The European Union is contributing to its own “terminal decline” due to naivety and fragmentation, according to Nick Clegg. Failing “a once-in-a-generation reinvention of the EU itself”, the former UK deputy prime minister claimed the union would become as hollowed out and impotent as the United Nations — “lofty bodies with almost no political sovereignty”.

Writing in the Observer today, Clegg argued that a “failure of collective leadership” combined with the threats from “an increasingly predatory constellation of the US, China and Russia” could spell the end of the EU. “The dream of a Europe free, strong and whole,” he wrote, “will have sputtered to an end at the hands of the nationalism, protectionism and big power conflict which it was founded to overcome.”

Clegg’s intervention comes as Donald Trump’s presidency creates fresh challenges for Europe. The continent has struggled to grapple with US-imposed tariffs, while Trump has said that Europe must pay its way on defence, rather than relying on an American security umbrella. In his Observer article, Clegg described these shifts as a “shock — greater geopolitically than 1989 or even 2008”.

The former head of global affairs at Meta also took aim at Brussels’s slow decision-making, internal one-upmanship and lack of innovation. Rather than wasting time on trivial issues and “micromanaging”, he argued, the EU should instead “focus only on the existential priorities: defence, energy, and innovation”.

On tech, Clegg said the EU’s “single digital market still does not exist in practice”, while development “remains balkanised by countless national and regional regulations, and data protection and licensing requirements”. To achieve “the much-needed transition to cleaner energy,” he wrote that Europe should “integrate its own electricity system — including building long-delayed connections between France and Spain and in the North Sea”. Most crucially, regarding defence he claimed: “the EU needs to be rewired to wield hard, not just soft, power.”

Clegg has long been a champion of the EU. He previously worked for the European Commission and was a member of the European Parliament from 1999-2004 in what he described as the “heyday of globalisation and European integration”. The former Liberal Democrats leader was a prominent opponent of Brexit, publishing his book How To Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again) a year after the 2016 vote. In December last year — before he stood down from his role at Meta — he said that the UK must rejoin the EU, arguing that “you can’t defy geography.” In today’s piece, Clegg wrote that “the historical folly of Brexit has now delivered the worst of both worlds to the UK: out of the heart of Europe, while plaintively pleading for special favours in Washington.”

Last summer, he warned that the new European Parliament faced an “existential” moment. That has only been confirmed with the “wholesale redrawing of the shape of the west” since Trump’s election, which Clegg today labelled “as profound a shift as the fall of the USSR”. The EU is “not fit for purpose”, he wrote. “The question now is not whether Europe wants to change. It is whether it will change enough, and fast enough.”

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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