The Case for Unity

The world is changing. Europe needs to change with it. Astra Europa will drive this change.

Europe’s current system of governance is anchored in 19th- and 20th-century nation-state thinking, and it is buckling under 21st-century pressures. Despite decades of deepening integration, Europe is still economically, militarily, and politically fragmented along national lines. Its governance is a thicket of overlapping institutions, treaties, and procedures so dense that few citizens understand how it works. Complexity of this kind stalls decisions, hides failures behind procedural fog, suffocates innovation and ambition, and alienates European citizens. Ultimately it has created a Europe that — despite immense economic weight, world-leading talent, and deep scientific capacity — is unable to turn its assets and potential into results. Today’s Europe is incapable of acting effectively in a world of continental-scale powers and continental-scale problems.

Our disunity and resulting weakness are being exploited by hostile powers every day. A revanchist Russia wages war on European soil. An unpredictable USA has started treating allies as vassals, using economic and defense integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and eying annexation of our territory. A hegemonic China has been hollowing out our industrial base by flooding our markets with state-subsidised overcapacity, while tightening its grip on the supply chains we need for our future. Europe faces sustained hybrid attacks, irregular migration crises, and an economic model in which inequality has reached levels that threaten social cohesion. Artificial intelligence is poised to transform our labour market at a speed we are not prepared for. Europeans feel this every day: in weaker growth, rising living costs, and public systems that cannot keep pace. The most damaging consequence is the growing belief that the future holds no promise. Too many Europeans, especially the younger generations, feel their future has been stolen from them.

We believe the only real solution is to unite Europe into a federation, rather than merely deepening integration. Coordination has a structural ceiling, and on the powers that matter most we have already reached it. Twenty-seven national policies on defence, foreign affairs, or industry cannot add up to a European strategy; they only divide the response. And on the hardest decisions — sending soldiers into harm’s way, sustaining sanctions at serious economic cost, committing taxpayer money at continental scale — coordination lacks the required democratic legitimacy. A national government outvoted in Brussels cannot credibly tell its citizens that a foreign majority has bound them to fight a war or fund a project they did not choose. Decisions of such weight need an authority whose mandate is European. That authority is a sovereign, democratic European federation.

Established political parties across the political spectrum have proven unable to offer real solutions. The cause of failure is mostly structural, as political parties organise themselves and derive their power from the national level. A united Europe will not be built by those whose careers depend on its absence. Twenty-seven foreign ministers, twenty-seven defence ministers, twenty-seven heads of government, and the apparatus around each of them hold twenty-seven fragments of European power. Uniting Europe would fuse them into a greater whole, eliminating many of these offices and diminishing the rest in favour of a joined European governance. National political parties will not voluntarily deliver this. It must come from parties that gain, rather than lose, by creating a united European state. The absence of a credible federalist option is what has allowed the fringes to grow: regressive nationalist populists on one side, dogmatic illiberal progressives on the other. Neither offers a serious path forward.

The challenges of the 21st century demand political organisation at the European level to overcome the traps and perverse incentives of national fragmentation, and to unleash Europe’s full potential to benefit the European people. Astra Europa has been created to realise this vision. We are pan-European by design, ambitious in our pursuit of reform, and focused on delivering real results. We refuse to be the generation that leaves Europe worse than we found it. We must take the risk of building a better future, not accept a managed decline. Join us in building a Europe worth dreaming about, one that reaches for the stars instead of staying stuck in the past.

Who We Are

Astra Europa is a pan-European movement and future political party. Our overriding mission is the political unification of Europe into a sovereign, democratic federation that is capable of protecting and uplifting its citizens. We aim to keep Europeans safe, prosperous, and free to shape their own future.

We are federalists. Unity is Europe’s greatest untapped strength, and division our greatest weakness. We believe the only way to secure Europe’s freedom, prosperity, and place in the world is to unite. Not through endless summits and compromises between national governments, but through a genuine democratic federation with the power to act.

We are proud Europeans. We draw strength from a civilisation that gave the world democracy, the rule of law, the scientific method, and the tradition of human rights. We intend to honour this inheritance by building on it, while not forgetting the lessons from the darker sides of our history. We will prove that Europe’s best contributions still lie ahead.

