Some scholars are arguing that the EU is already a federation (Robert Schütze, European Union Law, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2021) or a state, albeit of a different nature from the traditional nation-state (Sylvain Khan, L´Europe: un État qui s´ignore, CNRS Éditions, Paris, 2026).
Schütze argues convincingly that standard German legal tradition fails to properly identify the nature of the EU since it only admits two categories of political entities: sovereign states (either unitary or federal) and international organisations. From this follows that the EU can only be an international organisation (which it clearly is not in view of its many distinctive features), or alternatively a “sui generis” organisation. This characterization of the EU in fact creates a “category of one”, with therefore limited explanatory power. According to Schütze, there is at least a third category of political organisation: the “federation of states”, something different from a federal state (unitary in origin before political decentralization, or otherwise with the central state exercising the “competency to establish competencies”).
Thus, using the United States, as a federal union of states, as a metric, Schütze concludes that the EU is also a federation. Several features are common: creation by international treaty ratified by all Member States, specific attribution of competences to the Federation by the constitutional framework and dual sovereignty, joint legislation by an elected chamber representing the people and a chamber representing the states, and primacy of federal law.
