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Oct. 25 · Soft Secession

Would the U.S. Be Better Off as a European Union-Style "Country of Countries"?

Under the EU treaties a member's soldiers and ballots are its own, and Article 50 lets it leave on two years' notice.

By Christopher Armitage ·

Gov. Wes Moore signs bills into law in Annapolis on May 12, 2026. Image from Maryland GovPics, CC BY 4.0.

The European Union will spend €192.8 billion in 2026, 1 percent of the 27 members’ gross national income, and Congress spent $7 trillion in fiscal 2025, 23.3 percent of the United States economy.

A reader asked me whether the United States would be better off as a European-style union of countries, and those two budgets are where I started, because the money is the first thing that changes. A union that spends 1 percent of the economy leaves everything else with its members, and I wanted to know what the blue states would do with the other 22 percent, so I went through the EU treaties and the EU’s record since 2022 one power at a time.

Each EU member commands its own police and soldiers, and the treaties give the union no army and no command over any member’s forces.

On June 7, 2025 the president federalized California’s National Guard over Gov. Gavin Newsom’s objection and sent the Guard into Los Angeles with 700 Marines, the first time in 60 years a president had activated a state’s Guard against its governor. In October 2025 he federalized the Illinois Guard over Gov. JB Pritzker’s objection, and on Dec. 23 the Supreme Court refused to reinstate that deployment while the case continues.

Under the EU treaties neither order could be written, because the only soldiers in Illinois would be Illinois soldiers.

Each member also conducts its own national elections, and the union counts none of the votes.

On March 31, 2026 the president signed Executive Order 14399, which directs federal agencies to build lists of eligible voters for each state and tells the Postal Service to restrict mail ballots to its own list, with prosecution and the loss of federal money threatened against election officials who refuse. A coalition of 23 attorneys general sued within days, Judge Indira Talwani of the federal district court in Massachusetts declared the key sections unconstitutional on June 25, and on Aug. 24 the Supreme Court stayed her ruling 6 to 3 on the ground that the states had sued before suffering a concrete injury.

Under the EU treaties, who votes and how the ballot arrives is each member’s law alone, and no office in Brussels can write a voter list for Vienna.

Each member pays for its own health system, and the EU treaties leave the organization and financing of health care to the members.

Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, legislators in 21 states have filed 66 single-payer bills, by the count of Erin Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey, the health law professors who surveyed every one of them in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and every one of those bills has to be drafted around the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, the federal statute that preempts state regulation of employer health plans and leaves a state a narrow and risky path to the employer spending a single-payer system needs.

Whole Washington, the coalition of health care professionals and volunteers behind the Washington Health Trust, is bringing Senate Bill 5233 and House Bill 1445 back to the Legislature in 2027, and the bill will carry the same ERISA workarounds. In the EU, a Washington State health trust would answer to Olympia alone.

The EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights binds a member only when the member is applying EU law, so a member’s gun law or campaign finance law answers to its own constitutional court and, under a separate treaty, to the European Court of Human Rights. The U.S. Supreme Court applies the Bill of Rights to every state.

In 2022 the Court struck down New York’s concealed-carry licensing law in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, and in 2012 the Court reversed the Montana Supreme Court in American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock and applied Citizens United to the ban on corporate election spending Montana voters passed in 1912. Under the EU model, New York keeps its licensing law and Montana keeps its ban.

Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union lets any member leave for any reason. The member decides under its own constitution and notifies the European Council, and the two sides then have two years to negotiate a withdrawal agreement, which the Council of the EU approves by a strong qualified majority of 72 percent of the remaining members. If no deal is reached, the treaties simply stop applying to that member two years after notice, and the leaving member sits out the Council’s discussions and votes on its own withdrawal. No other member can block the exit itself.

The U.S. Constitution has no exit clause, and in Texas v. White in 1869 Chief Justice Salmon Chase wrote that a state’s place in the Union could be undone only through revolution or through consent of the States.

A member that can leave on two years’ notice can bargain for the terms of staying, and the EU has granted those terms: Denmark kept the krone through a negotiated opt-out from the euro, and the United Kingdom stayed outside the euro and the Schengen passport-free zone for decades before it left. California, New York, Illinois and Washington State could bargain the same way for any union program they rejected, with departure as the fallback.

A union with a 1 percent budget cannot pay for Social Security and Medicare, so each member funds its own retirement and health programs, and that is the part of the deal the blue states already pay for.

Over the five federal fiscal years before 2020, New York’s taxpayers sent $168.2 billion more to the United States government than New York got back in federal spending, the most of any state, by the count of the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the State University of New York’s public policy research arm, which has tracked the balance of payments since 2015. Laura Schultz, the institute’s executive director of research, names New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois as the states that pay more in taxes than they receive in a normal year, with Massachusetts and Connecticut behind them.

In an EU-style union those states keep that money and set their own benefit levels. West Virginia and Mississippi, which receive more federal spending than they pay in, lose the transfers.