We are liberals, in the European sense. We stand for democracy, civil liberties, rule of law, free enterprise, solidarity, and the right of every person to live without arbitrary interference. Where markets work, we back them. Where they fail, we do not hesitate to step in.

We stand for European Sovereignty. In a world of continental powers, the safety, prosperity, and self-determination of Europeans depend on controlling our own defence, our own energy, and our own physical and digital infrastructure. Strategic autonomy is how Europe engages with the world as an equal rather than as a vassal.

We are socially conscious. We believe in a Europe that guarantees every citizen the conditions for a dignified life. A Europe where housing is affordable, work is fairly rewarded, and every generation can believe in a better future. Prosperity that is not broadly shared is prosperity that will not last.

We are forward-looking. We believe in science, technology, and human ingenuity as forces for good. We are optimistic about what Europeans can achieve when given the tools and the freedom to follow their ambition to build. We reject the politics of managed decline and the false comfort of nostalgia.

We think in generations. Many of Europe’s hardest problems were foreseen, and deferred. Politicians who prefer the next election to the next generation have built up a debt — fiscal, demographic, environmental — that someone will eventually have to pay. We will tell Europeans the truth about what their choices cost, and we will make decisions on the timescale the problems demand.

We are simplifiers. Europe’s rules stack across local, national, and European layers — each reasonable on its own, unworkable in aggregate — with no built-in way to clear away what no longer serves. We commit, structurally, to keeping European law legible and the cost of changing it low.

We are results-oriented. We have no interest in moral posturing, ideological purity, or pandering to people’s fears. We want to solve problems, deliver outcomes, and build something that works. We will make the hard choices others avoid and be judged by the results we deliver.

We will contest local, regional, national, and European elections on a common platform, building a mandate for change from below as well as above. We are building the political will to make the changes Europe needs to flourish in the 21st century.

12 Guiding Stars for a New Europe

1. A European Federation

Europe must become a sovereign, democratic federation. Not as an end in itself, but because only a federation can govern at the scale our challenges require. This federation must be a liberal democracy founded on human dignity; guaranteeing civil rights, equality before the law, and protections against discrimination; freedom of conscience, expression, association, and enterprise; and the protection of property and privacy. These are the foundational constitutional commitments that should bind every level of government within the federation.

We propose a democratically legitimised federal government: an elected leader who can speak for Europe, and a bicameral parliament in which both chambers have the right to legislative initiative, and must agree on proposals for them to become law. An elected lower chamber gives equal representation to Europe’s people. An upper chamber representing the member states ensures that national interests contribute to shaping federal law, but where no national veto exists to override a democratic majority. An independent federal judiciary protects the rights of citizens against abuse of power at every level. The federation should have real powers where common action is necessary — foreign policy, defence, borders, energy, the single market — while respecting subsidiarity everywhere else. What can be decided locally or nationally, should stay there.

National constitutions and constitutional monarchies retain their place within this federal structure. Europe should be united where it must act as one, and celebrate national and regional diversity where it is our strength. The United Kingdom, Ukraine, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and other European democracies will always be welcome to join the federation on equal terms.

The federation must be designed to be understandable. Where today’s European architecture has accumulated layers of overlapping competence, the federation will be a single, legible structure: clear lines of authority, clear rights, clear paths for citizens to participate or contest. Simplicity at the constitutional level is the precondition for accountability.

We will immediately push for and contribute to a European constitutional process: a founding moment in which the peoples of Europe, through their elected representatives, draft a federal constitution. We do not need to wait for all member states to be ready at once. Those willing to take this step together should be free to do so, with the door open for others to join on clear and democratic terms.

2. United Defence and Foreign Policy

Europe cannot remain politically impotent, militarily dependent, and strategically incoherent in a world of continental powers. As long as we hold twenty-seven national positions, rely on foreign powers to coordinate our national militaries, and run inefficient, fragmented procurement, we will remain weaker than our size, wealth, and interests require and would allow for. Already today EU member states combined have more active military personnel than the USA, but only a fraction of the global power projection due to the lack of unity.

