Together for Europe: Α call

Dear friends,

We are living in tumultuous times.

And Europe is completely unprepared for them.

The past two decades have seen crisis after crisis sweep the world, destabilizing all that we had considered normal. And Europe through all this at best ploughed barely through, and at worst lost ground and influence.

​Together for Europe is a movement - and a grassroots organization - that emerged in the midst of such a crisis. We were born out of the frustration that a group of interconnected Europeans felt about the – indecisive, inefficient and problematic - way that the European Union faced a global emergency: the Covid19 pandemic. It was the lack of a unified reaction which was the trigger that pushed us to do something concrete, seeing that the retreat to the national brought weakness not strength.

There are major global issues emerging for which there is no simple solution, especially no simple solution that can be effectively handled at a national level, and for which the intergovermentalism that has been the modus operandi of the European Union so far seems to be failing.

In the face of fierce superpower pressures, Europe is on its way be squeezed, shoved into a dependent periphery of world affairs and practically vassalized. The near total surrender of its elites to this fate, is a symptom not mainly of the leadership’s personal failures, but the outcrop of a diffuse malaise that is making Europe less assertive, more phobic and angrier.

We at Together for Europe believe that a federal Europe, a Europe that finds a way to invent and organize around a federalism appropriate for its histories, is the only Europe that can remain a relevant player in world events and assert both its peoples’ interests and its basic principles. We also believe that the vibrant debate and discussion that this process will entail, can jolt the European public, its citizens, its peoples into a politically creative renaissance. We are not talking about EU reform here. We are talking about the creation of a new European Federal state.

We do not imagine that this will be easy, nor do we believe that the core politics of this new federal entity we want to emerge in our continent is something that is given. A constitutional assembly will be needed to produce the legitimation of the new rules. The ensuing debate is bound to produce a synthesis that we cannot foretell. Since federalism is a project that is primarily institutional and constitutional, but open to many forms of politics, we are certain that federalists will be all over the political map after the creation of a federal Europe. What we strive for is the creation of a unified European political space. And we feel that this is no longer merely a vision, a preferred political path, but a necessity if our continent is not to slip into irrelevance.

Let's start from the bottom up

But this is our view. Let's discuss it.

We suggest that we should start multiple conversations on critical issues that have to do with Europe as a whole. Identify the problems. We believe that debating the problems we are facing will confirm that the federalist transformation of Europe is a necessary (though admittedly, probably not sufficient by itself) way for Europe to retain its sovereignty.

We want, then, to talk about many different issues on a different basis. These are the conversations we are calling you to join:

Technological Sovereignty. Europe's dependency on non-European platforms, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and digital standards is a political vulnerability. We believe that a federal Europe would offer the scale and the institutional coherence to build and sustain genuine technological sovereignty: to invest in European champions, to spark startup- and scale-up- entrepreneurship in a number of different tech sectors, to set standards that reflect European values, and to ensure that the digital infrastructure of our societies remains under democratic control. Is there any other way?

European Defense. Sovereignty without the capacity for self-defense is dependence with a polite name. For decades, Europe has outsourced its security to an alliance whose continued commitment can no longer be taken for granted. Events in the US and in Ukraine have made this starkly plain. Europe must develop a genuine common defense capability — not as an act of aggression or militarism, but as the elementary precondition for being able to make free choices in world affairs. And it also can do that without the waste of arming 27 different militaries and mindlessly replicating 27 different infrastructures. Defense issues concern political will and democratic legitimacy – we think that this legitimacy can only effectively conferred through a federal structure.

A European Social Contract. The promise of Europe has always included, however imperfectly, a vision of social solidarity, of societies that do not abandon their most vulnerable members to the blind mechanics of the market. Yet as Europe has expanded and integrated economically, the social dimension has lagged dramatically behind. If Europe must build a common floor of social guarantees, a European welfare framework that gives meaning to the idea that all European citizens share not just a market, but a community of fate, then it seems to us that federalism is the only such principle that this could legitimately be organized. Without social solidarity, the European project will continue to breed the resentments that feed nationalism and disintegration.

Energy Sovereignty and a Common Climate Plan. Europe's exposure to energy blackmail — as brutally demonstrated by its dependency on Russian gas and now American LNG — is inseparable from the broader question of sovereignty. At the same time, the climate emergency is the defining long-term challenge of this century, and it is one that no European nation can meaningfully address alone, in fact it must act as an anchor for global action. Europe, then, needs a unified energy policy. Energy and climate are not separate issues — they are two faces of the same existential challenge. Our view is that it is only through federation that the EU can achieve these goals.

What Does It Mean to Be Sovereign and Democratic Today? Underneath all of the above lies a more fundamental question, philosophical as much as political: what does sovereignty actually mean in the world as it is now? The classical notion of the sovereign nation-state, is being hollowed out by economic globalization, by the platform power of technology giants, by climate change that recognizes no border, by the military reality that small and medium powers cannot project credible deterrence alone. To insist on national sovereignty in this environment is often, paradoxically, to guarantee dependency and irrelevance. We want to have an honest conversation about this — including with those who disagree. What forms of democratic self-governance are actually viable in this geopolitical contingency? What does it mean to be free, collectively, in the world of 2026 and beyond?

These are the conversations we want to start. And we do not want to start them only among those who already agree with us.

We are holding an open online meeting on June 4th, and we want you to be part of it. The purpose of this meeting is not to deliver conclusions from on high, but to collectively set the priorities and define the tasks that our movement should take on.

We want to hear from people across Europe — from different countries, different political traditions, different generations.

If you are a convinced federalist, come and help us build. If you are a Eurosceptic who believes that the problems we have described are real but that a European federation is not the answer, come and tell us why. Bring your counterarguments. Sharpen our thinking. The quality of the debate matters more to us than the comfort of an echo chamber.

Europe's future will not be decided by the indifferent. Join us.

Dimitris Tsingos
Founder

Together for Europe

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