After the Federation: Why Europe’s Real Problem Is Learning to Arrive Together
Published: May 9, 2026
Carl‑Vincent Reimers’ recent article in Svenska Dagbladet makes one of the clearest cases I’ve read for a federal Europe. He argues – rightly – that the EU’s half‑finished political construction creates a worst‑of‑both‑worlds: centralised overreach in areas where it doesn’t belong, and crippling weakness where real unity is needed, from defence to foreign policy. His solution is a federal constitution: a directly elected president, a senate, a clear division of powers, and a European bill of rights.
It’s a vision that feels clean, rational, and historically overdue.
And yet something kept nagging at me as I read it.
Would a federation, by itself, actually solve the pattern of failure that leaves Europe constantly agreeing in principle but arriving late – or not at all – in practice?
The mirage of the one‑time fix
Europe has, in recent years, learned to decide together remarkably well. In 2020, the EU broke a decades‑old taboo by agreeing on a €750 billion recovery fund in a matter of weeks. It was fiscal integration at a speed no one thought possible. But if you look at what happened after the decision, the picture fractures: money took years to reach some economies, national plans were of wildly varying ambition and administrative quality, and the actual impact on the ground depended far more on domestic capacity than on the elegance of the Brussels compromise.
The same pattern shows up everywhere. The migration pact is agreed in principle, then takes four more years to inch toward implementation. Climate targets are set, but national plans don’t add up to them. Energy crises hit, and even when a joint purchasing platform is created, national responses diverge so dramatically that the European market fragments internally.
The EU has become expert at producing brittle coherence: enough alignment to create expectations, not enough to deliver them reliably across 27 different political, administrative, and cultural realities.
This is not a constitutional failure. It is a coherence deficit. And it cannot be fixed by a new set of institutional boxes alone.
What a federal blueprint misses
The federalist diagnosis assumes that unclear competences are the root cause. Clarify who does what, add democratic legitimacy at the centre, and the system will work. Through a systems lens, however, the EU’s real trouble lies deeper – in the patterns that reproduce misalignment, regardless of the org chart.
Let me give you one very tangible example: the translation gap. Every piece of EU legislation is designed in Brussels but implemented in 27 national capitals, each with its own administrative culture, budget cycles, and political sensitivities. Between the EU‑level design and the national‑level execution sits a near‑vacuum – few mechanisms to adapt common rules to local contexts, and almost no structured feedback from the local experience back up to the centre. The result is predictable: directives are transposed differently, regulations are enforced unevenly, and the intent drifts.
Now, add asymmetric capacity: the EU contains some of the world’s most capable public administrations, and some that are deeply strained. Any policy must work for all of them. The system’s outer effectiveness is always pulled down to the level of its weakest implementing member – no matter how clear the legal competence of the federal level might be.
And then there is time. Crises operate on days and weeks. The EU’s ordinary legislative procedure operates on months and years. A federal constitution with a president and senate would not, by itself, close this gap. It would still need to negotiate, align, and implement across 27 distinct systems. The machine would simply be larger.
Even the most elegant federal settlement would inherit these dynamics. The Negotiation‑Dilution Loop – crisis, emergency coordination, partial agreement, diluted implementation, temporary stabilisation, underlying divergence remains – would merely be elevated to the federal plane. The EU would have a new flag on the mast but the same operating system underneath.
The real upgrade: building the capacity to arrive together
This is not an argument against federalism. It is an argument for doing the deeper, less glamorous work that would make any institutional architecture – federal or otherwise – actually function at the speed and scale the 21st century demands.
In our recent report, The Coherence Mirage, we try to describe what that work might look like. The core idea is simple: the EU does not need to become a state. It needs to become capable of coherence without uniformity – able to act with speed and legitimacy where togetherness is necessary, while respecting genuine diversity where diversity belongs.
Six shifts stand out:
From ad‑hoc crisis coordination to standing crisis‑mode protocols. Pre‑agreed fast‑track decision procedures, triggered by objective criteria, with democratic accountability built in – so the Union is not improvising under pressure every time.
From implementation dependence to implementation partnership. A standing European capacity to support administrative translation and joint execution, rather than simply issuing directives and hoping for the best.
From 27 national public spheres to a polycentric public sphere. Not a single European demos conjured by a presidential election, but multiple overlapping deliberative spaces, multilingual media platforms, and citizens’ assemblies that give Europeans a lived experience of solving problems together.
From subsidiarity as a static list to subsidiarity as a routing protocol. An institutional mechanism that timely determines which level – EU, national, regional, bioregional – currently has the capacity and legitimacy to handle a specific challenge.
From reactive regulation to anticipatory governance. Strategic foresight capabilities embedded at the highest level, capable of detecting early signals and making them visible to national capitals before the next polycrisis hits.
And perhaps most concretely: Coherence Regions. Cross‑border territories – the Alpine arc, the Baltic Sea catchment, the Danube basin – granted real, binding authority to pilot integrated governance across challenges that ignore borders. Not another Interreg programme, but spaces where shared budgets, shared execution layers, and real‑time data integration build the connective tissue the EU currently lacks.
These upgrades are not replacements for democratic decision‑making; they are the infrastructure that would make decisions land with integrity across an enormously varied continent.
No need to choose between federalism and capacity
Here’s the point that I think gets missed in our binary debates: a federal constitution, should it ever materialise, would still require everything I just listed. The translation gap, the asymmetric capacities, the time‑scale mismatch, the absent middle layer between design and delivery – none of them are solved by redrawing a few boxes in a treaty. They are solved by building the operational muscles that turn collective intention into aligned action, in time.
That’s why we’ve framed the report not as an opposition to federal thinking, but as the work that could eventually make federal thinking viable. Or, perhaps, make it unnecessary by achieving the thing that the federal vision seeks – coherent European action – without demanding a uniform constitutional shell that 27 democracies are unlikely to accept.
An invitation, not a rebuttal
I read Carl‑Vincent Reimers’ article with genuine appreciation. It is rare to see a public intellectual in Sweden argue so forthrightly for a stronger Europe while also insisting that national self‑rule can be better protected, not eroded, through a smarter architecture. That instinct is exactly right.
My only addition – and the reason I’m sharing our report – is that the architecture we need most urgently is not constitutional. It is the living, sensing, learning tissue between the grand decisions and the messy, local reality of 450 million people.
Europe has learned to decide together. It has not yet learned to arrive together. The question is not whether the Union will survive. It is whether we can upgrade its capacity to move at the speed of the challenges we face, without surrendering the plurality that makes this continent worth holding together in the first place.
Read the full Coherence Mirage report at https://www.bjornkennethholmstrom.org/reports/eu-coherence-mirage. I’d love to hear from anyone – federalist, sceptic, or simply curious – who’s willing to think about what comes after the constitutional debate.
Author’s Note: This post was written by DeepSeek for me, and I want to acknowledge an unusual process. I used several large language models as structured thinking partners – feeding them my report, the original article, and a clear interpretive lens – and then curated, challenged, and synthesised their analyses into the argument you’ve just read. The final synthesis and responsibility are entirely on me. In a piece about building collective intelligence, it felt appropriate to practice it.