EU: the world's most wanted club

Every club on earth is judged by one unforgiving measure: who wants to get in. Of all the large political entities that exist in the world today like the United States, China, India, the great regional blocs and federations and empires old and new, only one has a queue outside its door. Only one generates, in country after country, a genuine popular longing to belong.

That entity is the European Union – a body routinely described as bureaucratic, technocratic, democratic-deficit-ridden, perpetually in crisis, and yet somehow, stubbornly, irresistibly attractive. The countries currently seeking to join the EU are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, and Türkiye. Ukraine has paid in blood for the possibility of membership. The Western Balkans have spent decades patiently rewriting their legal systems, their judiciaries, their entire economic architectures in the hope of eventual admission. Even Turkey, despite years of profound political divergence, has never formally withdrawn its candidacy. And then came 2025 and 2026, when something genuinely unexpected happened: Canadians – citizens of a prosperous, stable, geographically non-European country with no historical relationship to the EU's founding project – began seriously polling in favour of exploring membership, with a YouGov survey finding 42 per cent in favour, outnumbering those opposed. What had changed was neither geography nor historical kinship, but something harder to quantify: a growing sense that European values represent something genuinely worth belonging to.

Bart De Wever, the Belgian Prime Minister, put it with characteristic bluntness in early 2026: "People want to join the European Union. Nobody wants to join China. No neighbour of the United States says, 'We want to join the United States.' Nobody wants to." It is a remarkable observation – and it comes from a conservative politician, not a European federalist, which is perhaps the point: even those most sceptical of Brussels bureaucracy recognize that the EU exercises a form of attraction no other major power on earth currently matches.

Why? That is the question this article tries to answer. And the answer requires a journey through several centuries of ideas, catastrophes, organized struggles, and institutional inventions – a journey that is considerably more surprising than the official version of European history tends to suggest.

Values that no one invented – and everyone reached for

The easiest and least satisfying answer to the question of Europe's appeal is that it embodies superior values. Least satisfying, because it is both partially true and deeply misleading.

Human dignity, solidarity, the rule of law, the protection of the person against the arbitrary exercise of power which are the values at the core of the European project are not European inventions. Every major tradition of human thought has reached for something resembling them, from different philosophical starting points, in different historical contexts, without any of them having borrowed from the others.

Buddhism grounds the worth of every being in the capacity for compassion and the possibility of liberation from suffering. Remarkably, this foundation extends beyond the human to all sentient life, making it philosophically more radical on this point than anything the Western tradition produced. Islam has the concept of karāma – dignity bestowed directly by God on every human being regardless of faith, race, or status. Islam also developed extraordinarily sophisticated frameworks of human protection, in some respects centuries ahead of European jurisprudence. When the Chinese scholar Zhang Pengchun participated

in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, he explicitly argued that the Declaration should not overemphasise the European roots of dignity, since the Confucian concept of ren ( benevolence or humaneness) conveys the same meaning, and the Chinese word for dignity, zunyan, appears in documents predating the Common Era. The famous African philosophical tradition of Ubuntu, best rendered as "I am because we are", grounds dignity not in the individual soul or rational capacity but in the web of relationships that constitutes a person, a socially richer foundation than much Western thought has managed.

And within the Western tradition itself, the lineage is more tangled than the standard account suggests. The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome argued, in a slave-owning world, that all human beings share a common rational nature and therefore a common worth regardless of birth or status – a philosophically revolutionary claim. Christianity translated this intuition into the theological doctrine of imago Dei, the idea grounded in Genesis that every human being is made in the image of God, giving it institutional weight and cultural reach across centuries, even as the Church spent many of those centuries failing conspicuously to live by it. The Renaissance amplified these threads through a new humanist register – Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Man, often called the founding manifesto of humanism, is also a deeply theological text, its argument being that God gave humanity a unique freedom, the freedom to choose what to become, and that dignity flows from precisely this God-given openness. The Enlightenment then attempted to reanchor human worth in reason alone, arguing, above all through Kant, that dignity belongs to us as rational autonomous agents with no divine warrant required – inheriting a moral intuition cultivated across more than a millennium of Christian thought, even as it stripped away the theological framework that had generated it.

