Sometimes lemons can make use of
political gravity to become lemonade. Of course, behind the lemons are human
beings, who are of course innately economizers, political actors and moral
agents. When accosted by proposals that additional governmental sovereignty be
delegated from state governments to the federal level, state-government
officials feeling the gravitas of narrow self-interest are inclined to resist
even if the transfer is in the political and economic interest of the union as
well as all of its states. I am of course describing a drawback that goes with
state governments having too much power in a federal system, whose interests are
not always identical with those of a particular state or even those that
pertain to the state level as distinct from the federal level. I submit that a
federal system in which such dynamics are ignored in favor of focusing on particular
issues, such as the E.U.’s increased need for defense given Russia’s unprovoked
invasion of Ukraine, can gradually slip “off the rails” toward dissolution or
consolidation. By ceding the E.U. itself (i.e., the federal level) additional authority,
including for revenues and expenditures, the European Council, which is
composed of the state governors, could “kill two birds with one stone,” as that
saying goes. Those birds would be unbalanced state power in the E.U. at the
expense of a common purpose, and Russian President Putin’s military adventurism
in Eastern Europe.
One casualty of excessive state
power in a federal system is accountability that the federal institutions could
exercise on state governments whose officials willfully violate federal laws
and regulations. Those officials, I submit, are all too acclimated to turning
the “lemon” of being held accountable in the federal system into “lemonade” by
turning a proposal made by a branch of government at the federal level for more
authority at the expense of the power of the state governments (and thus of
their respective officials!) into a proposal to suspend the federal measure of
accountability on the state governments. In short, the state governors would be
saying to the federal officials: You want more federal power? We reject that
and will exercise the requested power ourselves and we need you to waive a
federal constraint, which some of us have been violating, in order for us to exercise
the power. I contend that this is how the following can (and should) be
interpreted and understood.
On February 14, 2025, the
President of the E.U.’s executive branch, the Commission—a name that seems more
imposing than The White House—announced that she would “propose to activate the
escape clause in the [union’s] fiscal rules in a bid to ‘substantially’ boost
member states’ defense investment.”[1]
Alternatively, the federal president could have carried through with her
earlier proposal to increase the E.U.’s own authority in defense, thus enabling
the union to benefit in terms of security from collective action instead of
each state doing its own thing. Arguably, such collective action would be
necessary should the U.S. back off from defending the E.U. against potential
and actualized threats from Russia.
From the perspective of a governor
of a state in the E.U., the benefits from going beyond coordinating to pool
military defense at the federal level are less important than gutting the federal
requirement (in the Stability and Growth Pact, which is really a federal law
rather than a pact) that state fiscal deficits be “under 3% of GDP and
debt under 60% of GDP” of a given state.[2] Seeking to obviate the Commission’s Excessive
Deficit Procedure (EDP), which includes penalties, including fines, on
violators, the governors meeting in the European Council had only weeks earlier
stated a preference for putting the EDP on ice so the states could increase
their defense spending (and not have to pay fines) instead of enhancing the
Commission’s defense competency (i.e., enumerated power) at the expense of the
remaining sovereignty that the states still had.
Eight states—Belgium, France,
Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia—were in violation of the limits
on deficits and/or debt. It is no coincidence that the governments of the E.U.
states of Poland, Italy, Greece and the Baltic states had been requesting that
the Commission review the required limits on state deficits and debt. It also
no coincidence that at the “informal” session of the European Council held only
weeks earlier, the state officials considered lifting the required limits to be
“among the least controversial options on the table.”[3]
Waiving being held accountable is of course not controversial for the people
who would otherwise be held accountable. Relative to the Council, the power of
the Commission and the Parliament individually and even combined was
insufficient to object, citing both a federal system’s need that state
governments be held accountable when they violate federal law and regulations
and the defense-benefits from the collective action in energizing the E.U.
competency on defense.
Put another way, to the E.U. state governors, removing the federal constraint on state spending that is not covered by tax revenue and resisting the delegation of additional governmental sovereignty to the federal government are more important—both for self-interested reasons—than strengthening both the union’s federal system, such that the federal level could effectively hold violating state governments accountable and thus make federal law real rather than mere parchment, and the union’s ability to stand up militarily as a unit rather than conglomeration to Putin, especially as the U.S. was sending clear signals of a desire to pull back from defending Europe from Russia. The triumph of narrow, private-benefit-delimited—self-interest over the good of the whole—in this case, Europe—and the related (i.e., not coincidental!) political weakness of federal officials to be a check on the exploitation of the conflict of interest at the state level are themselves (and especially together!) internal threats to the viability of the European Union. Lest the threat be presumed to be solely external, from Russia being militarily in the Ukraine, E.U. citizens could have done worse than exchange their binoculars for microscopes, at least for a while.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
