A Union under siege, or a Union besieging itself? The EU's new budget and the future of European integration

The European Commission’s proposed Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028–2034 is the most far-reaching recasting of the European Union’s (EU) budget in the Union’s history. It folds fourteen funds into National and Regional Partnership Plans, tilts spending towards competitiveness, defence and strategic autonomy, and replaces cost reimbursement with performance-based milestones. The diagnosis behind the reform is broadly sound. Its likely consequences are risky for future European integration. Drawing on original cartographic analysis of competitiveness, defence capacity, trade exposure and industrial anxiety across European regions, we show that the proposed architecture will, in all likelihood, steer investment towards places that are already advantaged while hollowing out Cohesion Policy, the one instrument that has historically reached Europe’s most vulnerable territories and tempered the growing geography of discontent. A budget designed to make Europe more competitive, more secure and more strategically autonomous may instead make it less inclusive, more polarised and more fragile. Europe does not face a choice between competitiveness and cohesion. It faces a choice between mobilising its full territorial potential and gambling with the Union’s legitimacy and survival.