By Niklas Romberg
One of Penn’s most distinguished political scientists on why the European Union is more misunderstood than any other institution in the world.
Most students arrive in Brendan O’Leary’s course on the European Union thinking they already have a rough sense of what it is. A trading bloc, maybe. Something like a looser version of the United States. By the end of the semester, most of them have had to rethink that entirely.
O’Leary is the chair of the Political Science department at Penn and one of the world’s leading scholars of nationalism, power sharing, and territorial politics. He is Irish, European, and American, and has been teaching the course “The European Union: Arguments and Evidence” most academic years since 2011. He brings to the subject not just academic expertise but the perspective of someone who has lived inside the institution he studies.
A confederation, not a federation
O’Leary’s first corrective for most students is a basic one: the European Union is not a federation. It is a confederation, and that distinction matters enormously. In confederations member-states retain sovereignty, as they did in the American Articles of Confederation. That includes the right to secede—a right the UK unwisely exercised in his view. “Many people assume the EU works like the United States,” he said. “But that comparison breaks down almost immediately once you look closely.” In the American system, the Senate gives states representation, but party loyalty ultimately drives decision making. In the EU, the European Council, composed of the heads of government of member states, is the decisive power. There is no real equivalent of it in the American system. Member states are not just administrative units, they are sovereign governments that have chosen to pool certain competencies while retaining others, and there’s variation in how they do that. Grasping that is essential to understanding anything the EU does. The Court of Justice of the European Union is a successful example of a court that has avoided party-politicization. It is also confederal: each member-state gets one judge. It is genuinely complex and diverse: it has three federations within it, Belgium, Germany and Austria, legacy constitutional monarchies and post-communist democracies, all struggling to exercise sovereignty, and stay democratic.
The overall EU architecture, developed in spurts, has a historical purpose. The institution’s predecessors were formed in 1958 to make war between European powers structurally impossible by binding their economies and polities together. That founding logic still shapes everything the EU does, even as the institution has grown far more complex. “You cannot understand Europe without understanding the EU,” he said. “And you cannot understand the EU without appreciating what the small states bring to it.” By that he means you can’t just know about Germany and France and expect to understand the EU. And no, he says, “it’s not all about the single market and the customs union.”
A common misconception
O’Leary is candid about the patterns he sees among American students and policymakers alike. The tendency, he says, is to treat the EU as a backdrop rather than an actor—to study European politics by focusing on individual member states and assuming the EU layer can be skimmed over. “That is not possible,” he said. “The EU is not a detail. It is the framework within which European politics happens.” It even has powerful effects on its neighbors: as a standard-setter, in laws, policies and regulations. And European countries still want to join it. Ukraine is even willing to shed its soldiers’ blood for that right.
American policymakers have historically made a version of the same mistake, sometimes deliberately so, seeking to build bilateral relationships with major European powers while bypassing EU institutions on everything except trade. O’Leary sees this as a fundamental misreading of how power actually works in Europe today. The European Council does not get the attention it deserves in American foreign policy circles, and that blind spot has real consequences.
For undergraduates, he sees a different version of the problem. Students often come in assuming that because they know something about one or two big states, they know something about the EU. His course is designed to dismantle that assumption carefully and rebuild something more accurate in its place.
The EU in turbulent times
O’Leary is direct when asked about the current state of the transatlantic relationship. The EU, he says, has been treated with a degree of contempt by the current American administration, and that has forced Europeans to reckon seriously with their own strategic autonomy. “European elites have been awakened,” he said. “They have been treated with contempt, but their organizations are set up for success if they choose to use them.” The easy assumption, “that the Union is for economics, “flanking polices,” and shared rights, while NATO is for security, for the non-neutrals,” has gone. Strategic rethinking is underway. Trump’s outrageous demand that the Europeans send their navies to the Persian Gulf forget that NATO is a defensive alliance, and that the Persian Gulf is not in the North Atlantic region. And, of course, he did not consult NATO before going to war with the Ayatollahs.
On defense, he is cautiously optimistic. The EU has the scientific expertise, the industrial capacity, and several member states have significant military capabilities. And it can ally with the UK on defense. The question, he says, has never really been about capability, but about political will. Germany’s shifting posture, France’s existing nuclear capabilities, and the broader shock of recent years have pushed that conversation further and faster than most observers expected. “If Europeans can organize their independence, the capabilities are there,” he said.
On populism, O’Leary offers a perspective that cuts against the prevailing anxiety. He believes the peak of European populism within the EU may have passed. Crucially, he points out that most populist parties that once flirted with leaving the EU have quietly abandoned that position. There’s not talk of Frexit, Grexit, or Espanexit. The Trump administration’s overt support for right-wing populist parties has actually made those parties less popular. “Brexit,” he suggests, had a clarifying effect on European publics. “People have realized it is simply not in their economic interest to leave,” he said. The more serious challenge, in his view, is immigration, which has placed pressure on EU institutions and continues to fuel nationalist sentiment across the continent. That, rather than any single populist party, is the stress test the EU has not yet resolved. The upcoming elections in Hungary will be an important moment: if the Orban government is defeated then European cohesion—and reform—and solidarity against Russian aggression and in support of Ukraine will be somewhat easier.
What the US and Europe can learn from each other
O’Leary’s answer to this question is pointed in both directions. The United States, he argues, could learn from the EU’s most basic achievement: the transformation of deep historical antagonisms between neighboring states within a framework of peaceful cooperation, free trade, respect for the rule of law, and human rights. “If Europeans can resolve some of the antagonisms they have had, there are lessons in that,” he said. At a moment when American relations with its immediate neighbors have become strained, that lesson feels timely. “And by the way,” he says, “many European countries have much more efficient and equitable health systems.”
What can Europe learn from the United States? Realism, above all. Europeans, O’Leary argues, have long underdeveloped their own security infrastructure, relying on American guarantees that now look considerably less reliable. The lesson is not comfortable, but it is necessary. The EU cannot simply hope to export peace and democratization by example. It must put its own house in order, and be able to defend itself against Russian aggression, American arrogance, and Chinese subversion.
European Studies at Penn
O’Leary is frank about what he sees as a gap in Penn’s approach to European studies. The university sends a significant number of students to study abroad in Europe every year, and it has genuine strength in European-related scholarship across multiple disciplines. What it lacks, he argues, is the institutional infrastructure to draw that strength together. “Penn does not have a European studies center,” he said. “That is extraordinary given how many Penn students spend a semester abroad in Europe and how many faculty work on European questions.” And by comparison with our peers, “we are fragmented among the humanities and the social sciences; our natural scientists—including those with EU citizenship—could participate in European research programs.”
His hope is that the European Studies program grows in an organic way with other initiatives, builds on what already exists, across the University, rather than trying to import a model from elsewhere, or appoint a new outsider to a shoebox. The students, the faculty, and the interest are there. What is needed, he suggests, is the institutional will to bring it all together. Like European integration he is prepared to be patient.
For students deciding whether to take his course on the EU, his pitch is simple. Whatever your interests, Europe is relevant to them. Its history, its institutions, its failures, and its ongoing experiment in multi-national co-operation, including monetary union, offer lessons that no other region of the world can replicate. It is, so far, the most successful confederation in history, and “Without understanding the EU,” he said, “you simply do not understand modern Europe.”
The author would like to thank Professor Brendan O’Leary for generously taking the time to sit down for this interview.
Author Bio:
Niklas Romberg is a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, Class of 2027.