What this panorama reveals is something genuinely astonishing. Across cultures that had little contact with one another for most of human history, human beings independently arrived at a remarkably similar moral intuition: that people should be treated as subjects rather than objects. This convergence suggests that the intuition of human dignity is not a culturally specific invention but something closer to a universal moral discovery, reached by different routes and expressed in different vocabularies, yet pointing toward the same recognition.

Europe, of course, did not discover dignity. Humanity discovered it, many times over, in many places. What Europe did was find a way to make it politically real.

The unlikely first brick

The story of how Europe translated moral intuition into political institutiona begins in a place no one would expect: the office of a Prussian militarist.

Otto von Bismarck was the Iron Chancellor who declared that the great questions of history are decided not by speeches and majority votes but by iron and blood. And it was him, who introduced old-age pensions, accident insurance, and health coverage for German workers in the 1880s. He was not moved by any of the traditions of dignity surveyed above. He was moved by fear. Bismarck's aim was to make workers loyal to the empire and to purchase their silence with pension funds before they could demand something far more expensive: power itself. Think of it as a landlord who renovates the building only after hearing that the tenants have begun meeting to discuss the lease.

The strategy failed at its intended purpose magnificently. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) kept growing, and by 1912 it was the largest party in the Reichstag. But the sedative had become a foundation – and this is the first lesson the history offers: that social protection, once granted even cynically, tends to take root in ways its authors did not anticipate, because human beings, once they have experienced security, rarely agree to relinquish it. Something had been conceded, and over time, the concession would be transformed into a right.

This transformation required a specific and historically unusual set of conditions converging at the same moment. And understanding those conditions is the key to understanding why Europe, of all places, managed to do what no civilization before it had done at comparable scale.

Five conditions that made the impossible possible

The first and most fundamental condition was democracy itself. Many civilizations had the values of dignity and solidarity. What they lacked, in the historical window that mattered, was a functioning mass democracy combined with freedom of organization. Without the vote, without trade unions, without freedom of assembly and a free press, beautiful ideas about human worth remain exactly that: ideas. When democracy was established and unions' rights were recognized in law, parties representing working people were permitted to organize, and this produced a decisive shift in the balance of power. The people who most needed dignity to be institutionalized could suddenly build the political muscle to demand it. Democracy was the transmission mechanism that turned moral conviction into legislation.

The second condition is the great paradox at the heart of the European story: industrial capitalism created the pressure that forced the response. The fourteen-hour working day, the child labor, the workhouses, the periodic mass unemployment – all this true concentrated misery of 19th-century industrial production generated both the organized working class that had the power to demand change and the moral horror that made reform feel urgent to people across the political spectrum. Without the brutal efficiency of early capitalism in grinding human beings into productive units, there would have been no labor movement of sufficient force to extract the concessions that became the welfare state. Europe's social model was born from the collision between the most advanced capitalist economy the world had yet seen and the organized resistance of those it was consuming.

The third condition was catastrophe – and here the story takes its darkest turn. The welfare state as we know it, and the European Union as an institution, were both decisively shaped by two world wars, fascism, and the Holocaust. These were not merely military disasters but moral ones, and they created a political will that prosperity never produces. The post-war generation of European leaders, across political traditions, had lived through the consequences of extreme inequality, nationalist demagogy, and the collapse of democratic institutions. They built what they built partly out of genuine conviction and partly out of sheer terror at what they had witnessed. Catastrophe concentrated the political imagination. As one analyst has put it, the welfare state was born not out of utopian idealism but from the hard realities of crisis, crafted to stabilize capitalism while upholding democratic legitimacy. 

The fourth condition was the existence of strong administrative states capable of actually implementing policy at scale. A value without an institutional vehicle to carry it remains a wish. The European state, for all its historical violence and injustice, had developed over centuries the bureaucratic capacity to translate political decisions into social reality. It knew how to collect taxes, train teachers, build hospitals, and enforce labor law. This is less romantic than the story of ideas and movements, but without it the ideas and movements would have produced declarations rather than institutions.

