The EU is silently preparing to roll out major new treaty reforms before the end of the decade for the first time since the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, and most Europeans have no idea.
That’s deliberate, of course, since the current proposals—drafted primarily by the hardline eurofederalist Guy Verhofstadt—would give unprecedented control to the EU Commission in nearly all national matters, irreversibly damaging national sovereignty, and therefore, democratic representation, in the process.
Luckily, there is now also an alternative vision, even if it’s a long shot to expect the mainstream EU elites ever to agree with it. EU experts and Patriot MEPs presented a comprehensive reform proposal in the European Parliament on Wednesday, June 11th, with decentralization, sovereignty, and local decision-making at its core, titled “The Great Reset.”
“Yes, we wanted to pay tribute to Mr. Schwab,” joked lead co-author Rodrigo Ballester, the Head of the Center for European Studies at MCC, when someone asked about the familiar title and whether it’s connected to the WEF’s infamous global plan. “No, they have their own ‘Great Reset,’ which the EU is also playing into, and we have our own. Fighting fire with fire.”
The report is not new; it’s been out for months, and already managed to anger a good portion of the left-wing pro-EU elite. However, this is the first time it has been presented where it belongs: the European Parliament, courtesy of Patriots for Europe (PfE) MEPs András László and António Tânger Corrêa, who hosted the important event.
It began with a presentation from the other main author, Jerzy Kwaśniewski from the Polish think tank Ordo Iuris, who explained the ‘diagnosis’ and the two possible paths forward. The main problem with the EU today is its growing democracy deficit, he explained, with EU citizens having little to no say whatsoever on what’s being decided with massive implications on their lives.
Foundational parts of the current EU treaties—such as sovereignty and subsidiarity—are being ignored and violated every day, as the EU Commission takes over member states’ competences, abuses the notion of “EU values,” and blackmails them with infringement procedures to regulate things that it has no rights to whatsoever, such as family policies or education.
The Parliament only worsens the situation, as its members decide the fate of hundreds of millions while being accountable to only a fraction of them. “Without a unified political community, a European demos, there is no accountability and no democracy at all,” Kwaśniewski said.
Therefore, the authors believe there are only two roads ahead, and if the EU elites make the first impossible, the second will become inevitable.
Scenario 1: Back to the Roots
“Scenario 1,” with its 23 concrete reform proposals, is a comprehensive plan to decentralize the EU by putting the Council (of member states) in charge again, while limiting the power of the other institutions. The authors even propose renaming the European Union to “European Community of Nations” (ECN) to reflect a union of sovereign states, as it was originally envisioned, rather than a supranational entity.
Accordingly, the EU Commission would become a ‘General Secretariat’ without its current monopoly on legislative initiatives and infringement charges; the Court of Justice would return to being an arbitration court with no more authority over national judiciaries; and the Parliament would become a ‘Consultative Assembly’ with secondary legislative powers only.
Most importantly, however, member states should always be free to choose their level of participation—which the authors referred to as “absolute flexibility” or a “super à la carte” system—meaning different levels of integration with freely traversable boundaries and easy-to-trigger opt-outs, with the exception of core set of minimum commitments, such as customs union.
Accordingly, the unanimity principle—member states’ ability to veto in the Council, something that the federalist reformers would like to scrap as soon as possible—would be strengthened and protected in all matters of cooperation.
Subsidiarity is the cornerstone of the current EU treaties as well, yet it’s the most ignored aspect of them all, Kwaśniewski explained. So this proposal aims to fix that by making the Council the “supreme EU institution” and giving member states flexible cooperation options within it. That way, no EU body could unilaterally take over member state competences, like we see today, because democratically elected governments always retain the last word.
“This is nothing revolutionary,” Ballester said, noting that before the EU evolved into the “centralized monster” that it is today, “this was what the founding fathers wanted; we just had to put it on paper.”
Scenario 2: A New Beginning
However, if the elites insist on moving further with their centralization agenda—falsely presented as a necessity for enlargement before 2030—the current institutional framework will inevitably collapse under the weight of all the tension between the member states and Brussels, leaving no option but to rebuild from scratch.
Enter “Scenario 2,” a complete institutional overhaul that replaces the current EU framework with an even more flexible, loose intergovernmental structure. This means new treaties, new institutions, and a new common legal order being built from the ground up over a transitional period toward an entirely new EU, during which member states are free to join or leave nearly any and all joint initiatives at any given time.
But while new, permanent structures could then emerge after years of careful experimentation, it would be a chaotic and difficult process, and it’s hard to predict what the end result would look like. It’s ultimately preferable, therefore, to go with the first option: keep the EU and everything in it that’s working, and throw out only what’s not, the authors warned.
“We still like the vehicle, but we’d like to change the pilots,” Ballester explained, adding that we need to “make the member states the landlords of the EU, and not the other way around.”
And to the argument that member states should surrender even more power at the altar of the ‘ever-closer union’ for the EU to be able to stand strong amid the current geopolitical challenges, Ballester simply called it a lie.
“If you want a stronger Europe, then stop trying to decide on everything together,” he said. “The sum of strong national sovereignties makes a much stronger Europe than a top-down imposed ‘European sovereignty’ plagued with resistance and disagreement.”
