If several small villages or hamlets share the same resources, then how do they ensure they do not run out? How do they make sure the water is not poisoned, that one village does not cut down all trees, or that there is no overfishing? Economist Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for answering those questions. The villages and hamlets, she argued, will work together and come up with common rules. They don’t do it because they particularly like sharing things, but because it is in everyone’s interest to keep the vital resources they all depend on from being exhausted or sabotaged by outsiders.

Ostrom’s theory applies to the European Union, too. It perfectly explains why the EU, despite recurrent predictions that it will perish in the next crisis, holds together throughout multiple crises and often becomes stronger in the process.

If several small villages or hamlets share the same resources, then how do they ensure they do not run out? How do they make sure the water is not poisoned, that one village does not cut down all trees, or that there is no overfishing? Economist Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for answering those questions. The villages and hamlets, she argued, will work together and come up with common rules. They don’t do it because they particularly like sharing things, but because it is in everyone’s interest to keep the vital resources they all depend on from being exhausted or sabotaged by outsiders.

Ostrom’s theory applies to the European Union, too. It perfectly explains why the EU, despite recurrent predictions that it will perish in the next crisis, holds together throughout multiple crises and often becomes stronger in the process.

In their new bookFrom Club to Commons: Enlargement, Reform and Sustainability in European Integration, Erik Jones and Veronica Anghel compare Ostrom’s villages and hamlets to the EU’s 27 member states sharing and managing common resources within their limited territory. Some of those are natural resources like the ones that Ostrom had in mind. Others are common facilities they created together because it was in their interest to do so, such as the internal market, the euro, the common financial area, and now European defense.

Such a way of looking at European integration is rather novel. Many Europeans still tend to see the EU as an exclusive club that manages common goods for them. Clubs, however, are static: They don’t need to change because outsiders cannot access those common goods. In other words, there is no intrinsic need for more rules, for more Europe, or for new members to be admitted. In this view, it is a choice to change or not to change.

In their book, Jones and Anghel took issue with that analysis. The EU is not a club, they argue, because common European goods are not exclusive at all. Outsiders like non-EU countries and companies have access to them, too—some intensively while others less so. When it comes to security—a crucial, post-war good—outsiders like the United Kingdom, Norway, and Ukraine are becoming far more useful to the EU than neutral member states like Ireland or Austria, not to mention recalcitrant Hungary.

What’s more, the EU is highly attractive to outsiders, from countries and companies to students and asylum-seekers. People risk their lives to go to Europe. That makes Europe’s common goods and facilities even more vulnerable. Ten years ago, for example, global financial markets almost destroyed the euro. Eurozone countries then had to work together and integrate further than they had ever imagined. The COVID-19 pandemic is another example: When the virus struck, governments immediately closed the EU’s internal borders and started subsidizing national companies.

That severely endangered Europe’s single market, which protects cross-border labor mobility and severely restricts state interference with national companies. To save the single market, they started doing things that had always been taboo, like ordering vaccines together and collectively borrowing money to help affected EU economies recover from the pandemic. In other words, further European integration was not because they freely and happily chose it but because of sheer necessity. By now, the EU has long ceased being an exclusive club, Jones and Anghel wrote, and has become “a rather inclusive community.”

For many member states, taking such steps is difficult. Some procrastinate, while others try to wriggle out of commitments or abandon the implementation of new EU policies. The European banking union, which was set up during the banking and euro crisis, remains far from completed. During the pandemic, Austria tried to change the agreed-upon vaccine procurement scheme halfway through the process. There are many other examples. Such behavior often leads to internal conflicts, imperfections, and weaknesses. Hungary’s constant dilution of EU policies on Ukraine, for example, makes the EU more vulnerable from the inside, because decision-making on Ukraine is slowed and complicated, and the outside, because hostile governments exploit those vulnerabilities.

This explains why the EU always works on two fronts at the same time: internally, by reforming its policies and by enforcing more self-discipline by member states, and externally, by co-opting non-EU countries and by constantly seeking agreements with them. For instance, the EU regularly concludes new agreements with Ukraine on things like defense cooperation, telecom roaming, its participation in the European electricity market, and the implementation of EU anti-corruption laws.

This is necessary because the closer that non-EU countries like Ukraine come to the EU, the greater the risks for member states and the greater the need for new agreements. At a certain point, it will become simpler and safer to include such outsiders in the common arrangement—in other words, to enlarge the EU. That is what happened in 2004, when 10 new countries joined, and it is happening again today with Ukraine and Western Balkan countries like Albania. The process of co-opting outsiders is not always successful. Hungary, again, is a case in point. In response to this, some want to introduce a trial period for new EU members to make sure that the EU’s rule of law will not be eroded by more outsiders coming in—an internal reform, yet again.

So, internal reforms change the relations between EU insiders and outsiders, which in turn lead to more internal reforms. Today, the EU’s multiannual budget is being restructured, member states are working on a European weapons procurement policy, and new instruments are being created to protect countries and companies from external economic pressure and coercion.

In this way, with permanent peristaltic movements as it were, the EU is broadening and deepening at the same time. Contrary to what some say, there is no choice between enlarging (external) and deepening (internal). Europe cannot choose one or the other. It cannot even choose to do nothing. It must always do both at the same time, since one leads to the other. And all this is meant prevent what Ostrom called a “tragedy of the commons” and to make sure the EU’s common facilities keep benefitting everyone. For Europe, ultimately, this is a matter of survival.