Can the Climate Crisis Unite Europe? |
LONDON—Europe today faces an increasingly hostile geopolitical landscape, yet the European Union is struggling to unite its member states around a shared political project. Security, competitiveness, migration, and democratic values have all been invoked as grounds for deeper integration. None has proved sufficient.
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Meanwhile, the environment—once at the heart of Europe’s political project—has fallen by the wayside, a casualty of the rupture between the certainties of the past and an increasingly uncertain future. But dismissing environmental priorities like climate action as outdated misunderstands both the crisis they represent and their significance for Europe’s political union.
Consider the historical roots of European unification. Speaking at the Peace Congress of 1849, Victor Hugo gave voice to the aspirations of generations of European intellectuals who envisioned a federal republic that would bring peace and stability to the continent. “[A] day will come,” he declared, “when we shall see those two immense groups, the United States of America and the United States of Europe, stretching out their hands across the sea, exchanging their products, their arts, their works of genius, clearing up the globe, making deserts fruitful, ameliorating creation under the eyes of the........