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Members of the Trump administration are guilty of making the same mistake as backers of Brexit in the UK, in assuming other people share their own prejudices about the European Union. This perception bias has led the administration to conclude that Europeans are yearning to be “free” from the “shackles” of the EU, and that the US has a crucial role to play in achieving this.
In its recent National Security Strategy, the administration blames what it calls Europe’s decline on the supposedly malign “activities” of the European Union, which it accuses of undermining political liberty and sovereignty, and imposing stifling over-regulation. It hints at its desire to break the bloc apart, in order to restore European nations’ “individual character and history.”
According to the defense analysis organization, Defense One, this aspiration is made even more explicit in a longer unpublished version of the NSS which it claims to have seen, which lists Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland as countries the US should “work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union]”
However, recent opinion polls confirm that across the EU, a majority of people still have a broadly positive view towards it, even in countries like those above targeted by the US.
An opinion poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in September revealed that among the nine member countries surveyed, seven-in-ten or more in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, and over half in Spain, Italy, Poland, France and Hungary, have a favourable view of the EU. The only country where views were more negative than negative was Greece.
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The same poll revealed that even in countries outside the EU many held a broadly positive attitude towards the bloc. In Canada, Nigeria, South Korea and Australia, roughly three-quarters had a favorable opinion of the EU. Six-in-ten or more agreed in five other nonmember countries, including the United Kingdom, and even the United States itself.
Views were more finely balanced in Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa.
A similar poll conducted EU-wide earlier this year by the EU’s in-house surveyor, Eurobarometer, revealed that over 74% of respondents think that their country benefits from EU membership – the best result ever recorded since this question was first asked in 1983. Figures ranged from a staggering 92% in Malta, over 90% in Ireland, Lithuania, Estonia and Denmark, to the lowest percentage in Bulgaria, at a still solid 61%.
In the same survey, 89% said they believed that more unity was crucial to tackle global challenges, with 75% or more citizens agreeing with this in every Member State.
Another poll conducted by the same organization this year found that over 70% of respondents in the 20 euro member states also believed that the euro was a good thing both for the EU and for their own country.
In a third poll, a majority of correspondents in nearly every EU member state supported further EU enlargement, with Ukraine the most favoured country for accession, provided it can meet the membership criteria.
Amongst those more sceptical about enlargement, concerns included uncontrolled migration (40%), corruption, organized crime, terrorism (39%) and the cost to European taxpayers (37%).
This suggests that the US administration may be onto something, when it highlights concerns in its NSS about Europe’s stagnating economy, migration policies, and loss of self-confidence. But, just as Brexit was never the right solution to the UK’s genuine domestic problems in 2016, when the Brexit referendum took place, so, breaking apart the EU would not resolve Europe’s current ills.
Empty Echos
Unfortunately, individuals in and around the Trump administration seem stuck in an echo chamber, where they mainly engage only with European counterparts who share their scepticism about the EU, such as Victor Orban in Hungary, or members of extreme right wing parties across the continent.
This mirrors the situation I found in 2018-2019, as the Brexit Counselor at the British Embassy in Washington, when visiting British Ministers were always reluctant to engage with any US organisations sceptical about Brexit.
Foreign Secretaries, including Dominic Raab and Liz Truss, or Trade Ministers such as Liam Fox, would repeatedly attend events hosted by Brexit-backing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, or only meet Trump administration officials who actively wanted the UK to leave the EU. They were stubbornly resistant to meeting members of Congress who were more concerned about Brexit, including the impact it might have on European security, or peace in Northern Ireland.
These Ministers would have their pro-Brexit biases confirmed by only hearing what they wanted to hear from their interlocutors. I have never forgotten one prominent Republican Senator, soon after politely meeting one British Minister, privately telling a gathering of like- minded conservative at a lunchtime event that “he had no idea what those batshit Brits were doing with Brexit.”
It’s true that eurosceptic parties are gaining ground across the EU, as revealed in last year’s European Parliament elections, where right wing parties made significant gains against the more centrist parties.
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But, as in the UK, for parties like these, the EU is just an easy scapegoat for the much more significant failures of domestic governance. It is easier to blame their country’s problems on the EU, or on foreigners allowed in under the EU’s migration policies, than do the hard work of convincing voters to accept tough reforms at home.
The Trump administration’s negative attitude towards the EU may in part be influenced by their genuine distrust of most transnational bodies, including the United Nations. Indeed, many Americans of my acquaintance, not just on the political right, wonder why Europeans are so willing to accept intrusive EU regulations, which in their view stifle enterprise and innovation. Even those who claim to be concerned about climate change also criticize the EU for sticking to its green agenda, as if there was some magical way to combat climate change without reining in fossil fuel usage.
I suspect a stronger reason for wanting to break up the EU may be American businesses’ resentment at the EU’s power as the world’s single largest economic bloc, which is able to set many of the global rules on trade. Big American tech companies, which have strongly aligned themselves with the Trump administration, are particularly opposed to the EU’s efforts to regulate social media and Artificial Intelligence, and fine transgressors, as happened with Elon Musk’s X recently .
What they, alongside many Brexiters in the UK, have always failed to understand is that the EU is not just a transactional body, where the costs and benefits can be calculated in dollars and cents, but an ideological concept bigger than any one individual nation. They don’t understand that Europeans can feel genuinely attached to the idea of the European Union, and its four freedoms of movement of goods, services, capital and people, as a larger aspirational vision.
The preamble to the Treaties of the European Union includes the reminder that it was born out of the ashes of World War Two: “Recalling the historic importance of the ending of the division of the European continent and the need to create firm bases for the construction of the future Europe”.
The preamble to the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights states that “The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever-closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values. Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity; it is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law. It places the individual at the heart of its activities, by establishing the citizenship of the Union and by creating an area of freedom, security and justice.”
The narrow Trumpian understanding of the EU is all the more perplexing given that most Americans have no difficulty understanding similar concepts set out in their own constitution, which opens “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The US itself, like the EU, was forged out of warfare, in its case, the struggle for independence from the United Kingdom. The 13 original American colonies came to understand they would be stronger if they acted as a union together. They were willing to subserviate many of their individual states’ rights for a greater common whole.
This is no different from the idea behind the establishment of the European Union. Just as individual US states sometimes chafe at directives from the federal government, so individual EU member states sometimes chafe at regulations from the EU. But, there is no serious debate within the US about breaking up the Union. Nor should there be about breaking up the European Union.
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The United States is a creedal nation, meaning it is based on its principles and ideals, derived from its Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, rather than a specific ethnicity or culture. In a recent article in the conservative Wall Street Journal, the distinguished historian Gordon Wood, rejected the argument of those, who he didn’t single out by name, but include people like Vice President JD Vance, who argue that these creeds have become “too permissive, too weak a basis for citizenship”. He argued that the United States “isn’t a nation like other nations, and never has been….To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”
The European Union is based around a similar set of common values and beliefs. The EU will never turn into a formal federal union. But, like America, it is founded on an underlying creed, to which most Europeans remain strongly attached. American attacks on the European Union are more likely to band it closer together, than succeed in breaking it apart.
The National Security Strategy also unwittingly makes clear the fate of any European nations tempted to follow the UK’s path out of the EU. It heralds the idea of working with strong independent nations restored to their former greatness. But the UK itself gets only one dismissive reference in the document, almost as an afterthought : “America is understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent, and of course (my italics) to Britain and Ireland.” Far from enhancing the UK’s status in American eyes, the NSS suggests that out of the EU, the UK has become almost irrelevant.