Gaps between the European Union’s advocacy of ambitious policy goals and its ability to implement them matter greatly in a world changed from market integration through globalisation to one dominated by power politics and growing security threats. Such incoherence risks losing the public support vital to EU success, according to influential EU policy experts.
Ireland’s six-month EU presidency sits squarely astride these contradictory imperatives. Securing an EU budget deal for 2028-2034 is a priority made more difficult by the political contest between states supporting more resources for the EU and those who prefer a relatively smaller financial commitment. Ireland’s commitment to more market-driven integration along the lines of the 2024 Draghi and Letta reports now has to confront the reality of a more troubled and fragmented world.
Ireland’s existing economic and political model – based on an open transatlantic economy, multilateralism and global human rights – is sorely tested in this new world environment. It needs renewal based on far more critical public debate about its durability, realism and appropriateness. Can the model be renewed through alternative pathways involving Canada, a UK newly convergent with the EU and a pragmatically enlarged and re-empowered internal EU market? Is that pathway made more difficult by the emerging power-dominated and rightward-shifting trends in major EU states like Germany, France, Poland and Italy?
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s eloquent advocacy of the first course comes up against his own and the EU’s reluctance to pool economic sovereignty outside formal membership. The Carney approach is seen as unrealistic because of this by a variety of critics like the columnists Wolfgang Münchau and Martin Sandbu.
READ MORE
The second scenario is foreseen by the Carnegie think tank group writer on EU affairs Stefan Lehne, who fears that elections in France, Italy, Poland and Spain next year could shift the EU in a right-wing sovereigntist direction, making it much less inclined to re-empower itself in economic competitiveness, security and defence or adapting to a multipolar world.
Lehne notes that there has been no fundamental EU treaty reform in 20 years. Instead, there has been secondary legislation and inter-governmental financial and political innovation in response to events like the 2008-2012 financial crisis and recent geopolitical changes. Such “failing forward” methods by political elites can undermine popular support and legitimacy for deeper structural changes. That opens the way to the right-wing populist movements so visible this week in Germany, while simultaneously exposing the pathetic mediocrity of Friedrich Merz’s leadership and the vulnerability of other leaders.
A recent survey of public opinion on the EU in France, Germany, Britain, Poland, the Netherlands and Italy by the European Centre on Foreign Relations bears this out. Across the six countries there is a sense of general deterioration in everyday life and a loss of normality; fears about war, conflict and insecurity; feelings of political fragmentation and division; and of economic hardship and geopolitical turbulence. Political leadership is seen as lacking, poor or slow, hypocritical on Ukraine and Gaza and lacking alternative visions to the liberals’ preparation for war with Russia. The only leader commended is Pedro Sánchez in Spain.
The spring Eurobarometer survey across the 27 EU member states charted similar findings about current problems, but reported more positive feelings about the EU as a zone of stability and potential hope if uncertainties recede and leadership improves. In Ireland, 74 per cent see membership as a benefit – but 23 per cent do not; economic benefits of membership substantially outweigh security and international relations in Irish opinion.
[ Nostalgia and lost pride: the fuel that feeds Europe’s far rightOpens in new window ]
The annual review of EU affairs by the Journal of Common Market Studies concluded in 2025 that what emerges across the agenda on climate, defence, enlargement and social policy “is a broader pattern of strategic drift, a context in which the EU articulates far-reaching policy goals and institutional reforms, often in response to ad hoc crises, but struggles to ensure the political cohesion necessary for effective implementation”. Integration without supranationalism lacks a unitary political demos; the term “demoicracy” – a growing politicised interaction of national democracies – may be more apt.
Academic debates on whether the EU is a federal, confederal, liberal intergovernmental, compound or differentiated polity continue. They are echoed in the surveys of public opinion. Emmanuel Macron’s ideas about a strategically autonomous EU with its own sovereignty have not gathered support as he departs. Disintegration is now recognised as a plausible future.
Strategic drift no longer suffices as the EU awaits a firmer direction. It remains to be seen whether the next group of leaders can respond more creatively to the many crises facing it.