The fifth condition was the organized political intelligence of progressive forces: the labor movement, the socialist and social-democratic parties, the feminist organizers, the internationalists who believed that solidarity across borders was a civilizational project rather than a naïve dream. These were the people who understood, earlier and more clearly than anyone else, that dignity requires material conditions, not merely philosophical recognition. You can have the right to vote and still die in a workhouse. You can be formally free and materially enslaved by the wage system. The progressive tradition's central insight, namely what distinguishes it from both conservative paternalism and liberal individualism was that freedom without security is an abstraction, and that the purpose of political power is to create the conditions under which every person can actually live, rather than merely survive.

Thus, these five conditions (democracy, industrial capitalism as pressure, catastrophic war as moral accelerant, the strong administrative state, and the organized political will of progressive movements) converged in Western Europe between roughly 1880 and 1970 in a way that had no precedent in human history. None of them alone was sufficient. Together, they produced something the world had never seen: a political community in which the material conditions of dignity were made available, imperfectly and incompletely but genuinely, to ordinary people rather than only to elites.

What it actually feels like to live in the EU

Abstract arguments about dignity and institutional design are more convincing when they touch ground. So what does Europe's political experiment actually produce, in the daily lives of the people who live inside it?

Life expectancy at birth in the EU reached 81.5 years in 2026 – a figure that would have been unimaginable to any previous generation in human history, and that reflects not merely advances in medicine but decades of investment in public health, nutrition, housing, and the reduction of poverty. Astonishingly, recent research found that even the wealthiest Americans have shorter lifespans than their European counterparts; across wealth levels, mortality was higher in the U.S. than in the parts of Europe studied, and in some cases the richest Americans had survival rates comparable to the poorest Europeans in Western Europe. In the EU, the number of healthy life years at birth, meaning years lived free from the limitations of illness or disability, stands at around 63 years. This means that the average European can expect not just a long life but also a long life in reasonable health. These numbers are the accumulated result of political choices, made and sustained over generations.

The working life of a European is structured around assumptions that would strike much of the world as extraordinary. Every EU worker is legally entitled to a minimum of four weeks of paid annual leave – a floor, not a ceiling, that most countries exceed considerably. Every EU Member State guarantees workers statutory protection in the event of illness through a system of sick leave and income replacement, although the duration and level of compensation vary between countries. A German worker who falls ill continues to receive full salary for up to six weeks before the social insurance system takes over; an Italian worker can claim statutory sick pay for up to 180 days. Statutory maternity leave across EU countries typically runs from 14 weeks to over a year, with wage replacement rates ranging from 70 to 100 per cent, depending on the country. At the same time the United States remains one of the few high-income countries in the world without a mandated national paid maternity leave programme at all. Parental leave, available to both parents is guaranteed across the Union, with Sweden offering 480 days of shared leave at 80 per cent pay, a policy that has measurably increased fathers' participation in early childcare and contributed to some of the highest gender equality scores on earth.

Healthcare in EU countries is universal in ambition and, in most member states, close to universal in practice – meaning that a medical emergency does not also become a financial emergency, that a cancer diagnosis does not simultaneously trigger bankruptcy, that the quality of care you receive is not a direct function of the size of your employer's insurance package. All countries in the European Union offer some form of universal health coverage, no other major economic bloc has achieved the same degree of universal public health protection across all of its member states.

Workers' rights are protected by a dense and constantly evolving web of EU legislation: the right to organize collectively, protections against unfair dismissal, mandatory rest periods, limits on working hours, rights to flexible arrangements for parents of young children. Austria, for example, scores a perfect 100 in the Labour Rights Index for freedom of association and collective bargaining, with roughly 98 per cent of Austrian employees covered by collective agreements that ensure wage standards and working conditions across sectors. The freedom to move across 27 countries for work, study, love, or retirement without a visa, without bureaucratic permission, without surrendering social protections is a form of liberty so embedded in European daily life that those who possess it rarely pause to notice how unusual it is.

