Cohesion and territory in Europe’s present crisis

March 2025

Currently the world order is changing rapidly. The US is power gaming on several fronts domestically and around the world to ”make America great again”. This is all very visible and dominates the media.

For Europe, the long-term, close democratic alliance with the US seems to have taken a heavy, even maybe a knock-out blow, and Europe is now facing a new geopolitical reality for its security, economy and democracy. New autocratic alliances and constellations are undermining the most powerful democracy from within and the US sees Europe more as a competitor than a friend.

Europe is not only faced militarily with an aggressive imperialist autocrat at its Eastern doorstep, but now economically and politically with an increasingly autocratic US President obsessed with strengthening his country’s leadership in the world, wanting to take over markets and even new territories, including Gaza, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and to abandon existing young democratic territorial integrities, in particular Ukraine.

The EU and other European countries are challenged with this triple threat, which highlights that unity and intense collaboration with clear, fully supported common goals, are now at the very heart of Europe’s survival. When we talk of “unity”, “intense collaboration” and “fully supported common goals”, we have a well-known word for this: cohesion!

Although the fledgling democracies such as Ukraine and Moldavia are in the front line, ‘cohesion’ in fully-established democratic Europe has never been more important, and that includes the non-EU countries such as Norway, Switzerland and the prodigal son, the UK. But the disadvantages of a lack of cohesion our own Member-State-driven EU have never been clearer. Up until now, the EU has accepted the limitations of a more political cohesion, where common European interests prevail over national interests, as a ‘fait accompli’, and has allowed a new sense of national identity and power to become stronger, leaving the EU fractured and weakened in the face of the current autocratic wave.

A much broader perception of ‘cohesion’ is needed in EU cohesion policy, than promoting a levelling up between those regions and cities with development potential and those lagging behind with structural disadvantages. Cohesion of a more fundamental nature with a greater degree of political unity, pursuing common political goals – facing up to the double and interlinked threat of Russian aggression and American rivalry – demands a collaboration more intensive than ever before.

In other words, under these circumstances, Europe needs to take ‘cohesion’ out of its present box and place it in a central position. Cohesion in Europe has never been more important than it is now. It needs to be re-established and redefined as a core concept of EU policy on which the EU, together with its non-EU neighbours, can build. It should be the platform, the starting point for facing the above geopolitical, military and economic challenges, but also the continuing major social (increasing inequality, migration, cultural integration) and environmental challenges (climate change).

Lately the Commission President has proposed spending Cohesion Policy Funds in rearming the EU. Broadening and deepening the concept of cohesion, however, does not mean reducing or abandoning the original policy goals. It is not ‘either/or’ but ‘and/and’, expanding the concept of cohesion, not reducing the importance of the original policy goals. However, if the Cohesion Policy Funds are used to increase military manufacturing potential and other investments directed towards European security, then sufficient attention should be paid to their territorial impact ensuring investments in less developed regions, of course with the exception of Hungary.

And is there not one major common element in these five mega-challenges: territory? Russian imperialist military aggression is purely territorial; Trump’s geopolitical ambitions are explicitly territorial; blocking trade and trying to transfer economic production from Europe to the US has major territorial implications, depending on the resilience of nations, regions and places; increasing inequality, migration and poor socio-cultural integration have major territorial dimensions at all levels; the environment knows no political or administrative borders. 

Redefining and re-establishing cohesion as a fundamentally important central concept in facing Europe’s current major challenges, have as well to revive and give political priority to territorial cohesion. In so doing, Europe, and specifically the EU, needs to consider its territory far more as one continuum and use the territory, it’s diversity of places, as the basis for a more long-term vision of how we want to develop further as a cohesive, democratic continent.

by the Territorial Thinkers
Derek Martin, Peter Mehlbye, Peter Schön & Kai Böhme