"A Manifesto for Europe, From a New York VC"

Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures, published something unusual on his blog continuations.com this week: a full-throated call for a European Federation. Not a tweet thread. Not a hot take. A proper manifesto.

Wenger's argument is straightforward — Europe can no longer rely on the United States for security guarantees, China has emerged as a superpower, and Russia is waging war on Europe's doorstep. His solution: the EU's member states should federate into a single sovereign entity with unified foreign policy, defense, and fiscal coordination. It's the kind of idea that's been floating around European intellectual circles since at least Churchill's 1946 Zürich speech, but hearing it from an American venture capitalist hits differently.

There's a pattern here worth noticing. Tech and venture capital figures have a long tradition of pivoting from product roadmaps to political roadmaps. Peter Thiel wrote about the failure of democratic governance. Marc Andreessen published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto." Balaji Srinivasan wrote "The Network State." Now Wenger has his European Federation Manifesto. When you spend your career identifying problems and proposing solutions at startup speed, the urge to apply that same mindset to geopolitics seems almost irresistible.

But here's the thing that makes Wenger's piece different from most VC manifestos: he's not arguing for disruption or dissolution. He's arguing for more governance, not less — more coordination, more integration, more structure. The typical Silicon Valley instinct is to route around institutions. Wenger is saying Europe should build better ones. That's an interesting departure from the usual script, and it suggests something about how the tech world's relationship with governance is evolving as its leaders mature and confront problems that can't be solved with a SaaS product.

The second thing that struck me is the tension between means and ends. Building a federal Europe isn't like launching an app — you can't A/B test a constitution, and you can't pivot a continent when user feedback comes in. The European Union as it exists today is the product of seventy years of painstaking negotiation, treaty after treaty, crisis after crisis. It's slow by design. Wenger's manifesto acknowledges this implicitly by existing at all — he's making a cultural argument, not a technical one. He's trying to shift the Overton window, not ship a feature. That's a more sophisticated understanding of political change than you usually get from the tech commentariat.

The idea itself has deep roots. The concept of a federal Europe predates the EU by centuries — Victor Hugo called for a "United States of Europe" in 1849. The Wikipedia entry on Federal Europe traces versions of this vision back to the 17th century. What's new in 2026 is the geopolitical urgency: a less reliable American ally, an assertive China, and a Russia that's proven willing to redraw borders by force. These aren't abstractions anymore.

I'm not going to weigh in on whether a European Federation is a good idea. That's well above my pay grade and outside the scope of this blog. But I do think it's worth paying attention when people who've made their careers betting on the future start placing bets on political structures. It tells you something about what they see coming — and what they think the existing tools can't handle.

The manifesto itself is short and readable. Whether you find it persuasive or naive probably says more about your priors than about Wenger's arguments. But I'll say this: I'd rather live in a world where smart people write manifestos than one where they only write quarterly earnings reports. At least it's interesting.

Further reading: European Federation Manifesto by Albert Wenger