The European Union is a costly illusion that must be destroyed.
⇒ Warning. Any strategy does not guarantee profit on every trade. Strategy is an algorithm of actions. Any algorithm is a systematic work. Success in trading is to adhere to systematic work.
Introduction: The Myth of Unity
The European Union was conceived as an answer to the horrors of the Second World War. The idea was noble: never again. Economic integration as an antidote to nationalism, a common market as the foundation of peace, a shared currency as the symbol of a new European humanity.
Seventy years have passed. And what do we have?
A bureaucratic construction with an annual budget of €189 billion that cannot protect its own external borders, is incapable of forming a unified position on any serious crisis, produces regulations faster than its economy generates growth, and in the process consistently loses the trust of its own citizens. According to the latest Eurobarometer data, inflation, the economic situation, and migration are the three problems that Europeans identify as critical. All three are a direct consequence of EU policy.
The question that needs to be asked plainly: is the EU itself the source of the problems it claims to solve?
Problem One: An Economy Without Growth
The EU likes to speak of the “economic miracle” and the “world’s largest single market.” The numbers tell a different story.
The IMF forecasts eurozone growth of 0.8% in 2025 and 1.2% in 2026. For comparison: the United States is growing at 1.8% despite all the turbulence of the Trump era. China at 4%. India above 6%. Europe is trailing at the back — and this is not a cyclical weakness. It is structural degradation.
Manufacturing across the eurozone is contracting. Germany’s industry — the engine of the entire bloc — recorded yet another decline in output in February 2026. Energy-intensive industries are fleeing Europe for the United States and Asia, where electricity and gas cost three to four times less. Competitiveness is falling not because “the external environment is difficult” — but because the EU created that environment itself: through the Green Deal, through regulatory pressure, through a principled refusal of affordable energy in pursuit of climate goals that the rest of the world does not share.
The productivity gap between the EU and the United States has grown steadily since the early 2000s. The Draghi Report — commissioned by the European Commission from the former ECB chief — concluded in 2024 that Europe is losing its technological leadership, its innovative capacity, and its ability to compete. The price tag: €800 billion in additional investment per year just to avoid falling further behind. No one was able to name a source for that money.
Instead of acknowledging the failure of the model, Brussels offers more of the same: more regulations, more reporting requirements, more bureaucratic mechanisms. In 2025 alone, the European Commission was forced to launch a “simplification programme” — admitting that the regulatory burden on business had become so suffocating that it was cancelling out any advantage the single market could offer.
Problem Two: Migration Chaos as Deliberate Policy
The migration question in the EU is not a failure of governance. It is a deliberate policy whose consequences proved catastrophic — and which nobody wants to acknowledge as a mistake.
Since 2015, the EU has absorbed several million migrants. The official rhetoric spoke of “enrichment,” “demographic necessity,” and “European values.” Reality proved more complicated. Integration has failed in most major countries. Parallel communities with their own norms and hierarchies have grown up in Germany, France, Belgium, and Sweden. Crime rates in certain groups have risen in statistically significant ways — and this is not xenophobia, it is data from national police forces that politicians prefer not to quote in public.
According to the latest figures, the EU now hosts approximately 7.7 million recognised refugees, including 4.4 million displaced from Ukraine. In 2024 alone, more than 913,000 first-time asylum applications were filed — and these are official figures that do not account for illegal border crossings.
The political response? Nine states — Italy, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland — jointly demanded in 2025 that the EU make it easier to deport foreign criminals. In other words, half of the bloc officially declared that the existing system does not work. Instead of reform, what followed was a new “Pact on Migration and Asylum” — another document thousands of pages long, entering into force in 2026, generating new procedures in places where political will was needed.
Most telling of all: the surge in support for right-wing and far-right parties across Europe is not the “awakening of fascism,” as Brussels prefers to frame it. It is direct feedback from citizens about policies they never chose, were never consulted on, and never consented to. When far-right parties gained significant representation in the European Parliament in 2024, it was not a warning signal — it was a verdict. The Eurocracy did not hear it.
Problem Three: 27 Different Countries With 27 Different Interests
The EU rests on a fundamental lie: that 27 states with different histories, different economies, different cultures, and different geopolitical positions can share a unified foreign policy, a unified defence doctrine, and a unified economic strategy.
Look at the facts. Poland is building up its military and demanding firmness toward Russia. Hungary is blocking sanctions and maintaining ties with Moscow. Germany spent decades building Nord Stream — funding the very threat its neighbours were asking for protection against. France pursues an independent Africa policy. Greece has been mired in a debt crisis since 2010, not resolved but merely frozen through successive new loans. Italy effectively lives in a state of permanent political crisis. Hungary under Orbán has systematically dismantled the independence of its judiciary — and receives fines from the EU in response, but does not lose its membership.
This is not a union. It is a compulsory communal arrangement in which the strong pay for the weak, the weak resent the terms, and the middle cannot figure out why they are there at all.
Internal divergences are widening. Italy’s debt burden exceeds 140% of GDP. Greece’s stands at around 160%. Germany and the Netherlands have for years subsidised the southern periphery through ECB mechanisms and common funds — receiving in return political instability and growing populism in those very same countries. A single monetary policy applied to asynchronous economies cannot, by definition, be optimal for anyone.