We support a single European foreign policy and a genuine European defence capability under democratic federal control. That means integrated planning and command, common procurement, federal intelligence capabilities, and a defence industrial base able to arm and sustain European power. Europe must be able to deter aggression, defend its territory, respond to hybrid threats as one, and project power abroad when European interests demand it. Strategic autonomy means the capacity to act outside our continent as well as within it: to secure trade routes, protect Europeans abroad, and stand with allies under pressure As warfare is increasingly shaped by autonomous systems, Europe must not only continue to develop its own frontier AI models, but also lead in establishing clear democratic oversight of how these technologies are developed and deployed.

The strongest guarantee of strategic autonomy is still nuclear deterrence. As long as nuclear weapons remain part of the world we live in, Europe cannot outsource the ultimate guarantee of its security. It must provide its own deterrent, under democratic control by a federal government and a federal nuclear doctrine.

3. Europe in the World

A united Europe does not turn inward. It engages the world from a position of strength, and strength requires both soft and hard power. We seek partnership with like-minded democracies, and we are prepared to use Europe’s diplomatic and economic weight to defend our interests and values on the global stage, starting with our own neighbourhood: We are determined to support Ukraine as long as it takes to make forceful border changes a thing of the past.

We do not seek to lecture the world on how to govern itself. We are proud of the system we have built and we believe in it, but we do not feel the need to impose it. Europe has as much to learn from others as it has to offer them. We engage abroad to protect our interests, honour our commitments, and work alongside those who share our democratic aspirations. Where we invest in the developing world, we ought to do so as partners seeking mutual benefit, not as patrons dispensing charity. The international order built after 1945 no longer reflects the world as it is. Institutions like the United Nations Security Council are paralysed by a veto system designed for a world of five powers, not the multipolar reality of the 21st century. Europe should champion the reform of global multilateral institutions, including replacing national vetoes with a system of regional representation that gives all parts of the world a meaningful voice while making collective action possible again.

4. Borders, Migration, and Justice

Migration is one of the defining political tests of our generation. The failures of the past decade have eroded public trust, fueled support for the political fringes, and left genuine humanitarian commitments unmet.

We support a federal border and migration system that restores order and public trust. That means secure external borders, firm returns for those without a right to stay, and a legal migration system that selects both for the skills Europe needs and for prospective immigrants’ capacity to integrate into European life. Every country has a finite rate at which it can absorb newcomers successfully. That rate is higher when migrants share linguistic, cultural, or civic proximity with the host society, and lower when they do not. A serious immigration policy treats this as an empirical fact and calibrates accordingly.

Asylum is a moral obligation, but not an unlimited one. We support an in-region principle: each region of the world bears primary responsibility for sheltering those displaced from within it, with European support directed to building the conditions and capacities that make this possible. Europe should also be willing to invest, abroad and early, in the climate adaptation, security, and state capacity that prevent forced migration in the first place. Forced migration is a loss for everyone; prevention is more humane, more durable, and more economical than reception.

Hostile states have learned that engineered migration flows can be used as a weapon. Belarus’s instrumentalisation of the Polish and Baltic borders is the textbook case, and it will not be the last. A Europe that controls its borders denies these tactics their effectiveness. That makes the world both safer and more humane, because the people deliberately funnelled into these flows are themselves victims of the strategy.

Justice and law enforcement must operate at the scale on which cross-border crime already operates. Europe needs stronger federal capacity against terrorism, organised crime, trafficking, and hybrid threats, together with European prosecution and judicial institutions able to enforce federal law effectively. We will ensure that justice moves across our internal borders as swiftly as criminals, traffickers, and hostile actors do.

Europe’s territory is not confined to the continent. We recognise the strategic value of European overseas territories to our security and that of our allies. Federal protection must extend to them fully. Their defence must not be treated as a peripheral concern.

5. Energy Sovereignty

A Europe that does not control its own energy supply does not control its own destiny. Europe imports most of its energy at an annual cost exceeding the combined defence budgets of all EU member states. This dependency has been weaponised against us repeatedly.

