“State rights” was a common
refrain by the eleven U.S. member states who sought to exit in 1861; the
underlying fear was that the exclusive competencies, or enumerated powers, of
the U.S., combined with the numerous accessions of new states, were already
compromising the power of the eleven states to protect their economies from “encroachment.”
In 1858, for instance, a tariff disadvantageous to those economies had been
passed in spite of the “Southern” objections in the U.S. Senate. Had each
member state had a veto, rather than just the ability to filibuster, the eleven
states would have been able to protect the viability of their respective
economies from encroachment by the Union. To be sure, the state rights claim
that the U.S. was still just a bloc, as had been the case from 1781-1789 under
the Articles of Confederation, was sheer denial, for the U.S. Constitution
instituted a new kind of federalism—partly national, partly international—based
on dual sovereignty, wherein both the member states and the Union have a
portion of governmental sovereignty. It is this form of federalism, “modern
federalism,” that the Europeans adopted in creating the European Union because the
E.U. has exclusive competencies. But whereas the shift made by the Americans in
the eighteenth century left the state-veto behind at the Union level, the
Europeans retained the veto, which at the very least works against the
effective operation of modern federalism. The arduous and much delayed task on
a reparations loan for Ukraine in spite of the self-interested objection—and thus
promised veto—of one state is a case in point. Even the alternative of the E.U.
issuing debt faced state-level opposition, as was the case in the U.S. in the
1790s, but in that case, the self-interested states that were relatively clear
of debt could not stop the issuance because none of those states could wield a
veto at the federal level. This is important because back then, the American
states were still widely viewed as countries by their respective inhabitants. “I
must fight for my country,” General Lee told Lincoln in 1861, referring to
Virginia. A refresher on American history could help Europeans cross the
Rubicon to a more internally consistent modern federalism. Whether Euroskepticism
or States’ Rights, the ideology, as etched into the E.U.’s Basic Law, is
responsible for Van der Leyen’s headaches in getting the E.U. to put Ukraine in
a position of strength against the Russian invaders.
A Union of states that allows
a self-interested state to block federal action that is in the good of the
whole Union is weak. So, when Ursula von der Leyen said late in 2025 that the
European Commission would provide Belgium with sweeping guarantees to unblock a
controversial reparations loan for Ukraine, a state official representing
Belgium countered that the Commission’s proposals “do not address our concerns
in a satisfactory manner. It is not acceptable to use the money and leave us
alone facing the risks.”[1]
That Belgium’s government could wield its veto gives “not acceptable” the ring
of finality. This is despite the guarantees for Belgium consisting “of
bilateral contributions by member states, a backstop by the EU budget, legal
safeguards against retaliation and a new prohibition on transferring sovereign
assets back to Russia.”[2]
Experts could of course weigh in on how failproof these guarantees actually
would be.
From the perspective of the
E.U.’s federal system, the following statement made by President Von der Leyen
is crucial: “We have created a very strong solidarity mechanism where in the
very end the Union can intervene, because we want to make very sure to all our
member states, but specifically also to Belgium, that we will share the burden
in a fair way, as it is the European way.”[3]
The problem is that to state officials, relying only on “the European way” was
insufficient; the veto in the European Council and the Council of Ministers was
also felt to be necessary for self-protection. Hence Belgium’s language includes
“not acceptable.” Mistrust of the E.U. may be behind at least some of the
resistance of the states to agree to an expansion of qualified majority voting.
For the eleven U.S. member
states who tried in vain to exit the U.S. in 1861, another kind of qualified
majority voting in the U.S. Senate was deemed to be insufficient to safeguard
the Southern agrarian economies based on Plantation-level slave-labor. But for
the E.U.’s state-veto, we have to go back to the disastrous Articles of
Confederation Between the Several States, wherein the U.S. depended on voluntary
financial contributions from the states and there was no common debt. The state-veto
that is justified in confederal systems by the fact that all of the governmental
sovereignty is retained by the states is toxic in modern federalism because the
federal level is too prone to being hamstrung even with regard to proposals
that are in the interests of the whole even if not in the self-interest of each
and every state. A part should not be able to upend the common good.
That Von der Leyen had to go to such lengths that Belgium would have guarantees for its financial interest in attracting sovereign wealth funds in the future is indicative of just how toxic the state-veto mechanism is, especially when Russia was succeeding in invading Ukraine for years by the end of 2025 when the E.U. was yet again proposing a reparations loan (or common debt). This point alone should disabuse any State Rights folks from clutching so tight to the veto. Also, in a union of states, sometimes a state “takes one for the team.” This is true solidarity. “Man up,” may be the relevant expression, given Belgium’s intransigence, but, then again, I’m an American, hence rather crude and thus unbecoming at a European dinner party. “Lose the veto, guys,” I would readily and flatly say amid polite, too polished conversation.
The problem is that no one likes to give up power unless in a crisis, and an invasion to the east is evidently not a crisis. It may be that, like the Schengen Agreement and the Stability Pact, an exogenous “more closer union” may need to be formed by the more federalist-leaning states, sans the sordid veto, for another budget as well as foreign and defense policy. Instead of the 55% in qualified-majority voting (QMV), perhaps 60%, which matches the percent needed in the U.S. Senate to overcome a filibuster, could be used as a compromise. This is not to say that the E.U. and U.S. should converge; the Europeans are smart to fear the sort of consolidation at the Union level that eclipses any sort of federalism, and thus needed space for the states to act as per their respective cultures and ideologies. The American case clearly demonstrates that a citizenry giving primary loyalty to the state level cannot be relied upon as a safeguard in the distant future against creeping encroachments by the Union on the sovereignty retained by the member states. Even so, whereas the U.S. by 2025 had lapsed too close to consolidation at the expense of federalism, the E.U. risked dissolution by states plying themselves away from an ineffectual, internally hamstrung Union, for no one likes to be a part of self-inflicted weakness. Nietzsche taught us this.