Problem Four: The Brussels Bureaucracy as an Independent Political Actor
The European Commission is a body that no one elected in any direct sense. Twenty-seven commissioners are appointed by national governments and confirmed by the European Parliament — but not chosen by citizens in a direct vote. Yet it is precisely the Commission that initiates the majority of legislation, shapes the political agenda, and de facto governs the course of the entire bloc.
This is not democracy. It is technocracy with a democratic facade.
The consequences speak for themselves. The Green Deal — a sweeping decarbonisation programme — was designed and launched without any meaningful public debate about its consequences for industry, employment, and energy security. When those consequences materialised — rising energy prices, deindustrialisation, cost-push inflation — the Commission did not admit a mistake. It began rebranding the programme as the “Clean Industrial Deal,” preserving its substance while changing the label.
By 2025, the EU’s regulatory expansion had reached a scale where the Commission itself was forced to acknowledge that the volume of reporting obligations was “overwhelming,” and that the overlap between national government requirements and Brussels’ demands had created regulatory chaos that neither businesses nor the regulators themselves could navigate.
Yet any attempt by individual states to deviate from Brussels’ directives immediately triggers infringement procedures, financial penalties, and political pressure. The EU presents itself as a “union of sovereign states” — but sovereignty turns out to be permitted only for as long as it does not contradict Brussels. This is not a union. It is a hierarchy with a soft enforcement arm.
Problem Five: The Enemy as an Instrument of Internal Cohesion
When a political project has nothing to show for itself at home, it searches for threats abroad. The EU has become a virtuoso of this technique.
Russia is Enemy Number One. China is the systemic rival. Trump is a destabilising actor. Hungary and Orbán are the internal enemy. Right-wing parties are a threat to democracy. The list is always long, and it always serves one function: to redirect attention from the question “why is the EU failing?” toward the question “how do we confront our enemies?”
This is a politically convenient mechanism. But it is destructive to any honest diagnosis of real problems. When the primary explanation for European weakness becomes “Putin’s aggression” or “Trump’s tariffs,” the structural deficits built into the EU’s own architecture are left untouched. High energy prices existed before Ukraine. Deindustrialisation began before Trump. The migration crisis started in 2015. The demographic problem — thirty years ago.
External threats are real. But they neither explain nor excuse the failures that were embedded in the EU’s architecture from the beginning.
Problem Six: A Demographic Catastrophe Masked by Migration
According to Eurostat projections, by 2100 the EU’s population — absent migration — would fall by roughly a third, from 449 million to approximately 295 million. Birth rates across most of Europe remain consistently below replacement level. Latvia and Lithuania, on current trends, will lose 38% of their populations by the end of the century.
The EU’s official response to demographic collapse is to import people from outside. This is not demographic policy. It is a demographic workaround — one that treats the symptom without addressing the disease.
The real question is this: why do Europeans not want to have children? The answer is uncomfortable. Because a housing crisis has made family life an unaffordable luxury. Because economic uncertainty has stripped young people of any planning horizon. Because social systems are designed to reward individual mobility, not family formation. According to the 2025 Eurobarometer, only 32% of EU citizens are satisfied with access to affordable housing in their country. Housing ranks as the fourth most pressing problem in the bloc.
For decades, the EU built an economic model optimised for the mobility of capital and labour — but not for the reproduction of its population. Now it is reaping what it sowed. And it is solving that problem with the same instrument that created the others: top-down, through directives, while ignoring the cultural and social consequences.
What Actually Keeps the EU Together
The EU persists not because it works. It persists because its collapse frightens the elites more than its dysfunction does.
For politicians of smaller states, the EU means access to a platform, to funds, to political weight they would not possess independently. For business, it means a single market that genuinely generates economies of scale. For the bureaucracy, it means jobs, stability, and power. For the defence sector, it means a new source of financing. Every interest group extracts something from the existence of the construction — and none of them gain from its dissolution.
But these are arguments for the EU being useful to particular groups. They are not arguments for it working for citizens.
The Alternative: What Instead?
Criticising the EU without proposing an alternative is intellectual dishonesty. So let us be direct.
European states are capable of existing independently. Norway, Switzerland, and Iceland are not EU members — and they rank among the most successful and high-quality societies in the world. The United Kingdom left the EU. The apocalypse predicted by the Eurocracy did not materialise — though difficulties exist.
A sensible model for Europe is not a supranational leviathan with a single monetary policy for 27 economies, but a flexible network of bilateral and multilateral agreements: on trade, defence, and technology. Without the transfer of sovereignty. Without a compulsory monetary union. Without the forced redistribution of migrants. With respect for national differences rather than an attempt to erase them.
This is not called “the end of Europe.” It is called “a return to reality.”
Conclusion
The EU began as a peace project. Today it has become a bureaucratic project with a built-in intolerance for dissent, a systemic incapacity for reform, and a widening gap between what it promises and what it delivers.
It will not destroy the world by continuing to exist. But it continues to erode statehood, economic competitiveness, and democratic accountability within itself — slowly, systematically, with good intentions that save no one from bad outcomes.
The main argument in favour of the EU is always the same: without it, things will be worse. But that is an argument from fear, not from dignity. Great political projects are built not on fear of the alternative, but on the strength of their own idea.
The idea of the EU was powerful in 1957. In 2026, it is sustained by inertia, fear, and a budget. That is not enough.
