By Graham Vanbergen: For most of its existence, the European Union has suffered from a curious political asymmetry. The further right one travels along the ideological spectrum, the colder attitudes toward Brussels tend to become. Euroscepticism has long been treated as a defining badge of conservative authenticity, while European integration was framed as a liberal, technocratic indulgence, useful perhaps for markets and mobility, but corrosive to sovereignty and tradition. That alignment is beginning to fracture and a United States of Europe is already a possible counter-move.
Not because Europe has suddenly become more culturally conservative, but because the world around it has become more aggressively transactional, more openly coercive, and less sentimental about alliances. And in that world, the nation-state once the sacred unit of right-wing politics, looks increasingly inadequate.
The idea that Europe’s hard right might one day champion something approaching a United States of Europe sounds, at first hearing, like a political paradox. But history is full of such reversals. And recent developments, particularly emanating from Washington are accelerating conditions in which the paradox becomes plausible.
Trump, Greenland, and the Return of Raw Power
Donald Trump’s second presidency has dispensed with any lingering illusions about American benevolence toward Europe. His revived threats to impose punitive tariffs on EU countries, his explicit willingness to include Britain in those measures, and his renewed fixation on Greenland now framed not as an eccentric impulse but as a strategic demand have clarified something that European leaders long preferred not to say aloud: the United States now treats Europe less as a partner and more as a bargaining chip.
The Greenland episode is especially instructive. It is not merely about Arctic resources or military positioning. It is about a superpower signalling that sovereignty, alliance norms, and historical sensibilities are subordinate to leverage. When Trump implies that favourable trade relations with Europe and even Britain, might depend on acquiescence over Greenland, he is not negotiating; he is demonstrating hierarchy.
For decades, European sceptics could plausibly argue that Brussels was the greatest external constraint on national autonomy. That argument now feels anachronistic. Regulatory harmonisation pales beside the reality of tariff warfare, technological dependency, and strategic vulnerability in a world dominated by continental-scale powers.
The Conservative Roots of European Unity
There is an irony here that many on the modern right have forgotten: the idea of Europe as a civilisational whole was not born on the left.
Before “European integration” became synonymous with liberal internationalism, the essential oneness of Europe was a conservative concept, articulated through ideas of Christendom, shared heritage, and common moral order. Even the early architecture of the European project carried this imprint. Robert Schuman, widely regarded as the EU’s founding figure, was a devout Catholic whose vision of unity was rooted as much in reconciliation and civilisation as in economics. That he is now on the path to beatification is not incidental trivia; it is historical symmetry.
What changed was the framing. Over time, Europe came to be sold as a market, a rules-based system, a technocratic peace machine. Useful, yes, but emotionally anaemic. This allowed nationalists to cast themselves as the sole defenders of culture and identity against a grey bureaucratic centre.
That framing no longer fits the world as it is.
From Sovereignty to Survival
A generation ago, a French or Italian voter attached to national particularities could reasonably believe that Brussels posed the primary threat to their way of life. Today, the threats feel both larger and less polite: American extraterritorial sanctions, Chinese industrial dominance, global tech platforms indifferent to European law, and an international trading system that increasingly resembles economic coercion.
Against that backdrop, the question quietly shifts. If what is under pressure is not merely a nation, but European civilisation—a phrase now routinely invoked by the hard right, then the scale of political organisation required to defend it changes too.
This linguistic drift matters. When political movements stop talking primarily about the nation and start talking about civilisation, they are already downgrading the nation-state without fully admitting it. Civilisations, by definition, exceed borders. They demand mass, coordination, and strategic depth.
No single European country, Germany included, can realistically protect its economic model, cultural norms, or geopolitical autonomy alone in a world of hostile giants. A continent of 450 million people, acting as a loose federation, just might.
The Next Right, Not the Current One
This shift will not be led by today’s hard-right leadership. Figures such as Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni have moderated their hostility toward Brussels, but largely for pragmatic reasons. Toleration is not enthusiasm. The psychological leap from begrudging cooperation to affirmative euro-federalism is too great for a generation formed in opposition to the EU.
The change, if it comes, will be generational.
Across social media and online political culture, a new, sometimes unsettling strain of pro-European sentiment is emerging—less about Erasmus and consumer rights, more about power, resilience, and confrontation. It is a Europe imagined not as a market, but as a fortress: capable of retaliation, technological independence, and strategic autonomy. For those who grew up watching their continent buffeted by tariff threats, tech dominance, and now open pressure over territory, this posture feels less ideological than practical.
Britain, it should be said, is unlikely to be part of this evolution. Brexit removed the UK from the emotional as well as institutional feedback loop of continental politics. While Europe may harden, Britain will remain structurally external, caught between a less reliable America and a more unified continent it no longer helps shape. Nigel Farage and his far-right Reform UK political band of has-beens has led the charge to this strategic failure and defence weakness.
When Liberalism Loses Its Monopoly on Europe
There was a time when belief in a united Europe signalled liberal instincts almost by definition. That monopoly is eroding. The case for deeper integration is no longer solely about efficiency, law, or markets. It is increasingly about scale, leverage, and survival in an era of open great-power competition.
This is uncomfortable for those who preferred Europe as a technocratic project, governed by central bankers, competition regulators, and courts quietly clipping corporate excess. But discomfort is the point. Political projects evolve when circumstances force them to.
A decade ago, the idea of a pro-Kremlin American Republican or an openly protectionist United States would have seemed absurd. Yet here we are. Movements do not merely change their minds; sometimes they reverse them entirely.
A hard-right euro-federalism may sound like a contradiction today. But listen carefully to the language already being used, about civilisation, strength, and continental destiny, and it begins to look less like a Penrose triangle and more like an unfinished blueprint.
When that moment arrives, some Europeans will ask the new converts what took them so long. Others may decide they preferred Europe before everyone agreed it needed to be powerful.
Either way, the old assumption, that Europe must choose between unity and conservatism is beginning to look like a relic of a gentler age.