Is Europe Worth Dying For? The European Union and the Russian War Against Ukraine

The Russian aggression against Ukraine forces Europeans to reconsider the very purpose and viability of the European project. Can and should the European Union become a major geopolitical actor? Is it possible and desirable to create a truly sovereign Europe? And finally, for that to happen can the EU be transformed from a peace project to a war project? The aim of this paper is to discuss these questions drawing on the insights of Max Webber, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt and Jan Patocka. I will argue that while the very existence of sovereign states presupposes a political community for which its members are willing to die, the European Union is not that kind of polity. What is more, the EU cannot transform itself into a sovereign European superstate (Morgan 2005), let alone a ‘war project’ (Leonard 2024) without abandoning its normative commitments. It would need to sacrifice both its ideal of democratic self-governance, as the peoples of Europe do not constitute a demos which could legitimise a supranational government, and its self-understanding as a novel polity that eschews violent conflicts, resorting instead to its normative power.