Ever since Immanuel Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace, many democratic peace theorists have posited that the means to overcome a war-torn state of nature is to spread democracy and promote unity through a supranational federal structure. In this vein, the European Union is often hailed as model for regional and even global integration. However, for all the accolades that have been bestowed upon the EU, there exists an equally noteworthy dark side to the process of European integration. Drawing particularly upon the work of James Tully, the author argues that European integration has also been used as a tool to impose Franco-German interests both within and outside the EU, thereby reproducing the structure of dependence and subordination characteristic of informal empire. He supports this thesis through an analysis of two contemporary case studies: France’s influence over the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and Germany’s involvement in addressing the Greek sovereign debt crisis. He concludes with some suggestions for how the EU can become a normatively acceptable model for global governance, namely by democratizing, and hence de-imperializing, its integrative process.