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.

From Club to Commons: Enlargement, Reform and Sustainability in European Integration, Erik Jones and Veronica Anghel, Cambridge University Press, 95 p., $23, November 2025

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........

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