On 2 April 1831, from the French port of Le Havre, aboard the sailing ship Le Havre, two French nobles, aged 26 and 28, departed on an official mission to the United States. After a 38-day crossing, they arrived at their destination and spent nine months exploring the New World. At that time, America was barely 30 years old (France was 800) and had a population of 15 million (France had twice as many).
The younger of the two, a relative of Chateaubriand, published, four years later, a book entitled La démocratie en Amérique, which achieved immediate and remarkable success not only in France: it was translated in the same year into English, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Greek, and Danish, and was read in Italy by Cavour, Gioberti, and Massari. To this day, it is regarded as the foundational text of modern democracy. Since the publication of that work, for two centuries Europe has compared itself to America, taking it as a model to emulate (or to criticise) in its attempts at unification, not only in relation to democracy.
I propose to continue this comparative exercise, but through a different method, drawing on a technique coined in literary studies by Franco Moretti, known as 'distant reading,' which adopts a longue durée perspective and combines historical, comparative, and quantitative approaches, in order to avoid viewing Europe through American eyes or America through European ones.
The United States constitutes a geographical division of the world, occupying a large portion of a continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The idea of uniting the British colonies of North America emerged around 1760; the Union itself took shape roughly two decades later (between 1766 and 1787). However, it was only two centuries later, in 1959, that the Union of 50 states, as we know it today, was completed with the admission of Alaska and Hawaii (after approximately thirty other states had joined between 1812 and 1896).
Europe, by contrast, is not a natural geographical division with clear boundaries: there is no Europe 'by nature.' It became a historical unity through the major currents that traversed it—from Christianity to Gothic art, from the Republic of Letters to the Enlightenment—following the collapse of the Roman Empire (as argued by the eminent French historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre). Unlike the United States, Europe developed very slowly over 1,500 years toward a still incomplete political unity.
At the time of political unification, the American territory comprised 13 British colonies, none older than a century and a half; Europe, by contrast, consisted of several dozen state formations with histories spanning three to five centuries, in addition to the 'newcomers,' Italy and Germany.
The United States reached 39 states after one century and took approximately 170 years to assemble its current 50 states. The European Union, which began with six member states, has, over just more than seventy years and through seven successive enlargements, grown to include 27 countries.
The European Union has a population of approximately 450 million, compared to 347 million in the United States; however, the EU covers around 4 million square kilometres, whereas the United States extends over more than twice that area. The United States is characterised by vast territory, whereas the European Union is densely populated by peoples with diverse histories. At the time of American unification, the population was around 5 million; by 1835 (the time of Tocqueville’s journey) it had reached 15 million, and today it stands at 347 million. Europe, by contrast, had approximately 180 million inhabitants initially and now has 450 million.
The United States began with political unification, grounded in a common Constitution. The European Union, on the other hand, initiated its process of institutional unification through economic integration and markets, only gradually and still incompletely moving toward political integration.
After roughly seventy years, the United States was divided by an internal conflict—the Civil War of 1861–1865—in which approximately 2 per cent of the population perished (and only after 1865 did the singular expression “the United States” become prevalent). The European Union, by contrast, emerged as a response to devastating prior wars and experienced, after about half a century, the secession of the United Kingdom.
The death penalty remains legally provided for in 27 U.S. states, as well as in the federal and military systems, although its actual application is limited to a smaller number of states. By contrast, it no longer exists in the 27 Member States of the European Union, where the Charter of Fundamental Rights provides that “no one shall be condemned to the death penalty or executed.” A state that retained capital punishment could therefore not be part of the Union, which is, in this respect, more unified than the United States in recognizing the fundamental value of life.
The United States has developed numerous student exchange programmes among its approximately 3,000 universities, involving around 300,000 students annually, predominantly for study abroad. Europe, for its part, has, for fifty years, hosted the European University Institute, which has fostered a community of approximately 8,000 scholars and practitioners, representing a powerful integrative force within the Union. In addition, for about forty years it has operated a centralized programme, Erasmus, involving roughly half a million participants annually across an area comprising 27 countries and 24 languages, and totalling around 15 million participants since its inception in 1987.
The United States maintains approximately 750 military bases in 80 countries, and its military expenditure accounts for 38 per cent of global spending—more than the next nine countries combined, including China and Russia, as recently observed by Alexander Stubb. The Member States of the European Union spend between 250 and 300 billion euros annually on defence, roughly one third of U.S. expenditure, with spending fragmented across the 27 states.
The United States has a federal budget approximately 35 times larger than that of the European Union, which is therefore, by comparison, a financial dwarf, even though it is a regulatory giant of comparable scale, to the extent that it is feared by American Big Tech companies. In terms of gross domestic product (purchasing power parity), the European Union reaches approximately 28 trillion dollars (32 trillion including the United Kingdom), while the United States stands at around 29 trillion dollars. Moreover, the European Union is the world’s largest exporter and importer of goods and services.
Thus, the United States and Europe, continuously compared over the past two centuries, differ in at least twelve respects: geographical and cultural unity, weight of the past, speed of aggregation, population relative to territory, population growth, starting points of unification, degree of internal cohesion, shared fundamental values, cultural exchanges, military strength, financial and regulatory power, and economic output. These indicators do not always favour the country that unified first—the United States.
Viewed from this comparative and historical perspective, and at a certain analytical distance, can it still be argued that the European Union lags significantly behind the American federation? And can it still be maintained that the sum of differences among European countries outweighs their similarities?
As early as 7 September 1949, the Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset, speaking to students at the Freie Universität Berlin, observed that Europe embodied both homogeneity and diversity, and that “European peoples have long been a society.” He argued that “the European individual has always lived simultaneously in two historical spaces, in two societies: one less dense but broader—Europe; the other denser but territorially more limited—the nation.” He concluded by referring to a “unified duality of Europe and nation.”
More recently, Loïc Azoulay and Armin von Bogdandy have noted that “European society as a whole is shaped by complex networks of interdependence, but is also marked by divisions, tensions, and inequalities that test its cohesion.”
Today, the European Union displays many features of statehood: a territory and borders, European citizenship, and a public authority endowed with the three classical branches—legislative, executive, and judicial.
In conclusion, a comparison between the European Union and the United States that considers all dimensions of public power—from past to present, from geography to history, from speed of integration to shared values—reveals the remarkable strength of the European Union’s integrative capacity.
I began these reflections by referring to the journey undertaken two centuries ago by Alexis de Tocqueville in the United States. I would like to conclude by recalling another journey, this time an intellectual one, undertaken forty years ago, starting precisely from Florence—from Fiesole, from the European University Institute—by a group of scholars who retraced Tocqueville’s path. I refer to the 'Florence Integration Project' and the multi-volume work Integration through Law: Europe and the American Federal Experience, promoted and directed by Mauro Cappelletti, Monica Seccombe, and Joseph Weiler. One of the leading American international lawyers described this work as monumental and cosmopolitan. It examined the forces and potential for a European identity—an identity created through law—adopting a comparative and transatlantic approach and analysing various federal experiences from multiple perspectives. This constitutes yet another of the great achievements of the institution whose first half-century we celebrate today.