Mario Draghi’s speech in Rimini offered a pretext to revive the old “United States of Europe” recipe : more integration, less sovereignty, more Brussels. A vision that, behind the veil of efficiency, would mean definitively handing over the political, economic and social life of the continent to unelected technocrats.
When Mario Draghi speaks, there are those in the buildings of Brussels who take notes. Not so much the citizens, who have been looking at the Union with growing skepticism for years, but the gray architects of technocracy, the bureaucrats and think tanks working in the shadows. All it took was one sentence from his speech at the Rimini Meeting to trigger almost unanimous applause from the Eurofederalist front: newspapers, commentators and politicians ready to turn his words into a new mantra.
An entire establishment dreaming of a United States of Europe, masking under Draghi’s praise yet another cession of national sovereignty.
We believe the path is the opposite: not a centralized super-state, but aconfederal Europe that restores decision-making power to the people and their governments, leaving only the big issues-foreign policy, common defense, energy security-to cooperation.
From More Europe in Italy to Macron and large sectors of the Commission to the most radical pro-European parliamentary groups, the proposal is always the same: take away the voice of the states and impose the principle of “qualified majority voting” even on foreign policy and defense.
It is the ideological legacy of the Ventotene Manifesto, which called for the abolition of sovereign nations. But after years of centralization, the results are clear: democratic deficits, loss of competitiveness, enlargement of bureaucracy.
According to the study The Great Reset (MCC and Ordo Iuris, 2025), the EU has transformed itself into a quasi-state entity, capable of imposing financial sanctions on member states, extending the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice without limits, and imposing ideologies through regulations and non-negotiated “European values.”
The result is a Union that stifles economies with excessive regulations, undermines national identities, and proves incapable of responding to migratory or geopolitical crises.
A new Europe of nations
The conservatives’ proposal is clear:
- National sovereignty over European primacy
- National constitutions over court jurisdictionalism
- European Council at the center of decision-making, not the Commission
- Flexible cooperation: an “à la carte” model that allows states to join only those projects useful to their interests
- Common defense and shared foreign policy, but under intergovernmental leadership, not the bureaucracy.
This is the alternative to centralism: a Europe that cooperates where it is needed, without undoing peoples and identities.
Those who today call for more Europe in a federalist sense-from Magi to Brussels circles-are actually proposing the ultimate surrender to technocracy. We respond with another vision: a confederal Union, rooted in the sovereignty of states, capable of defending Europeans without replacing them.
Not “United States of Europe,” but Community of Free Nations: this is the true conservative answer to the continent’s crisis.
