Could artificial intelligence help overcome some of the barriers preventing closer European integration? Arvind Ashta argues AI should be viewed as both the means and the motivation to pursue European federalism.
The European Union faces a paradox. While it aspires to federal integration, member states increasingly calculate benefits in zero-sum terms (“what’s in it for my country?”) rather than embracing solidarity and shared prosperity. Simultaneously, Europe is losing the global AI race to the United States and China, hampered by fragmented markets, divergent regulations and insufficient investment scale.
I have previously argued that global crises, from pandemics to climate change, demand federal solutions, as states alone cannot solve challenges that transcend borders. More recently, in discussing Trump’s tariff threats and Europe’s strategic autonomy, I proposed that Europe’s ability to preserve its social model and assert its interests depends fundamentally on greater integration.
This argument can be extended to the AI race. Artificial intelligence not only offers technical solutions to federalism’s coordination challenges but could also create a feedback loop where AI would facilitate deeper European integration. Only a truly federal Europe can mobilise the resources necessary for competitive AI development. The result could be a virtuous cycle transforming both European governance and technological sovereignty.
How AI can make federalism work
The practical obstacles to European federalism are formidable: 27 legal systems, 24 official languages, disparate administrative traditions and complex regulatory interfaces. AI can reduce these transaction costs dramatically.
Regulatory harmonisation becomes tractable when AI systems can identify contradictions across member state implementations of EU directives, map regulatory differences to facilitate mutual recognition and reduce “gold-plating” where national rules exceed requirements.
Subsidiarity monitoring, determining which governance level should handle specific policies, shifts from political bargaining to evidence-based assignment. AI can track performance data showing whether EU, national, regional or local action produces better outcomes for particular challenges, enabling dynamic competence allocation that responds to changing conditions rather than frozen treaty compromises.
Administrative efficiency across borders becomes feasible when AI handles the complexity of coordinating healthcare reimbursements, recognition of educational credentials or business registrations across 27 systems. When a Portuguese entrepreneur can establish operations in Estonia as easily as in Lisbon, or a German patient can access treatment in Italy without bureaucratic nightmares, the economic case for federalism becomes visceral rather than abstract.
Fiscal federalism optimisation, the holy grail of federal design, could leverage AI modelling to calculate optimal taxation and transfer schemes. Transparent, real-time tracking of single market benefits and fair-share budget contributions addresses the “we pay too much” rhetoric that poisons solidarity.
Legitimising federalism with AI
Technical efficiency alone cannot sustain federalism. Democratic legitimacy requires genuine participation and deliberation across linguistic and cultural boundaries. AI enables this in unprecedented ways.
The elimination of language barriers represents the most immediate impact. Real-time, contextual translation allows symmetric multilingualism where every participant speaks their native language yet understands others fully.
Imagine European Parliament debates where a Portuguese MEP addresses colleagues in Portuguese, a Finnish MEP responds in Finnish, and both understand each other perfectly, along with citizens watching across the continent. The asymmetry that privileges anglophones dissolves, enabling genuine pan-European deliberation.
Information accessibility transforms when EU legislation becomes instantly available in all languages, when citizens can follow policy debates in other member states and when cross-border media consumption occurs without language privilege.
The notorious “democratic deficit” stems partly from information asymmetry: national politicians blame “Brussels” while taking credit domestically, because citizens cannot verify claims across languages. AI-powered transparency makes such manipulation costly.
Participatory democracy scales when AI synthesises citizen input from 450 million people across linguistic and cultural contexts, identifying consensus positions invisible at national levels.
Current EU consultations attract primarily organised interests, while genuine citizen engagement founders on language barriers and complexity. AI could enable meaningful transnational citizen assemblies, petitions and initiatives. This would rebuild legitimacy from the bottom up rather than through elite negotiations.
Deliberative quality improves when AI identifies fallacies and misinformation across languages simultaneously. Fact-checking becomes multilingual and myths cannot spread unchallenged in one linguistic community. This elevates the quality of debate above manipulation and misrepresentation.
