Ask Lemmygrad

best case scenario: EU continues stagnating and splinters into traditional intra-European nationalist squabbling. Worst case scenario: the EU remilitarizes, takes up the mantle of the Axis powers, and goes out giving Operation Barbarossa one last try while the US nukes east Asia.

Unlikely. Within the EU there is a lot of power imbalance and the periphery gets exploited by the wealthier western nations for cheap labour and resources. National borders facilitate this by being relatively porous for the movement for capital but much more restrictive for the movement of people. There is no incentive for those who hold power within the EU governance to unify as a single country.

The European experiment is likely heading for failure, as the liberal elite who have dominated it are being ousted from power, with their American supporters abandoning them. In France, two anti-EU factions are currently in control and are poised to win the next election. Similarly, Germany is on the verge of electing a far-right chancellor in the upcoming election. This means that the two key states that the EU relies on are likely to undermine its stability and effectiveness.

The European Union is in many ways the successor to the third and second reichs (4rth reich basically), and faces many of the same problems.

It was more or less founded as the "european steel and coal community", which was an economic agreement that finally gave german industrialists access to French and Belgian and other European coal and iron ores (gaining access to these natural resources was a key German war aim in both world wars).

Over time, this economic "partnership" has expanded more and more, giving German industrialists greater and greater access to European markets and European labor. This culminated in the 1990s with the maastricht treaty (establishing the EU and euro), and the conquest of the former USSR by European capital.

Effectively, the German imperialism problem was solved by rolling over to its war aims in peacetime. This is the real secret to "European peace". Although it should be noted that countries like france are too big to be exploited, and instead participate in the EU as exploiters.

Today then, we have a situation that can be understood as "what if nazis won the war and cleaned up their PR?"*. The answer is a system of imperialism that has survived for a remarkably short amount of time but already seems to be on its last legs.

Like all bourgeois economies, imperialism could give Germany and its exploiter compatriots a shot in the viens. Capital was exported and labor was imported, allowing western European capitalists to eventually destroy by market forces the post-war bargaining power the working class had achieved.

However, the new markets they gained access to filled up with capital quickly, while birth rates in the core collapsed (partly due to the capitalist dismantling of social safety nets).

EU capital is furthermore, facing competition from American capital and Chinese industry. For instance, did you know that US capital has an FDI of $4 trillion in europe**? Meanwhile EU capital has invested only $3.4 trillion in the US (same source). The difference doesn't sound like a lot, but the EU stock market is around $12 trillion while the American one is about $46.5 trillion. Relative to their mutual sizes, EU capital faces more competition from US capital than vice versa.

All of this had culminated in weak and inconsistent returns on European, especially German capital. Look at this data for returns on German bank equity for an idea.

Combine this with the rise of populist movements, and an inability to produce things, it becomes clear that the EU and western European imperialism as a whole are no longer sustainable in its present state. They are on a path to inevitable self destruction. The same was true of the third reich, which had reached its terminal crisis through a somewhat different mechanism, taking on unsustainable levels of debt (in secret) for rearmnament. It was the reason it literally had to go to war, or it would have gone bankrupt. Today, the drums of war beat loudly in europe once again.

*this is more literal than you might think, given how big of a role actual nazis (and their ideological successors) have played in the EU and NATO

**page 9 of the source I have linked

First, we use the words country, nation, and state very loosely. You're asking if you think Europe will ever become a single state. I don't think so - there's no reason for it. The concepts of states as we know them needs to ultimately be tossed into the dustbin of history. Europe is a territory, a land, or some might say a country with many nations living on it. Most of these nations have states. These nations have much to lose by giving up their states to a state that is plurinational.

Not in my lifetime, it best collapse

Formally no, but de facto it could. There are forces in Europe that definitely want that and are actively working toward that direction by increasingly centralizing power in the Brussels bureaucracy.

They wouldn't be able to get rid of the individual nation states, but they don't want or need to do that anyway. The formal structure of the national states provides a useful degree of separation for Brussels from the actual European population, insulating them against democratic processes that could threaten the financial-oligarchic control. All they need to do is keep usurping more and more powers from the states toward the EU center.

Already the power of the ECB over the currency is a massive theft of sovereign economic control from the Eurozone countries. And now they are talking about Eurobonds, a European army and other such things. Of course much of this is highly unrealistic in practical terms, Europe's industrial power is rapidly declining and despite the delusions of the Eurocrats you cannot build military and geopolitical power solely on financial machinations, but the intent is clearly there and they are continuing to push on with various processes of centralization.

Nah, too culturally distinct and anti-EU factions tend to hold varying degrees of sway within most EU countries to prevent that from happening. I think an attempt to unify it would quickly show that only the west side of it would be amicable (France, Germany, smaller countries like Belgium) and even within those countries I dont think their would be much support without a mass political movement behind it first.

Probably not but i think it would be cool if they did cuz i like big countries.