Thursday, September 3, 2026

A State Representing the E.U. at the G20

From August 29 through September 1, 2026, the G20 met in North Carolina in the U.S.; the E.U. was represented by one of its states, Ireland, because it was charged with chairing the sessions of the European Council of Ministers, which in turn plays a legislative role, as does the European Parliament, whereas the European Commission is the E.U.’s executive branch. Such international meetings as those of the G20 are attended by officials from executive rather than legislative branches of government. Accordingly, the economy commissioner, Valdis Dombrovskis, along with President von der Leyen should have been representing the E.U. at the meeting.

To label Ireland as holding the presidency of the E.U. for the second half of 2026 is utterly misleading. In actuality, state-level ministers of Ireland were chairing sessions of the European Council of Ministers, which is just one of several federal institutions of the European Union. The president of the E.U.’s executive branch could more accurately be referred to as the president of the E.U. itself, just as the head of the U.S.’s executive branch is styled as the president of the United States. Unlike the U.S., the E.U. went to excess in coining presidents throughout the federal level.

Within the false label of the Irish presidency of the E.U., even though Tánaiste Harris was the finance minister of the E.U. state of Ireland, his role at the federal level was legislative in chairing sessions of the Council of Ministers in which federal laws, rules, and directives were formulated and voted on. Because executive rather than legislative officials attend the G20, Dombrovskis, along with Von der Leyen, should have taken Harris’s place.

The oversight in sending a federal legislative official to the G20 meeting stems from the broader problem of the over-emphasis of the states at the federal level. In the U.S., the member-states are represented in the U.S. Senate, and even so only indirectly through popularly-elected delegates, which are called senators, rather than directly by state officials from the states’ respective executive branches. Whereas the U.S. states are only represented at the federal level in the U.S. Senate, E.U. states are represented at the E.U. level in both the European Council and the Council of Ministers. The most obvious reason for the additional role for the states is fear of encroachment by the E.U. on the prerogatives of the states, and all the Europeans had to do was to look over at the consolidating power over decades of the U.S. at the expense of its states. The concern is thus justified, but the founders of the E.U. may have gone too far.

For one thing, the economic and geopolitical interests of a state are not necessarily the same as those of the union that includes the state. So, a conflict of interest was possible in that, besides representing the E.U., Harris was scheduled to “hold bilateral meetings” with officials from the G20 countries (which are not “member states” as the G20 does not have a federal governmental system).[1] The word bilateral signals that the discussions were between Ireland, which is not in the G20, and the executive-branch officials of the G20 countries, so Harris would be pursuing Irish rather than European interests in those discussions. Aside from the fact that his presence at the G20 was to represent the E.U., it was not fair to other countries not in the G20 that Ireland was able to have bilateral talks at the meeting. It would be much simpler were the E.U. represented at international meetings by federal officials in the Commission. In short, the influence of the state governments at the federal level in the E.U. had become excessive.