Hungary cast 21 of the 48 vetoes EU members have used, because the treaties require unanimity for foreign policy, sanctions, taxation and enlargement while about 80 percent of EU law passes by qualified majority. On Feb. 20, 2026 Hungary’s representative blocked the €90 billion loan to Ukraine, and on Feb. 23 Viktor Orbán’s government blocked the 20th sanctions package against Russia. The union never suspended Hungary’s vote in Orbán’s 16 years in power.

Hungarian voters ended it on April 12, when Péter Magyar’s party won the election, and the next day Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told Euronews that moving to qualified majority voting in foreign policy is an important way to avoid systemic blockages. Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, answered that he would always be very cautious about abolishing unanimity, because the veto has been useful to medium-sized and smaller countries.

Every power a treaty gives California it also gives Texas and Florida, so the design rule for an American version is qualified majority voting for everything, with no unanimity carve-outs.

Twenty-one of the 27 members share the euro, and the euro’s first decade showed the second cost. Greece shared a currency with Germany with no shared budget behind it, so when the bubble burst in 2010, Greece and the other peripheral countries were left with debts they could not pay and no central bank of their own to print the money, as the London School of Economics’ European politics blog laid out in its four lessons from the crisis.

An American version keeps the dollar, so the treaty needs the fiscal backstop the euro lacked in 2010: a union fund that stands behind a member’s debt, or a rule that lets a member borrow against the common currency when its economy fails.

The Brexit figures measure leaving, and only leaving. The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent fiscal forecaster, estimates Brexit will leave British output about 4 percent smaller in the long run than it would have been inside the EU, and a 2025 paper with a senior Bank of England economist among its authors put the loss at 6 percent to 8 percent of GDP per person. A member that stays pays none of that, because the EU keeps a single market and a customs union among the members who stay, and under an American treaty a truck from Seattle would cross into Idaho the way a truck from Lyon crosses into Turin today.

The EU has no army and no nuclear weapons, and the treaties leave defense to the members and to NATO. A treaty of American states has to decide who commands the Navy, the Air Force, the Army and the warheads in the Montana and Wyoming silos, and the EU’s record offers no answer, because no EU member ever had to divide an existing military. The closest precedent is the one the United States already uses for the Guard: a force a state commands until a union authority calls it up under rules the treaty spells out, which is the arrangement the Supreme Court enforced for Illinois in December.

Texas v. White permits dissolution only by revolution or by the consent of the states, and Chase never said what consent requires: an act of Congress, an interstate compact Congress approves, a vote of every state legislature, or a constitutional amendment ratified by 38 state legislatures under Article V all fit his words. The states that lose the transfers hold the votes to withhold that consent, and any 13 states can block an amendment.

The other route, a unilateral exit law and a lawsuit that asks the Court to overrule White the way Dobbs overruled Roe, fails under the Dobbs test itself: the majority asked whether a claimed right is rooted in the Constitution’s text and the nation’s history, and the text has no exit clause while the history includes the Civil War.

What I learned is that the blue states are already building the EU arrangement by statute, without the treaty.

On April 28, 2026 Gov. Wes Moore signed Maryland Chapter 248, the Federal Obligations Enforcement Act, which took effect July 1: when a court has found the United States government out of compliance with a decision upholding congressionally approved spending, Maryland’s Board of Public Works can find the United States government delinquent by majority vote, the state can place liens on federal property in Maryland, and the Comptroller can hold back the state’s payments to the United States government until the money arrives. Twenty-two states, Maryland among them, sued when the Federal Emergency Management Agency canceled the BRIC program in April 2025, won, and sued again when FEMA ignored the order, and Chapter 248 is the law for the next time.

Maryland’s law does it for the money, Whole Washington’s 2027 bill does it for health care, the December ruling for Illinois does it for the Guard, and the Massachusetts ruling did it for elections until the Supreme Court stayed it in August. Those are the four powers the EU treaties give every member, won one statute and one lawsuit at a time, and the arithmetic says the blue states can afford the rest of the deal: New York alone sent $168.2 billion more than it received over five years, and the EU pays for the whole union with 1 percent.

For the states that pay in, the answer to the reader’s question is yes, and the price of waiting for a treaty nobody will ratify is the 18 months of Guard deployments and voter-list orders they just lived through.

Buy the ER some coffee by clicking this sentence.

Call to Action

Each of the four powers above is won in a state capitol, and the first one is already law in Maryland. The people who decide it for you are your state senator and your state representative, who can file the Federal Obligations Enforcement Act in your state’s next session; the ER’s model bill, built from Maryland’s Chapter 248, is a Google Doc you can open by clicking this sentence.

The plain benefit is that when a court rules the United States government is illegally holding your state’s money, your state holds back what it owes until the money arrives, which is how Maryland protects its $80 million in disaster-prevention grants and how your state protects its own. Your legislators are listed by address at Open States by clicking this sentence.

The message is one sentence, that they file the Federal Obligations Enforcement Act and tell you when, followed by who you are, what you do and why you care, in your own words, because a legislative office reads a hundred identical messages as one message and a letter that sounds like a constituent as a hundred. This article is free to forward to anyone who wants to know why their state should have the same powers as Denmark.

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