The strange saga of the EU board game

The EU is an odd and often contradictory creature. It spends millions on the promotion of its values abroad but not a penny on fostering democracy at home. Brussels even presents the Union to its citizens as an undemocratic association of states.

The story of the European democracy game "Eurocracy" may serve to illustrate the argument. The board game was invented by a democracy campaigner at the time of the foundation of the EU in 1992.

The introduction of EU citizenship by virtue of the Maastricht Treaty triggered the initiative.

As a citizen of one of the 12 democratic member states, the author, a human rights lawyer, wanted to express his conviction that the new Union would only be viable as a European democracy.

At the time, however, critical intellectuals ridiculed the EU for its democratic deficit. The joke of the day had it that the EU did not meet the criteria for accession to the Union.

Although the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht was celebrated with the usual pomp and circumstance on 7 February 1992, no one could say what the newly founded Union actually was.

Could it be categorised as a European state or at least as a European state in the making, as the federalists argued, or was it no more than an ordinary association of states?

Neither pundit nor scholar knew the answer, and, in despair, EU Commission president Jacques Delors labelled his brainchild as an Unidentified Political Object.

The game maker had a different idea. As a convinced democrat, he argued that, if 12 democratic states agreed to pool sovereignty in ever wider fields with the view to attaining common goals, their organisation should be democratic too.

Sir Edward Heath

Merely three months later, he presented the board game Eurocracy in London to British prime minister who had secured the UK’s accession to Communities in 1973.

Sir Edward Heath described the board of the game as a delight for the eyes. At a party on the occasion of the first anniversary of The European newspaper, he saw the EU depicted on the board of the game as a democratic polity of citizens and member states.

The 12 countries making up the EU were represented on the board in line with their size, with one to four cities each. As each city wore the flag of its member state and they all were embedded in the azure blue of the EU, the board proudly paraded the colours of Europe.

Sir Edward could not stop grinning when the inventor explained the rules of the game and banged him after the introduction so forcefully on the shoulder that the poor man almost disappeared: “That’s what I’ve been working for all my life and you turned it into a game, you bastard!” 

The commission was not amused. The official designated to evaluate Eurocracy even accused the creator of outright betrayal.

Evidently, he had committed the sin of including the anti-Europeans as a political party in the game.

While each player assumed the role of leader of a political party (Spitzenkandidat) such as the Greens, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, the unforgivable mistake was that he had given respectability to the enemies of the Union.

The angry bureaucrat did not mince his words and ordered the creator in the clearest possible terms to leave the Berlaymont instantly. The publication of a rousing review by Le Monde on the eve of the French referendum on Maastricht did not influence Brussels attitudes.

Even a special report broadcast by CNN International on the occasion of the entry into force of the Treaty on European Union was dismissed as disinformation. While CNN heralded ‘the new kid on the block’, another Commission official wrote dryly that the EU only promotes democracy abroad, not at home. 

Some 33 years, a dozen of books, zero EU-subsidies and hundreds of game lectures on European democracy later, the board game Eurocracy has enabled its inventor to break the perennial deadlock in the debate about the nature of the beast.

In line with his original hypothesis concerning the democratic principle, he identified the EU as a democratic union of democratic states. The EU-27 definition, which he presented together with game enthusiasts to the European Parliament in June 2025, reads in 27 words — one for each member state:

The European Union is neither a state nor an ordinary international organisation, but forms a union of democratic states which also constitutes a democracy of its own.

In those years, his original hypothesis has also been validated in reality.

Driven by the desire to create an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, the EU has metamorphosed from an internal market into a European democracy.

Despite the treaties of Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2000) and Lisbon (2007) and notwithstanding the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice, however, Brussels continues to portray the EU in its official communications as ‘a unique economic and political union between 27 European countries’.

The gravity of this communicational mistake can hardly be overestimated, especially against the dramatic rise of autocratic forces within the EU and the existential threats from abroad.

While extremist parties aim to abolish the European Parliament and to degrade the EU from a democratic union of democratic states into an undemocratic organisation of illiberal states, the Russian president Vladimir Putin, wages war on Europe’s borders and his American counterpart wants to bully Brussels into submission.

Although EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen emphasised the need for Europe to become independent and to defend its values in her 2025 State of the Union speech, her DG Communication doggedly continues to portray the EU as an undemocratic organisation of states.

The message of the game is that the EU has to commit itself unreservedly to its democracy.

In line with the  Socratic advice to ‘know thyself’, the EU has to reconceptualise itself in democratic terms. If it wants to defend its constitutional achievements, the EU must embrace its democracy, take pride in its values and communicate its functioning as a democratic union of democratic states to its citizens.   

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