Socialist United States of Europe

Quote of the issue

As proletarian internationalists, we counterpose to the European Union the call for a Socialist United States of Europe. In 1923 Trotsky and his followers succeeded in having this slogan officially adopted by the leadership of the Comintern. But the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union remained hostile to it and soon abandoned it because, as Trotsky explains below, it is incompatible with the dogma of “socialism in one country”.

After the collapse of the 1923 German revolution, Europe lived the life of stabilization. The basic revolutionary questions disappeared from the agenda. The slogan of the United States of Europe was forgotten. It was not included in the program of the Comintern. Stalin explained this new zigzag with remarkable profundity: Since we cannot tell the order in which the various countries will accomplish their revolutions, it follows that it is impossible to predict whether the United States of Europe will be necessary…. As a matter of fact, it is not at all a question of the order in which revolutions will be accomplished. On this score one can only speculate. But this does not relieve the European workers, nor the International as a whole, from the necessity of giving a clear answer to the question: How can the European economy be snatched from its present state of dispersion and how can the popular masses of Europe be saved from decay and enslavement?

The trouble, however, is that the economic ground for the slogan of the United States of Europe overthrows one of the basic ideas of the present Comintern program, namely: the idea of building socialism in one country.

The essence of our epoch lies in this, that the productive forces have definitely outgrown the framework of the national state and have assumed primarily in America and Europe partly continental, partly world proportions…. In other words: thanks to the development of the productive forces capitalism has long ago been unable to exist in a single country. But socialism can and will base itself on far more developed productive forces; otherwise socialism would represent not progress but regression with respect to capitalism…. The formula Soviet United States of Europe is precisely the political expression of the idea that socialism is impossible in one country. Socialism cannot of course attain its full development even in the limits of a single continent. The Socialist United States of Europe represents the historical slogan which is a stage on the road to the world socialist federation.

— “Disarmament and the United States of Europe”, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1929]