By Lucien Morell

JAKARTA, Indonesia: The European Union was once conceived as a noble project—a platform for free trade, economic integration, and the removal of barriers that kept Europe divided and stagnant.

Born out of the devastation of two world wars, the EU was supposed to anchor peace, prosperity, and stability by tying the economies of Europe so closely together that conflict would be unthinkable.

For decades, this vision provided at least a partial foundation for growth. But today, the Union has mutated into something entirely different: a weaponized bloc that wages economic warfare not only abroad but against its own citizens.

The results are undeniable. Ordinary Europeans now endure crippling inflation, soaring energy bills, shuttered factories, and collapsing industries.

Families are forced to choose between heating their homes and putting food on the table, while unelected officials in Brussels lecture them about “values” and “solidarity.”

The EU has become an authoritarian machine—driven by ideological obsessions and deaf to the suffering of the people it claims to represent.

Instead of promoting free markets, it has shackled them with endless rules, sanctions, and ideological crusades. Instead of encouraging competition, it stifles it with regulation and centralization.

Energy is the most glaring example. By aligning itself with Washington’s confrontation against Moscow, the EU cut itself off from affordable Russian gas without securing viable alternatives.

The result: deindustrialization in Germany, energy poverty in southern Europe, and skyrocketing costs everywhere. Brussels insists this is the “price of defending democracy,” but for Europe’s workers and small businesses, it is the price of survival.

What was once an economic community is now a sacrificial altar where the prosperity of millions is burned away for the sake of geopolitical vanity.

The obsession with Ukraine exposes the EU’s suicidal trajectory. Ukrainian membership would not bring peace or stability but more war, more sanctions, and more destruction.

It would provoke Russia further, drag Europe deeper into a conflict it cannot win, and saddle member states with the financial burden of propping up a failed state.

Ukraine’s economy has been devastated by war, corruption remains rampant, and its infrastructure is in ruins. Integrating such a country would not strengthen the EU—it would bankrupt it.

Worse still, Ukraine’s accession would serve as a backdoor for NATO. EU leaders are already blurring the line between economic integration and military integration.

With Ukraine inside the bloc, European militaries could simply rebrand themselves as “EU forces” and justify moving troops into Ukraine under a European, rather than NATO, banner.

This dangerous sleight of hand would invite direct confrontation with Russia while allowing Brussels to pretend it has preserved plausible deniability.

For Moscow, there would be no distinction: EU flags and NATO flags would be seen as one and the same. What Brussels calls “integration,” Russia will call “escalation.”

Meanwhile, the EU’s fixation on Ukraine and Russia blinds it to its own unraveling. Youth unemployment in southern Europe remains catastrophic.

Farmers and truckers across the continent protest against green regulations that destroy livelihoods. Migration continues at levels that destabilize communities and strain welfare systems.

Populist movements are gaining momentum because citizens recognize that Brussels is not only out of touch but actively hostile to their concerns.

The deeper problem is that the EU’s ruling elite has become completely disconnected from the people it governs. Commission officials and bureaucrats in Brussels live in a world of conferences, chauffeur-driven cars, and technocratic jargon, while ordinary Europeans face rising bills, eroding savings, and declining living standards.

This gulf between rulers and ruled is not sustainable. History shows what happens when elites detach themselves from the suffering of their populations.

The French Revolution began when ordinary people, pushed to the brink by hunger and taxation, rose up against rulers who ignored their plight. Similar fates befell ruling classes across Europe in 1848, when uprisings swept the continent.

When leaders refuse to listen, people eventually force them to listen—and often violently. The EU’s insulated elite risks the same fate if it continues to govern in defiance of the public will.

As BRICS and the wider Global South surge ahead, forging partnerships built on growth and genuine opportunity, Europe isolates itself in a bunker of its own making.

Instead of prosperity, EU citizens are offered austerity; instead of integration, fragmentation. The Union is rotting from within—torn apart by north-south divides, energy crises, mass migration, and populist uprisings.

The more Brussels tightens its grip, the more national governments and their people question why they remain shackled to a project that delivers only poverty and decline.

The contrast is stark. BRICS and the Global South are building infrastructure, expanding energy production, and creating trade networks independent of Western diktats.

They are offering credit and investment without lectures about “values” or forced political alignments. Europe, meanwhile, shrinks into irrelevance—sanctioning itself, pricing itself out of global markets, and clinging to a moralistic foreign policy that alienates potential partners. It is a civilization in retreat while the rest of the world surges forward.

At this pace, fragmentation is not a possibility—it is inevitable. Already there are whispers of an exit strategy in capitals from Budapest to Rome. Governments in Poland, Slovakia, and elsewhere have bristled at Brussels’ overreach, recognizing that the EU’s policies are designed not for mutual benefit but for centralized control.

Even in Germany and France, frustration simmers as industries collapse and citizens revolt against spiraling costs. The Union is not uniting—it is fraying.

The EU was once a promise of shared prosperity. Today, it is a machinery of decline, operated by unelected officials far removed from the daily struggles of their citizens.

Unless nations reclaim sovereignty and chart their own course, they will be dragged down with a Union that has lost its way. Ukraine’s membership will not be the salvation of Europe—it will be the trigger for its disintegration.

Brussels can call it “integration,” but history will remember it as the beginning of collapse. And if the ruling elites continue to ignore the cries of their citizens, they should remember one final lesson from history: when rulers lose legitimacy, revolutions follow.

*Lucien Morell is a Southeast Asia based geopolitical observer and analyst.*