On December 6, 2024, the E.U.
finally—meaning more than twenty years after negotiations had begun—reached a
free-trade agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The deal
would cover 780 million people, but the completion of the negotiations between
the E.U. president and those of the South American countries was “just a first
stage before a long process”[1]
that would require passage by a qualified majority vote—meaning 55% of the E.U.
states and 55% of the E.U. population—in the E.U. Council and in the
European Parliament and in enough state legislatures. Presumably if
enough state ministers for trade in the E.U. Council vote yes, their respective
state governments would go along and also be sufficient for final passage. I
contend that the requirement that enough state legislatures also vote yes on
the deal is excessive.
The most obvious point to be made
concerning the excessiveness is that the state governments were directly
represented in the E.U. Council, so for those governments then to need to
approve the E.U.’s treaty is at best duplicative, and, at worse, enabling
opposition yet another means of thwarting final passage. Moreover, the treaty
is that of the E.U., rather than any of the state governments because the E.U.’s
executive branch negotiated the trade deal. To be sure, the presence of
non-trade terms in the deal, including binding commitments by the South
American countries to stop illegal deforestation, explains why the Commission
did not have exclusive competency, which the Commission had as of 2024 in commercial
policy as when President Van der Leyen had the Commission enact tariffs on
imports from China. Even though the
trade deal with four South American countries did not fall under the Commission’s
exclusive competency (i.e., domain of authority), this only means that the E.U.
Council and the Parliament had to approve the treaty too; non-exclusive
competency does not mean that the state governments must or even should
approve federal legislation (and E.U. treaties with other countries).
A subtle reason can also be cited
for why the E.U. is too fettered by the excessive role of the state legislatures
in being required to pass a federal trade treaty. Specifically, the ongoing
Euroskeptic, or states-rights (or “nationalist”), ideology, which had been so
unproductive for the E.U. precisely because of the extent of sovereignty that
the states retained (i.e., had not already delegated to the federal union), relishes
the duplication of the state governments’ power in passing federal trade
treaties as indicating that the E.U. had remained merely an alliance of sovereign
countries. Before Britain seceded from the Union, Prime Minister David Cameron
referred to the E.U. as just one of the networks to which Britain happened to
belong. With such a jarringly unreal notion of what the E.U. was politically,
it was best that that state seceded. The state of France had not been wrong in
halting Britain’s accession in the early 1970s.
In short, a bottom-heavy federal
system awash in an anti-federalist ideology can really be paralyzing at the
federal level. At the very least, having an excessive number of institutional hurdles
for a bill (or trade treaty) to become law undermines the legislative process. Moreover,
even dissolution is more likely to occur when the state governments wield a lot
of power over federal legislation.
This may seem trivial or even
silly, but words matter because language can feed (and starve) an ideology. Let’s
unpack the following passage from Euronews on the proposed trade deal: “Negotiators
from the Latin American bloc were assembled . . . with the EU trade
negotiation team to iron out the deal, that will cover 780 million people
between both zones. But the deal will need a sign off (sic) from EU 27
member states.”[2]
That European and American journalism often referred to the E.U. as a “bloc,”
even though an informal grouping of sovereign countries does not have a constitutional
(i.e., basic law) court, an executive branch, and a bi-cameral legislature
whereas the European Union contains the governmental European Court of Justice,
the E.U. Commission, the E.U. Council (like the U.S. Senate, representing the
states), and a (lower) Parliament, implies that in using the word “bloc” to
describe four South American countries as the Mercosur group, and we might
think too of the BRICS countries, those trade groups are of the same genre as a
federal union. That both the E.U. and U.S. cases of “modern federalism” include
dual sovereignty, wherein two governments have domains in which they are sovereign
for a given territory, nullifies the appellation of “bloc” or “zone” to either
union, even if anti-federalists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have
been in denial concerning this point.
At an academic talk at Harvard’s Center
for European Studies in which the dean of Boston University’s School of Global
Studies said that the E.U. does indeed have a federal system, a Harvard
graduate student dismissed this point and, in “asking” a question, insisted
that the E.U. is only an alliance of countries. I then asked the dean to
confirm her judgment that the E.U. is not an alliance, which she did. Yet I
doubt whether the Harvard graduate student had enough intellectual
humility to let this point sink in. In fact, at another talk at the Center, another
graduate student, who had been present at the visiting dean’s talk, insisted
that economically, a Swiss (county-sized) canton could be compared to “a
red or a blue state,” including Texas and California. That speaker, from MIT,
had said that in looking at the economic inequality between rural regions and a
metropolitan city, E.U. states should be compared with U.S. states rather than
with the U.S. overall (as there is no focal city of the U.S.). That the
European graduate student ignored this and implied that Switzerland is a United
States of Europe (and thus as equivalent to the E.U. even though the latter
treats Switzerland akin to a state in trade matters and free movement sans borders)
stunned me. I had been thinking of applying to be a visiting scholar at Harvard’s
Center for European Studies, but the stubborn, jejune disrespectful attitude of
the two graduate students, as well as their abject ignorance and yet presumption
concerning federalism theory, convinced me to cancel my application, for I was
already too old for the grief (and passive aggression). Also, I was not about
to buy an airline ticket to the E.U. only to be dismissed as a stupid American
for claiming that the E.U. has a federal system of government and is thus not a
“bloc” or “zone” equivalent to four countries in South America that have a
trading relationship.
Given the excessive ability of
state governments in the E.U. to styme federal legislation and treaties,
misconceiving the E.U. as a “bloc” or “zone” can cement the anti-federalist systemic
bias and thus render the E.U. itself as too paralyzed even with respect to federal
policy, regulations, law, and treaties that are at the level of the E.U.
and thus proper to it, with the state governments having direct federal access
through not only the E.U. Council (of Ministers), but also the European
Council, which sets the overall political priorities for the Union. Officials
of the state governments sit on both councils, and may even have excessive
influence over the political parties (not groups!) in the European Parliament.
That one of those parties, the European People’s Party, has nonetheless
been labeled as a “group” rather than a party from a state-level perspective is
yet another instance of how federal law-making must brace against a
head-wind of federal illegitimacy.
Lastly, it bears remembering that
thirty years from the U.S. having instituted a federal system characterized
chiefly by dual sovereignty in 1789 (before which the U.S. was an alliance, or
confederation, unlike the E.U.!), the American state governments had too
much sovereignty for the good of that union, given the multiple “Brexits” in
1861. To be sure, Lincoln was better off than General Washington had been in
fighting a war, for Lincoln’s Union had dual-sovereignty whereas Washington had
a confederation (i.e., the state governments were sovereign until 1789). Connecting the dots for my European friends
(and those Americans who are awake concerning the E.U. even existing), the E.U.
in 2024 was of the same federal genre or type as the U.S. had been since 1789
but not since 1776! Now this should get several Harvard graduate students from
Europe scratching their heads.