Energy sovereignty means producing more of our own energy from every available source. The priority is a rapid transition to clean domestic energy: renewables, nuclear, and geothermal. These are the sources that end our dependence permanently. Electrification, battery storage, hydrogen and other innovations will be essential to making that transition work at scale. But we are honest about the pace: fossil fuels will remain part of the energy mix for the foreseeable future, and where they are needed we prefer to produce them domestically rather than import them from regimes that use our dependency against us. The goal is energy that is affordable, secure, and clean — and we will not support policies that raise costs for households and industry in pursuit of timelines that ignore economic reality.

We will push for a single European energy market with harmonised permitting, connected grids, joint strategic procurement, and aligned reserve policies. Energy sovereignty requires acting as one Europe rather than twenty-seven fragmented national efforts.

6. The Digital Age

The digital world is increasingly the domain where economies operate, where people encounter ideas and each other, and where political opinion is formed and debated. Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the substrate beneath all of it: curating news feeds, running critical infrastructure, reshaping industries, and transforming how wars are fought. The platforms, infrastructure and AI systems that shape this space demand a strategic posture as serious as the one we apply to energy or defence.

Europe must develop and control its own frontier AI models. We should not depend on American or Chinese systems for the critical functions of government, defence, and strategic economic infrastructure. Digital sovereignty means European systems running on European infrastructure, subject to European law.

Artificial intelligence will transform our economy and society more profoundly than any technology in human history, and the timeline is shorter than most politicians are willing to admit. Over the coming decades, automation will not merely assist human work; it will replace enormous categories of it. Manufacturing, logistics, software, services: the transformation will be broad, structural, and permanent. We believe this is, on balance, an opportunity. The transition will be rough and the disruption uneven, and Europe is not currently prepared for it. We are committed to managing this carefully, ensuring the benefits are distributed equitably, and building a new understanding of work, income, and dignity that fits the world we are entering.

The integrity of the information environment is a precondition for democracy itself: when public discourse is shaped by opaque algorithms, flooded with disinformation, or manipulated by hostile actors, self-governance becomes a fiction. Citizens have the right to understand the systems that shape their information environment, and democratic societies have the duty to govern them.

Privacy is a right. We reject mass surveillance of Europeans, be it through AI facial recognition on the street or message scanning on personal devices. A democratic society relies on the ability of its citizens to communicate privately and securely without unreasonable interference from the government. We reject government-mandated security backdoors that make everyone less safe.

7. Fiscal Sovereignty

The EU today has a budget of roughly one per cent of its economic output; enough to administer, not enough to govern. It funds almost nothing of consequence from its own resources. Defence, borders, energy, and crisis response all depend on what national governments are willing to contribute, one intergovernmental and inter-institutional haggle at a time.

A European federation must have the fiscal capacity to match its responsibilities. We support a direct fiscal relationship between the federation and its citizens, replacing the current system of national contributions that turns every budget into a zero-sum standoff. Federal taxation replaces national taxation in the transferred domains. It does not add to it.

Some taxes are best collected at federal scale, above all corporate tax. Mobile capital can force individual countries into concessions they would not make on their own, creating tax havens within Europe and starving the budgets that need the revenue. A federal corporate tax base sets a floor that no multinational can dodge by shopping for jurisdictions. Outside those federal domains, taxation remains a national matter, with competition between member states a healthy feature of the union. Across Europe, tax systems have grown into a thicket of brackets, exemptions, allowances, and loopholes that punish effort and reward fiscal engineering. Those who earn through work face marginal rates that can exceed fifty per cent, while those whose wealth grows through ownership or corporate structures routinely pay far less. Europe should move decisively toward tax systems that are simpler, more transparent, and that fairly balance the burden between labour, wealth, and ownership.

8. Prosperity Through Scale

Europe must grow, build, compete, and innovate at continental scale to secure lasting prosperity.

The single market remains incomplete. Capital, services, digital markets, and business formation are still too nationally segmented, denying European entrepreneurs the scale they need to compete globally from Europe. We support completing the single market in earnest: uniform company law, a genuine capital markets union that lets European savings fund European growth, and the removal of bureaucratic and regulatory barriers that create legal uncertainty, increase costs, fragment investment and stifle startups. A single federal rulebook, one-stop compliance, and sunset clauses on regulation by default would do more for European competitiveness than any subsidy programme. European founders should be able to build continental-scale companies as easily as their American or Chinese competitors. European capital should fund them through to maturity, so that our most promising firms no longer need to relocate abroad for lack of domestic financing. A true single market requires a physically connected continent: a European high-speed rail network, seamless cross-border transport, and integrated energy and digital infrastructure that make the free movement of people, goods, power, and information a lived reality rather than a legal fiction.

