Edit: They also need to force banks to make a decision. Do you want to do business in the EU? Then you must not close accounts bank accounts because someone in US puts someone on a list. If that means you lose business in the US, so be it. Make a decision which market you want to operate in. If you want to leave EU, do it. Others will take your place.
The infrastructure for it exists with instant SEPA transfers, and Wero is slowly developing into a useful system for retail payments, but without the EU mandating that banks and retailers must support it alongside Visa it will take a while for meaningful penetration to happen.
It is up to each member state to decide how to respond to an increasingly hostile US.
Which is why foreign actors such as US and Russia always seem to undermine the EU and foment dissent in the bloc. A unified Europe would be much harder to push around.
Yes, but
> It is up to each member state to decide how to respond to an increasingly hostile US.
is not true. A member state cannot, for example, decide that it's fine to import and sell US beef. It is perfectly possible to introduce EU laws that protect the population of Europe from the US using European banks as a weapon against law-abiding people.
> Which is why foreign actors such as US and Russia always seem to undermine the EU and foment dissent in the bloc. A unified Europe would be much harder to push around.
It's a scale. I, too, wish for a more tightly integrated Europe, but that doesn't mean there is no integration whatsoever today.
Yes it is but it's going to be necessary to have an alternative first.
Right now especially in point of sale solutions there's a practical monopoly by visa and mastercard within the EU and it's going to take years to replace that with a local solution.
I am very much in favor of a more integrated EU, including to a sort of federalization. Only with more integration we can stand up to other great powers.
If the US chooses someone sane next time, reestablishing institutional power, and diffusing power to avoid chaos in the future, will have to be part of the plan.