There's plenty of chatter these days that Europe needs to be more independent from other powers, needs to be more competitive and so on.

What's not clear is if Europeans are actually willing to federalize/centralize power enough to make that happen. E.g. in foreign policy, a Europe with twenty different strategies and twenty different militaries will never be able to swing its weight around the same as the US*, even if the collective level of power is the same on paper. But Europeans are still focused so much on "my country wants to do X" that it seems like they'd rather be separate than strong.

* A strong military is almost always an important component of foreign policy, even when it's not actually used to do anything...because of the implication.

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