For decades the European Union has stood as the West’s most ambitious experiment in supranational governance — an unprecedented union of sovereign states seeking peace and prosperity through shared institutions.
Yet in 2025 the EU finds itself at a crossroads. The world beyond Brussels has shifted dramatically, and without bold reform the Union risks fading into irrelevance.
That is the stark warning from a host of voices now converging on a single conclusion: that the EU must evolve or face strategic obsolescence. In the view of EU Today editor Gary Cartwright, the most fundamental of all reforms — the disestablishment of the European Commission — is not merely desirable but urgent. Without it, he argues, deeper structural change will remain out of reach.
Cartwright’s argument is rooted in a blunt acknowledgment of reality: the EU today is not the flexible, democratic enterprise its founders envisaged, but a sprawling bureaucratic monolith that too often acts as a brake on Europe’s capacity to respond to crises.
These criticisms are echoed in a the broader warning sounded this week by a major new report led by former British prime minister Tony Blair and JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, which cautions that the European Union must reinvent itself amid intensifying US-China rivalry or risk slipping into strategic irrelevance.
The Blair-Dimon report, distilled from conversations with political leaders, business figures and civil society representatives, paints a world littered with geopolitical and economic fault lines. Europe, it suggests, must deepen integration — particularly in defence and economic strategy — to withstand pressure from both Russia and global competitors like the United States and China.
Yet Cartwright contends that embracing deeper integration under the current constitutional architecture merely perpetuates the Union’s central weakness: the European Commission has become a behemoth whose unelected bureaucracy lacks accountability and whose arcane processes shield it from meaningful scrutiny.
For all its ambitions, the Commission embodies the EU’s democratic deficit — a persistent source of disaffection from Warsaw to Lisbon and a focal point for critics who argue Brussels is out of touch with the voters it claims to serve.
In Cartwright’s estimation, simply tinkering with the Commission’s powers or trimming its remit would be insufficient. “The Commission,” he insists, has ossified into “an institution that defends itself first and Europe second.” To restore credibility and dynamism to European governance, he argues that the Commission must be disestablished — not to hollow out the EU, but to rebuild it on a more democratic, leaner and strategic basis.
Critics might dismiss such a call as radical, but Cartwright, a former adviser to British MEPS in Brussels and Strasbourg, points to sustained public scepticism towards EU institutions as hard evidence that the status quo is unsustainable. Across the Union, confidence in Brussels has waxed and waned — and while recent polling suggests broad popular support for EU membership, there is also a persistent undercurrent of frustration that Brussels wields too much power with too little accountability.
Disestablishing the Commission, Cartwright argues, would force member states to reclaim responsibility for core functions that genuinely matter to citizens — defence, trade policy and economic competitiveness — while breaking the chokehold of technocratic inertia. This would not mean the end of cooperation; rather, it would transform the EU into a truly intergovernmental body where decisions are made by accountable representatives of sovereign states, not by a distant apparatus of officials insulated from electoral pressure.
Supporters of the current system counter that the Commission plays a vital role in ensuring conformity across member states, safeguarding the single market and acting as the Union’s executive arm. They point to the Commission’s efforts to navigate complex issues, from Ukraine funding negotiations to broader economic reforms, as evidence of its continued relevance.
But for Cartwright, such defence is precisely the problem: the Commission’s “one-size-fits-all” approach inevitably finds itself at odds with the diverse interests and priorities of 27 distinct nations. At a time when Europe must be agile — responding rapidly to a rapidly evolving security environment, to technology disruption and to pressures on economic growth — the cumbersome machinery of the Commission represents a strategic mismatch.
The Blair-Dimon report underscores the broader context of this debate. It warns that without serious reform, Europe will become less able to manage systemic competition with the United States or China — and that standing on its own against Russia will be even more challenging. These external pressures add urgency to the need for an EU that is not merely bureaucratically coherent but strategically purposeful.
Cartwright’s proposal would see powers reallocated back to member states or to a reimagined institutional framework in which a reconstituted Council of Ministers — fully accountable to national parliaments — would take the lead on key policies. The aim would be to create a Europe that is federative in spirit yet respectful of national sovereignty, capable of rapid, democratic decision-making without the litany of approvals and directives that now characterise EU governance.
Detractors will inevitably cry “disintegration” at the very mention of dismantling a long-established EU body. But Cartwright emphasises that his vision is not about dismantling European cooperation; it is about refounding it on principles better suited to the 21st-century geopolitical landscape. By removing the unelected European Commission’s overarching bureaucracy, he argues, the EU can eliminate the very source of much of the frustration that has fed both Euroscepticism and political disengagement.
In a world where European strategic autonomy needs to be no longer a rhetorical slogan but a hard necessity, Europe cannot afford institutions that slow it down or distance it from those it serves.
Whether one agrees with Cartwright’s prescription or not, his call for radical reform opens an essential conversation about the future of the European project. The Union must adapt quickly or risk fading into irrelevance just as the world’s geopolitical stakes rise higher than they have in a generation.
Image: Photographer: Aurore BELOT Copyright: © European Union 2016 – Source : EP