Federalism for European power
Europe’s geopolitical irrelevance and technological dependence create strategic imperatives for deeper integration. AI both enables and requires this shift.
Crisis response coordination, whether during pandemics, migration flows or climate shocks, requires speed and scale beyond national capacity. AI can predict, coordinate and allocate resources based on need rather than bargaining power, making “European solidarity” operational.
Strategic autonomy in AI itself requires federal-scale investment. Europe’s fragmentation ensures defeat in the global AI race. No single member state can match American Big Tech or Chinese state capitalism.
Europe risks becoming merely an “incubator for AI leaders elsewhere” – developing talent and startups that are then acquired by US and Chinese firms who return to dominate EU markets, deepening dependencies. This dependence is not just economic but democratic: when European citizens and governments rely on American or Chinese AI systems, they cede control over algorithmic governance, from content moderation to public service delivery.
Yet a federal Europe pooling research, data, infrastructure and regulatory power could build AI systems aligned with European values – transparency, privacy, democratic accountability – rather than accepting whatever Silicon Valley or Beijing decides to build. The EU’s AI Act shows regulatory leadership – commercial leadership requires equivalent collective investment.
Cultural exchange and identity-building could benefit from AI-powered cultural translation that conveys not just words but context, references and nuance. Virtual exchanges, cross-border education and shared cultural experiences would become feasible at scale, building European identity without erasing national diversity.
The feedback loop
The crucial insight isn’t merely AI serving federalism, but a virtuous cycle. AI reduces federalism’s coordination costs, making integration politically feasible. But competitive AI development requires federal-scale resources that only deeper integration can mobilise. Europe’s fragmented AI efforts, while promising, cannot match American or Chinese scale. When OpenAI recently retired GPT-4o with minimal notice, it exposed Europe’s dependence on foreign AI systems that can disappear overnight.
Consider the virtuous cycle: AI-enabled language translation facilitates genuine European deliberation, better deliberation builds trust and solidarity, increased trust enables larger common budgets, federal AI investment funds (on par with US or China) lead to European AI leadership, and better AI tools for governance lead to deeper, more effective federalism.
Currently, Europe is trapped in a vicious cycle: national fragmentation leads to insufficient AI investment and technological dependence on the US and China, which leads to lost sovereignty, nationalist backlash and more fragmentation. The EU finds itself caught between competing narratives of “less Europe” and “more Europe”, unable to articulate a consistent vision. Breaking this cycle requires recognising that AI and federalism are complements, not substitutes.
A federal Europe with pooled AI research budgets could achieve what no member state can alone: technological sovereignty, competitive advantage in AI development and the governance tools to make federalism work effectively. The EU’s proposed European Chips Act and AI innovation packages point in this direction but remain insufficiently ambitious without genuine fiscal federalism.
From zero-sum to positive-sum
The “what’s in it for my country?” mentality that dominates European discussions reflects rational calculation within current institutional constraints. But AI offers a path beyond zero-sum thinking: better governance through reduced coordination costs, democratic legitimacy through multilingual participation and strategic power through collective investment.
The question facing European federalists is whether we can escape the current equilibrium trap. AI provides both the means (technical tools for making federalism work) and the motivation: the strategic necessity of competing globally. The choice is not whether to embrace AI or federalism, but whether to harness their synergies or accept continued fragmentation and irrelevance.
Reducing dependence on the United States requires not just defence spending but genuine integration. AI-enabled federalism offers a constructive path: using technology to overcome coordination barriers while building European capacity in the most strategically important technology of our age.
For scholars and advocates of European integration, the research agenda is clear: demonstrate concretely how AI enables federal governance, quantify the strategic costs of continued fragmentation and design institutions that capture the AI-federalism feedback loop. The alternative – a Europe of competing nation states losing the AI race – serves no one’s interest, however carefully calculated.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: New Africa provided by Shutterstock.
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