Open competition across a continent of 600 million consumers is the most powerful engine for producing European champions that can compete and win globally. But in strategic sectors where sovereignty or security are at stake — defence, critical infrastructure, energy systems, semiconductors — we support Buy European procurement rules that keep strategic capacity on European soil. Some dependencies are too dangerous to tolerate, and European firms competing for European contracts on a level playing field will produce better outcomes than offshoring our security to the lowest bidder.

9. A Human-Centered Economy

We believe the economy should serve people. Whether it does should not be a matter of opinion; it should be something we can measure.

Today, the world judges economic success by a single number: GDP. A measure designed in the 1930s to track wartime production counts arms sales and hospital bills as growth, but says nothing about whether people can afford a home, whether their work is fairly rewarded, or whether they have time for their children. A country can post record GDP while its citizens grow poorer and more miserable, and by the official metrics, that country is succeeding.

Europe should adopt the OECD Better Life Index: an internationally recognised framework that measures what matters: not just income and employment, but housing, health, education, environmental quality, work-life balance, and life satisfaction. We will require member states to report on these dimensions with the same prominence they give to GDP, and embed these outcomes into European budget frameworks so that public spending must demonstrate its contribution to the lives of citizens. European countries already rank among the highest in the world on these measures. We should make that visible, protect it, and hold our governments accountable for it.

Where the evidence shows Europeans are struggling, we will act. Housing has become one of Europe’s most urgent failures: costs consuming an ever-larger share of income, young Europeans locked out of ownership entirely. Housing is the foundation of a dignified life, not a speculative asset class. We support policies that increase supply, curb speculation, and treat housing as the social priority it is. More broadly, we support replacing today’s fragmented welfare bureaucracies and means testing with a simple system that rewards work and trusts people to make the decisions that are best for them themselves while providing a minimum standard of living to every European.

A society that believes in its future invests in families: we support strong parental leave, accessible childcare, and policies that make it possible for Europeans who want children to have them without sacrificing their livelihoods. No investment in Europe’s future matters more than the next generation itself.

Europe is aging faster than any other major economy. Pension and healthcare systems built when there were five workers for every retiree are now expected to sustain themselves with fewer than three. Pretending this is sustainable is a betrayal of the young, who pay into systems that may not pay them back, and of the old, who deserve the security they were promised. We will engage honestly with the demographic transition and the reforms it requires — pensions, healthcare, intergenerational fairness — rather than pushing them onto our children. A Europe that wants families to flourish must do right by its grandparents, children, and working generation in between.

We want a Europe where the coming generations live better than the current one. That is no longer just an aspiration; it is what we will measure, what we will report, and what we will hold our governments accountable for. If the economy fails that test, no amount of growth on paper will suffice.

10. Climate and Sustainability

Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth. We’re paying the cost of years of inaction through wildfires, heatwaves, floods, crop failures, and hundreds of billions of euros in damages every year. Climate change is not a distant threat. It is here, it is accelerating, and it will get worse before it gets better.

Europe is a world leader in the low-carbon economy, and we intend to extend that lead without compromising our productivity or our standard of living. The transition to a clean economy is both an ecological necessity and an industrial opportunity, and Europe should be building the technologies, the industries, and the standards that the rest of the world will follow. At the same time, climate change does not care where emissions are produced; policies that drive European industry abroad while we keep importing its output reduce nothing. We back climate policy that cuts emissions, not policy that relocates them.

A permanent, comprehensive carbon border mechanism would ensure that European producers competing under high environmental standards are not undercut by imports from countries with none; using the power of access to our market to set incentives that encourage clean production worldwide. At home, we support the restoration of degraded ecosystems and a transition toward sustainable agriculture while keeping European farmers competitive. We also support strong animal welfare standards and a shift away from cruel farming practices.