None of this is perfect. Inequalities persist within and between EU member states – an eight-year gap in life expectancy separates the highest and lowest performing countries, and within countries, gaps between the most and least educated remain stubbornly wide. Housing affordability has become a genuine crisis in many European cities. Mental health provision lags far behind physical health systems. The promise of the European social model is unevenly honoured, and in some member states it is under active political assault.

But the baseline, the floor below which EU membership commits a society not to fall, represents something genuinely without parallel in the world. When people in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Moldova, in the Western Balkans orient their political aspirations toward Brussels, EU bureaucracy is obviously not what they are dreaming of. They are dreaming of a society in which falling ill does not bankrupt you, in which having a child does not end your career, in which you can organize with your colleagues without fear of dismissal, in which the law protects you from the arbitrary exercise of power by employers, by states, or corporations. They are dreaming of exactly what the European social model, built through the convergence of the five conditions described above, actually delivers.

Who built EU

Into this confluence of forces came the men who gave the European project its institutional form. Robert Schuman of France, Konrad Adenauer of Germany, Alcide De Gasperi of Italy – Christian democrats all, shaped by the Catholic tradition of human dignity, each coming from border regions whose identities had shifted between nations, each having lived under fascist or Nazi persecution, each emerging from the wreckage of the 1940s convinced that the nation-state, left to its own logic, was a machine for producing catastrophe.

What they built at that time (sealed as the Coal and Steel Community of 1951, the Treaty of Rome of 1957) was, formally speaking, an economic project. The founding treaties made no mention of human rights or democracy. But behind the economic architecture lay a civilizational vision that Konrad Adenauer expressed with unusual directness in March 1946, speaking as a stateless man in a defeated Germany still divided into occupation zones: "Europe will only be possible if a community of European people is restored in which every population will provide its own irreplaceable, unique contribution to the economy and to European culture, thought, poetry and Western creativity." Did it sound like the language of markets?

The values these founders carried in their minds took more than half a century to find their way into the legal architecture of the institution they built. When the philosopher Jacques Maritain participated in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, he observed that the drafters had managed to agree on the rights while carefully avoiding agreement on why those rights exist – some approaching them through scripture, others through Kantian reason, others through the sheer imperative to prevent the suffering they had witnessed. The EU's founding treaties preserved this productive ambiguity: the moral vision was present as atmosphere rather than law, and only the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 formally enshrined human dignity as the first and foundational value of the Union.

What filled the space between the economic founding and the eventual codification of values was the long, unglamorous work of progressive politics – the expansion of workers' rights, the universalization of healthcare and education, the extension of full civic life to women, the recognition of various minorities as full citizens, the construction of environmental protections, the insistence, decade after decade, that the formal promise of human dignity be given material content. Every one of these expansions was driven by progressive forces and resisted, often fiercely, by conservative ones. The historical record on this point is clear across countries and decades.

The post-war settlement gave Europe its floor.

It took a different kind of political energy to keep raising the ceiling – and that energy came predominantly from the left.

A novel form of power

The European Union that emerged from this long process is unlike any political entity that has ever existed. Every great power in history has made itself felt through the march of armies, the weight of currency, the imposition of language, or the redrawing of maps. The EU does none of these things. It has no standing army, no unified treasury of meaningful fiscal scale, no shared identity capable of commanding the deep emotional loyalty that nations do.

The EU has a fascinating instrument which at some point surpasses all the above. Its instrument is the standard – the unexciting work of deciding what a safe toy must look like, what a food label must say, how much carbon a vehicle may release into the air your children breathe, what a company may collect about you without your knowledge or consent. Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford has named this the "Brussels Effect": the EU's ability to regulate global markets by setting standards that market forces then spread autonomously, because multinational companies find it far cheaper to comply with one rigorous standard than to maintain parallel systems across different jurisdictions. Apple, Samsung, and Meta adjust their global practices to meet EU requirements. GDPR functions as a planetary data protection law, enforced not by Brussels inspectors but by corporate legal teams in California, Tokyo, and São Paulo.

The most sophisticated political invention of the 20th century may be this: a superpower that rules through norms and whose influence deepens precisely as other powers spend their credibility on coercion. Standards, once embedded in global supply chains, are extraordinarily difficult to unwind – and the EU's power grows every time another country decides it would rather be inside the system than outside it.

