The European Civil Protection
Pool (ECPP) was established in 2013 to provide emergency response personnel and
equipment to combat natural and man-made disasters in Europe. The Pool is the
central component of the E.U. Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM). However, the
ECPP depends on voluntary contributions from the state governments and
even extends beyond the E.U. to include ten European sovereign states. The
reliance on voluntary contributions, as well as the distended coverage beyond
the E.U. have a weakening impact on the ability of the European Commission, the
E.U.’s executive branch, to respond to raging forest fires, as were out of control
in several southern states during the summer of 2026. Heat-wave after heat-wave
plus decades of those states allowing deadwood to accumulate in the forests (the
same error had also exacerbated the massive 1988 fire in Yellowstone and Grand
Teton parks in Wyoming) provided a “perfect storm” for raging fires by July.
Even the Commission’s emphasis on prevention had not been enough, given the
reliance on the states, literally to have enough brush and dead trees culled
prior to the hot summer. I contend that the Commission having to rely on the states
(and even ten other countries!) to contribute personnel and equipment in the ECPP
program, which is in line with the Commission’s typical coordinative approach,
is out of step with the E.U.’s actual federal system of dual sovereignty
because a mere coordinating role fits what Althusius, in his 1603 text, Political
Digest, calls non-plena foedus (non-full federalism: all
governmental sovereignty is at the state level).
With hundreds of thousands
being “forced to evacuate their homes as flames spread across several regions”
of the E.U., questions were being raised in late July, 2026 “over whether Europe’s
crisis management systems [were] adapting fast enough.”[1]
In two E.U. states alone, more than 120,000 hectares had burned. Even though
E.U. President Von der Leyen wrote at the time, “My thoughts are with the
firefighters who bravely battle the flames and with all those [people who have
been] evacuated,”[2]
her first administration had put the emphasis on preventing rather than
fighting fires under the assumption that if the fires are prevented, then not
much effort and money would be needed to combat fires once they are underway. The
problem, however, was not limited to a faulty policy-orientation at the federal
level. Crucially, the European Civil Protection Pool in the UCPM relied on voluntary
contributions from the states, and even other countries beyond the purview of
the Commission! To be sure, several states, along with Turkey, sent firefighters
and equipment to the fires, but not soon enough for the fires to have been
extinguished when they were small. That the massive scale of the fires could have
been anticipated as a result of climate change lays even more culpability on
the Commission both in regard to its emphasis on prevention and its unwillingness
to propose a federal firefighting force of personnel and equipment under the
direct authority of the Commission.
In the early U.S., the
Articles of Confederation, in force from 1781-1789, and prior to that, the
military alliance, also relied on voluntary contributions by what were
sovereign countries known generically as “states” because their permanent forms
of government had not yet been decide. General Washington’s complaints to the
Continental Congress for want of men and supplies merely frustrated the delegates
from the countries whose respective governments had sole discretion on how much
to supply to the cause of independence.
From its founding in 1993, the
E.U.’s states have shared governmental sovereignty with the federal
governmental institutions, including the European Parliament, whose elected
representatives represent E.U. citizens rather than the states, and the
Commission. Even in the European Council and the Council of Ministers,
qualified-majority voting on a significant number of federal enumerated powers,
or competencies, represents a transfer of some sovereignty from the states to
the Union. The E.U.’s supreme court, the European Court of Justice, also limits
state sovereignty, and thus even the authority of the highest state courts. Accordingly,
the Commission’s role should go beyond coordinating voluntary contributions
from states.
To be sure, it could be argued
that it took the U.S. more than a century to treaty a federal income tax, and for
the U.S. federal military to outgrow the preponderance of the state armies (the
Guards). Even as of 2026, the federal president was obliged to return the state
armies to their respective commanders-in-chiefs—the governors of the still
semi-sovereign states. Regarding forest fires, it was not until 1849 that the
U.S. Department of the Interior was created, and not until 1916 that the U.S.
Park Service was established and began fighting forest fires, and not until
2026 that the federal Interior Department launched the U.S. Wildland Fire Service
to consolidate what had been decentralized efforts.
In 2026, the predicted impact
of a hotter climate on forest fires was obvious in the E.U., even though
astonishingly some politicians were still peddling climate-change denial. Referring
to “lots of new parliamentarians in the European Parliament” and state-level
politicians who were being “being very vocal against climate science and
climate action,” Teresa Ribera, the E.U. Commission Vice President, warned at
the end of July, 2026 that those politicians were “lying to people” and putting
lives at risk.[3] It’s
like telling people that they can drink as much whiskey as they want and then
drive a car, she added. Perhaps that goes a bit too far, but her point that
denying natural science is stupid and even destructive is valid, given all the
data and the actual fires that year. She could have added that ideology
trumping knowledge is itself dangerous. Volunteering at a San Francisco film
festival in California during the summer of 2026, I was stunned when two young
lesbian women walking out of the film on my first shift chastised me with, “it
doesn’t work that way,” because I had just remarked that the sex scene in the
film was homosexual; the label fits because both women in the scene have vaginas.
Obviously, the mental state of one or both of those characters does not render
the physical act in the scene heterosexual, but this fact didn’t stop the young
lesbians from decrying my statement as “inappropriate” from the standpoint their
ideology. An elected representative saying, “I don’t believe in climate
change,” is just as culpable from the standpoint of knowledge.[4]
Suffice it to say that for several
reasons, the E.U. could not patiently wait out a century or more to federalize
a fire-fighting capability beyond merely coordinating voluntary contributions
from states and other European countries. The expedited basis with which to
shift from a state-centric power standpoint to a more balanced federal system does
have the advantage of being able to learn from another political union with the
same (dual-sovereignty) genus of federalism and thus avoid that union’s
over-consolidating federal legislation during the twentieth century. In other
words, the Commission could be given more authority with which to directly send
personnel and equipment to fires without fear that the E.U. would be on track
toward a centralized federal state at the expense of the cultural and political
interstate diversity that exists in any empire-scale federal union.
2. Ibid.
3. Marta Pacheco, “E.U.’s Competition Chief Ribera Slams Climate Deniers as Fires Rage: ‘They Are Lying,” Euronews.com, 30 July, 2026.
