Revisiting Europe’s Intellectual Foundations for the Geopolitical Age

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is often hailed as the intellectual progenitor of the European Union. His Perpetual Peace (1795) proffers a blueprint for European integration: a continental federation that would grow out of an initial vanguard of republican states, bound by shared values, in which war would ultimately become impossible. It is a mantra that European policymakers have adopted as their own: a grand moral scheme, inexorably inching towards its ultimate objective. Diplomacy replaces power politics, rules displace rivalry, and the rule of law ends the brutal machinations of history.

Despite the turbulence of global politics, there is no need to abandon all hope for a peaceful and just future. It is, however, necessary to embed that hope within a more resilient narrative about the Union. A narrative with a clear explanation of the EU’s raison d’être in uncertain times that justifies its strategic goal and, ultimately, the choices it makes. Like any good narrative, it must meet two conditions. First, it must be credible – grounded in facts, not wishful thinking. Second, it must be a distinctly European story – rooted in the history of our continent and of the European Union itself.

European Patriarch: Niccolò Machiavelli

This historical quest for the intellectual foundation of a new European narrative has no better starting point than the work of the Florentine thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, best known for his treatise The Prince (1532) in which he explains what a ruler must do to maintain power. Less widely studied, but just as influential for the history of European political thought, are his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (1531).¹ In this work, he analyses how republics can ensure their stability. His conclusion is one that the European Union would do well to heed: a sustainable political order is possible only through the active pursuit of power. Hoping to hold one’s position through conflict avoidance is a recipe for disaster.

Machiavelli distinguished three strategies for strengthening a republic. The first was violent territorial expansion through conquest and annexation – we might call this ‘the Putin method’ – an option Machiavelli dismissed as ‘completely worthless’, owing to its high costs and the difficulty of implementation. The second strategy was for a great power to position itself as the head of an alliance composed of weaker allied powers (we could refer to this as ‘the post-war US model’). These allies operated independently in name but were effectively under the control of the dominant partner. This was the method by which Rome expanded its empire. The third option – the most realistic in Machiavelli’s view for Florence at the time – was the formation of a league, a federation of equal states that united to stand stronger together against external threats. If done well, it was even a suitable model for expansionism, though usually by consensus, not through violence. During the early modern period, this model was applied with varying success by the Italian city-states of Machiavelli’s time, as well as the Swiss, the Germans, the Dutch, the Poles and the Lithuanians. In the adapted form of a ‘federal union’, it would eventually serve as the founding idea for a tradition of thinkers and statesmen and women seeking ways to unite the European continent after World War Two.

The geopolitics of the Grand Design tradition

Machiavelli’s concept of a league (or, as it later came to be known, a federal union) was not limited to specific regions or contexts. It also inspired serious proposals at the continental level, where the stakes of unity were even higher. The so-called ‘Grand Design’ of the French King Henry IV (1589–1610) and his chief minister, the Duke of Sully, demonstrates that the idea of a united Europe contains an element of strategic necessity from the outset. This plan, dating from the early seventeenth century, was not a utopian dream of a harmonious community of nations but an attempt to confront a harsh geopolitical reality. The Habsburg dynasty had designs on a universal European monarchy. Henry’s response was to initiate a grand federative structure, a joint defensive organization that not only provided protection to smaller states but also gave them an institutional framework to ensure their survival. The ultimate goal was a typically Machiavellian offensive idea: breaking the power and influence of the Habsburgs.

The idea behind the Grand Design was further elaborated in the eighteenth century in a debate among political philosophers. Thinkers like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Leibniz and Rousseau considered the conditions for the successful establishment of a union between European states; Immanuel Kant was to draw inspiration for his own continental federal blueprint from Saint Pierre’s writings. Their aim was not simply to maintain an internal peace, it was to impose Europe’s will on neighbouring competitors, such as the Ottoman Empire and Russia. The disagreement among these thinkers arose over the modalities and ultimate feasibility of the plan, with Saint-Pierre being the most optimistic and Rousseau the least.

After the Napoleonic wars, this philosophical debate would significantly influence the outcome of negotiations on the shaping of the new European order. The ultra-realist Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, summarizing the outcome of the negotiations, commented, ‘Hopefully, we have now established for a while what the good Abbé de Saint-Pierre wished to establish forever.’ On the Russian side, references were primarily made to the plan of Saint-Pierre’s inspiration, Henry IV and Sully’s Grand Design.²