11. Ambition and Discovery

We believe the future can and should be better than the present. Europe should embrace science, technology, and bold projects as instruments of human flourishing.

Europe’s civilisational identity was built by people who dared to think in centuries: the builders of cathedrals, the founders of universities, the scientists who mapped the stars, unlocked the power of the atom, and sequenced the genome. That ambition has not disappeared, but it has been buried under decades of risk aversion, underfunding, and institutional timidity. We want a Europe that invests seriously in fundamental research, to position Europe at the frontier of knowledge and innovation for years to come. But world-class research is not enough if its results are commercialised elsewhere. Europe must close the gap between discovery and industry by building the funding pathways, institutions, and regulatory environment that turn European science into European companies, European products, and European jobs.

We want a Europe that builds beautifully again. Architecture and public places are reflections of the society that creates them, and they shape how that society understands itself. The cathedrals, old towns, city halls, bridges, stations, libraries, squares, and civic buildings Europeans pass every day were built generations ago and still give people a sense of belonging, pride, and continuity. Public works should embrace modernity while honoring the best of our architectural traditions, proving that beauty, usefulness, sustainability, and innovation can go hand in hand. We should commission public works with aesthetic ambition as a core consideration, alongside cost, safety, accessibility, and environmental responsibility. Our aim should be to create public places that both us and those who come after us will not only use, but celebrate.

Per Europam ad astra is not just a slogan, it is a literal aspiration. A sovereign Europe should aim to become a spacefaring civilisation: capable of independently launching Europeans into orbit and beyond, of building the orbital infrastructure the future economy will depend on, and of pioneering the industries of the future beyond Earth — from satellite constellations to asteroid mining. Space is not a luxury. It is a strategic frontier for resources, communications, and security. We choose a politics of courage in pursuit of a better future.

12. European Identity

We believe a European identity does not replace national, regional or local identities. Instead we believe that identities are layered like an onion, where local or regional identities form a core that is wrapped in national and ultimately European layers. The outer layers protect the inner layers, and together they give depth, structure, and substance to the whole.

European identity has developed through centuries of exchange, conflict, memory, and renewal. It is rooted in the common inheritance of classical antiquity, Christianity, humanism, the Enlightenment, law, civic life, scientific inquiry, pluralism, and debate; and in the shared values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, solidarity, and peace.

Political unity requires more than institutions; it requires a sense of common belonging. The cultural foundations of a European identity are already there. What is missing is the civic substance: the lived sense among Europeans that they belong, together, to something worth defending and worth building. We treat the cultivation of a shared European identity as a serious political task, and as the foundation on which the federation we propose must rest.

We support a European dimension in education: curricula that teach the shared history, literature, and achievements of our civilisation alongside national ones, and language policies that equip every young European to communicate across borders. Beyond the classroom, Europe needs a richer shared cultural life: Paneuropean media that cover federal affairs as seriously as national politics are covered today, promotion of European film, literature, and the arts, expansion of programs like Erasmus that make living and working across borders a normal part of European life. Our goal is a Europe where being European feels as natural and as deeply felt as being Swedish, Lithuanian, or Greek. A Europe where people carry a genuine sense of belonging, shared destiny, and shared responsibility for this continent and for each other.

The Road Ahead

We strive toward uniting Europe into a sovereign, democratic federation. This will not be given to us. It must be built — politically, democratically, across every level of government from the local municipal council to the European Parliament and the European Council. It will require Europeans who are willing to organise, to stand for office and for something larger than their national interest. Astra Europa exists to bring those Europeans together and to give them a platform, which is distinct in its alignment with Liberalism.

Our twelve guiding stars are our programme for action; each one reinforcing the others, together forming the foundation of the Europe we intend to build. The ingredients for European greatness already exist. What has been missing is the political will to assemble them. To realise our vision and ambition, we will therefore start organising, building a network of NGOs, associations and political parties all acting across the continent under our joined Astra Europa brand, united by our joined vision and based in our values and convictions. Together we will build coalitions with like-minded European federalists, initiate referenda, contest elections and push relentlessly for European federation.

Join us in building a Europe worth dreaming about.

Per Europam ad Astra!