migration is important. But even more critical is Social Europe’s ability to accommodate external immigration over the coming decades. Between 1950 and the present day, the population of Africa grew sevenfold, from somewhat above 200 million to 1.5 billion. According to UN projections, it is expected to boom further, from 1.5 billion to nearly 4 billion inhabitants by the end of the century. This demographic explosion occurs while the European population, which was more than twice the size of Africa’s in 1950, is projected to shrink from 750 million to less than 600 million.
Who can realistically believe that the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert will prove wide enough barriers to deter the migration of tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people from doing what they perceive they must do to correct this huge and growing imbalance – namely, move North in the hope of escaping overpopulation, desertification, and starvation? Allowing defence spending to bite into the funds devoted to development aid and climate alleviation, as we are currently doing, will certainly not help mitigate these pressures.
Once among us, newcomers must be entitled to share fairly in our material wealth and therefore enjoy the same socio-economic rights as the native population, albeit perhaps after some reasonable waiting period. But it is equally, if not more, important to provide them with rapid and effective access to relevant human capital and social capital. For both, one seldom-mentioned component of Social Europe, broadly conceived, is of primary importance: language policy.
Language Policy as a Key Ingredient of Social Europe
An ever-growing share of European residents lives and works in locations where the language of education, administration, and politics differs from their native tongue. For the sake of both social justice and economic efficiency, language policy is therefore of ever-greater importance.
Firstly, the acquisition of the host country’s language, whether at school or elsewhere, is a key condition for the optimal development of any newcomer’s human capital. It is also a key factor in the development of their social capital, provided it is combined with intelligent town planning and housing policy. Urban streets and squares must be spaces that serve not only sustainable mobility but also enjoyable immobility – spaces designed and regulated so as to facilitate encounters, trust-building, cooperation, and collaboration between residents, whatever their origins and native languages.
Secondly, the encouragement of the effective transmission of all native languages is no less important. A solid command of a native language different from the school language is not only compatible with acquiring the school language and any other knowledge accessible through it; it greatly facilitates that acquisition and thereby contributes to the human capital of the young generations of newcomers. In addition, it contributes to their social capital, primarily by helping them maintain and develop mutually beneficial connections with the regions from which they or their forebears migrated.
Opportunistic Utopianism for Our Dark Times
To conclude: However important war might have been for nation-building and nation-level social progress in the past, it would be foolish to enthusiastically embrace the war against Russia in the hope of fostering the EU-level democratic-state-building and the EU-wide patriotic feelings that would accelerate the emergence of a more ambitious Social Europe.
Fighting for Social Europe when Europe is at war involves, instead, resisting warmongering rhetoric from bellicose figures and intensified lobbying by arms producers. It involves directing whatever defence spending our countries are compelled to make towards the development of dual-use technologies that can serve purposes other than killing and destruction, rather than rushing to swell the profits of American corporations by buying their fighter jets and missiles. And it involves hammering home the importance of ending the war as soon as possible to free up resources needed to upscale and update Social Europe, and to address the formidable challenges of ageing populations, recurrent pandemics, and, above all, climate change and migration.
We still have the privilege of enjoying a combination of peace and freedom, prosperity and solidarity that is truly exceptional, both historically and globally. Imperfect, of course, in all four dimensions, yet genuinely exceptional. European integration, whatever its defects, and Social Europe, whatever its limitations, are both major contributors to this exceptional privilege. From various sides, this privilege is under siege. In order to preserve it, and in order to be able to share it more widely, we must not defensively cling to Social Europe as it currently exists.
Instead, we must keep conceiving utopian ideas, subjecting them to critical discussion, and looking out for opportunities to move forward, without ever losing hope, even in the darkest times. We must accept that competitiveness matters, for the sake of both prosperity and geopolitical weight, but we must refuse to reduce Social Europe to being no more than the servant of Competitive Europe. And we must conceive of Social Europe broadly, paying attention, for example, to town planning and language policy no less than to the level of workers’ pay, the quality of jobs, and the design of benefit systems.
Being at war does not make any of this easier. But neither does it render it impossible.
This essay is the edited version of a speech delivered at an ETUI-OSE event which took place in Brussels on 3rd April 2025 on the occasion of the publication of Social Policy in the European Union: State of Play 2024.
Philippe van Parijs is Professor Emeritus at the University of Louvain (Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics) and special Guest Professor at the University of Leuven.