The Holy Alliance (September 1815) stipulated that conflicts should henceforth not be resolved through military force but prevented through diplomatic mediation and joint sanctions, and so a bridge was built between classical power politics and a more structured multilateral system. The Second Treaty of Paris (November 1815) institutionalized this with the introduction of regular diplomatic meetings, positioning the great powers Russia, England, Austria and Prussia as both the guardians of peace and the arbiters of international order. In this respect, the solution of the Congress of Vienna was a pragmatic synthesis of raison d’état and Kantian federal idealism (Metternich had studied Kant’s works as a student). For the first time, a structural framework was provided for preventative diplomacy and collective security in Europe. The most innovative element was that, in addition to the equality of union members as envisioned by Henry IV and the eighteenth-century philosophers, it added an element in the form of a council of great powers that held a distinct, higher status. This helped to make the idea of a continental federal union as attractive to larger states as it already was to smaller ones.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the equally realist Prussian Count Otto von Bismarck used federalism to unite the then-fragmented Germany. At decisive moments, he used the threat of war and actual warfare (against Denmark, and against the Austrian and French empires) to unite ever more German states into a federal cooperative framework. To Bismarck, a federal union had a dual function: it provided protection against geopolitical threats; and it transformed Germany into a power capable of conducting its own geopolitical manoeuvres. Ultimately, unification made Germany the new hegemonic power on the continent.

A federal union as a power instrument for self-preservation and aggrandisement was unsurprisingly embraced by the earliest geopolitical thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century. They deployed arguments with a striking resemblance to Machiavelli’s. For instance, the Swedish legal scholar Rudolf Kjellén, from whose work the term ‘geopolitics’ originates, described international politics primarily as a matter of a fight for space. In an inversion of Kantian logic, he termed territorial expansion a ‘categorical political imperative’.³ Although he saw a federal union as purely transitional, he considered it the most practically achievable form for Germany in the medium term. He advocated the creation of a sort of Central European union through cooperation with Austria–Hungary, an idea later elaborated in Friedrich von Naumann’s seminal work on the same concept, titled Mitteleuropa.

Churchill, Monnet, Schuman: Founders of a Geopolitical Union

It is tempting to read the post-war declarations about the need to form a European federal union through the lens of post-1990s European optimism: a Kantian plea for a world in which war had been permanently abolished. But closer examination reveals a different story. The quest for a federal future for the continent was based on the realization that ‘in Western Europe at least, the nation state is an obsolescent principle of political organisation which, far from assuring the security and power of its members, condemns them to impotence and ultimate extinction either by each other or by their more powerful neighbours’.⁴ These words were written not by a Kantian idealist but by the founder of the realist school of international relations, Hans Morgenthau. Similarly, Europe’s founders were not idealists. They accepted the existential challenges facing the continent and considered the formation of a European union to be a necessary response to the continent’s geopolitical situation.

Following the devastation of the Second World War, Europe faced a complex web of geopolitical challenges. In addition to the immense physical and economic devastation wrought by the war, a new world order was rapidly solidifying, marked by the clear division of Europe. The Soviet grip on Central and Eastern Europe quickly solidified, enforced through political purges and violence. This division meant that for the foreseeable future, European unification would be restricted to Western Europe.

The vision for a strong and safe Europe as an independent power was articulated by key figures like Winston Churchill and Jean Monnet. Churchill described the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’ as the ‘sovereign remedy’ to prevent a ‘new form of tyranny’. He envisioned this European federation as a separate power in the new world order. In his speech in The Hague to the 1948 Congress of Europe, he outlined a global security architecture resting on three pillars: the ‘vast Soviet Union’, the ‘United States and her sister republics in the Western Hemisphere’, and the ‘Council of Europe, including Great Britain linked with her Empire and Commonwealth’.⁵ This explicitly located Europe as a major power alongside the US and the USSR.

Jean Monnet’s vision for Europe was grounded in pragmatism. As early as 1943, he concluded, ‘There will be no peace in Europe if the States are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty.’ His idea was to form a ‘European entity’ that could function as a ‘common economic unit’.⁶ For Monnet, the initial European Coal and Steel Community (1951) – with France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg as its members – was about creating a new, effective authority capable of taking decisions in the common interest. As he stated in his autobiography, his vision was for Europe to become a separate power in its relations with the existing Great Powers.

Conclusion

Although the post-war moment follows in the tradition of previous European peace pacts, focussing on a Kantian interpretation alone risks overlooking the crucial geopolitical context and the pragmatic motivations of the post-war founders. Faced with economic collapse, the existential threat posed by the Soviet Bloc, and the demonstrable failure of absolute national sovereignty to ensure security and stability on the continent, European unification became a necessary, realist response.

In the geopolitical tradition of federal union, we find the sources for a European foundational narrative that embeds it firmly in realism. It is a story not of disarmament and moral enlightenment, but of strategic self-preservation and aggrandisement.

This geopolitical tradition of European unification offers a new source of inspiration for politicians in today’s European Union. Its ultimate vision is not of a technocratic institution that lulls itself to sleep with fairy tales about its own moral superiority, but of a resilient union that demonstrates geopolitical decisiveness. Rather than losing itself in idle speculation about an ‘end state’ of global peace in which all conflicts are forever resolved, it envisions a union whose legitimacy is rooted in its ability to act independently and strategically on behalf of and through its member states, in a world where power is paramount.