Coalitions of the willing are Europe’s path to ever closer union

Martin Sandbu martin.sandbu@ft.com · 17 Nov 2025

If the US’s motto — “out of many, one” — sounds hopelessly aspirational in Trump’s divided America, the EU’s could be seen as an oxymoron. “United in diversity” clashes against the received wisdom that diversity is what prevents common solutions. Some may even say that fragmented rivalry was such a key to Europe’s past successes that it has become an ineradicable obstacle to further progress.

But what if diversity is the road to unity, rather than a block to be overcome? We hear a lot about “coalitions of the willing” these days — mainly regarding attempts to mobilise military support to protect Ukraine’s security. But the more consequential coalitions of the willing may be those emerging over more mundane matters.

This is an old debate in Europe about whether it is better for a vanguard to move ahead with deeper integration or to take the time to find solutions all EU member states can agree with.

For some of the heaviest lifting involving major treaty changes, the former approach was taken. So it was with the euro and the Schengen borderless travel area. But mostly, European leaders have looked askance at integration with less than full participation.

In particular, “enhanced co-operation”, a provision for selective integration by as few as nine countries, has only been used a handful of times. Those that, like France, complain that integrationist ambitions are held back by laggards, have in practice declined to use a mechanism readily available to practice what they preach. Nor has the European Commission made enhanced co-operation a mainstay of its toolbox when unanimity is hard to find. In fact, its modus operandi is to seek (but not always find) broader majorities than it needs to push controversial legislation through. The trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc is a case in point.

Yet things are changing. In a speech last month, former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi called for a “pragmatic federalism . . . built by coalitions of the willing around shared strategic interests”. He imagined “countries with strong tech sectors agreeing on a common regime that enables their firms to scale rapidly”, those “with advanced defence industries pooling R&D and funding joint procurement” and “industrial leaders co-investing in critical sectors such as semiconductors, or in grid infrastructure that lowers energy costs”.

Coalitions of the willing, in deed if not in name, are emerging. Some EU expansions into new policy areas — notably “permanent structured co-operation” in defence — have been undertaken without full participation. Nineteen out of 27 countries have taken up the “Safe” scheme of common EU loans for jointly procured defence spending.

Draghi’s argument and these examples make coalitions of the willing seem a last resort, a lesser alternative to unity. But there can be a more positive logic, where parting ways in new integrationist pushes boosts unity in the end.

That is what we should hope for the Spanish “competitiveness lab” initiative, which encourages groups of willing countries to move ahead with elements of the agenda for unified capital markets. Madrid has convened interested finance ministers to work on relatively low-hanging fruit — common labelling for cross-border finance products, a joint securitisation platform and common rules for smaller companies’ credit ratings. The idea is that countries ready and willing to make the next integrative step can produce successes on the ground that others will not want to miss out on. Call it a political theory of Fomo.

Old attitudes die hard. I am told that Draghi’s ECB successor, Christine Lagarde, tut-tutted at a recent meeting of Ecofin, the EU council of finance ministers: “So are we going to have two Eco- fins now?” There are two answers to such a put-down. Ideally the threat of a “second Ecofin” is enough to forge greater agreement in the full group. But if that remains difficult — progress on capital markets union has been glacial for a decade — then, well, why not a sec- ond Ecofin that moves faster?

Behind the scepticism may be learned helplessness from the era when Franco- German agreement was seen as the motor of European integration, as well as those two countries’ strong sense of entitlement. But today they both strug- gle to agree with themselves, let alone with the other. The outbreak of low- level coalitions of the willing suggests the time is ripe for smaller countries to take their own leaps forward on issues where they see collective solutions.

If they just get on with it, they may discover that unity, like love or sleep, comes when you are focused on other things.