And then there is the case that may be the most instructive of all. The United Kingdom – which in 2016 became the first country in history to leave the European Union, in a vote that was supposed to signal a sovereign and confident departure – has spent the years since engaged in a complicated, and increasingly undeniable gravitational drift back toward the bloc it left. A YouGov poll published in April 2026 found 55 per cent of Britons supporting the idea of rejoining. A parliamentary petition calling on the UK to apply for membership gathered over 111,000 signatures. At a UK-EU summit in May 2025, London and Brussels agreed a new Security and Defence Partnership, with negotiations ongoing on a common sanitary zone, linked emissions trading systems, participation in the EU electricity market, and a youth mobility scheme. The UK in a Changing Europe research programme estimated that, by the end of 2025, Brexit had reduced the level of UK GDP by between 6 and 8 per cent relative to a counterfactual in which the UK had remained in the EU. What the trajectory reveals is that a country that voted to leave is finding, year by year, that the pull of what Europe has built is not primarily economic but something harder to quantify: a sense of where one belongs.

Why the queue keeps growing

Institutions, left untended, much like old houses whose structure remains even as their walls lose their strength. Over the last four decades, the social contract that made Europe what it is has gradually thinned through the retreat of public investment and the erosion of the institutions that once sustained housing, healthcare, and education.  The fish does not notice the water: for two or three generations, the achievements of the labor movement and the progressive tradition have been so total, so ambient, that they stopped feeling like political achievements and started feeling like facts of nature. And things that feel like nature are not defended. 

And yet the queue outside the door keeps growing.

Why?

Because the values that imperfectly the European project has tried to give institutional form to are not specifically European values. They are, as the great traditions of human thought across every civilization have independently demonstrated, something closer to universal human aspirations: that every person deserves to live in dignity, that security is not a privilege to be earned but a condition to be guaranteed, that very different peoples can share a political home without one of them having to dominate the rest.

What Europe proved, across the turbulent century between Bismarck's pension scheme and the Lisbon Treaty, is that these aspirations can be made real, translated from philosophy into policy, from moral intuition into law, from the dreams of intellectuals into the daily lived experience of ordinary people. That proof of concept is what generates the queue. It is generated neither by European culture nor by European wealth. The demonstration, fragile and contested as it remains, that a political community organized around the protection of persons rather than the accumulation of power is not merely a beautiful idea.

It is a working model.

A personal outlook

The following reflects my own perspective as a futurist and student of civilizational design – offered as an invitation to think further.

There is something in all of this that tends to get lost in the noise of daily European politics. Indeed, this noise is considerable. The EU is routinely described as a bureaucratic labyrinth, a democratic deficit, a project in perpetual crisis, and what not… and some of that is true; but step back far enough, and what you see is something else: a civilization that has managed to make dignity into policy, to translate humanist values into regulatory architecture. A civiliaztion that build a political community whose central organizing principle is the protection of the person.

This, I believe, is precisely why the EU's gravitational pull shows no signs of diminishing, even as its internal tensions multiply. The values at its core are not merely administrative preferences but a particular vision of what political life is for – that human dignity precedes and outranks any state interest, that wellbeing is the true measure of a society's success, that solidarity is the organizing logic of a community that takes itself seriously. The EU is trying to build institutions around these ideas, and its motto – "United in Diversity" – is not empty rhetoric but a genuinely radical proposition: that very different peoples, with very different histories, languages, and temperaments, can share a common home without erasing what makes each of them distinct.

The EU grew from a trade community into something that aspires to be, in the words of its own founding ambition, "an ever closer union". It's a shared framework within which very different peoples discover what they have in common, producing decades of remarkable achievement. What it will produce next depends on whether Europeans understand what they have been building well enough to keep building it – and whether the rest of the world, watching from the queue, finds in it the proof of concept it has been searching for.

And is this not, when all is said and done, something unprecedented: a working model, however flawed, of how very different peoples can share a political home?

Aksinya Staar, July 2026