E.U. President Von der Leyen’s
2026 State of the Union address can be characterized as a bricolage of concerns
“all over the map,” with proposed significant outsourcing of responsibilities
to the international level. A notable opportunity cost that goes along with her
approach is the political benefit that could have been gained by alternatively
focusing on internal reforms to the E.U.’s governance structure
and processes. Outsourcing internationally adds to this cost of a missed
opportunity to sell internal reforms by making the E.U.’s federal level look
weak. Even referring to the E.U. as a “bloc” and proposing an “associate
membership” for Canada saps rather than strengthens the European Union.
Rather than proposing that qualified-majority voting apply to foreign
policy and defense, President Von der Leyen “proposed a brand-new mechanism
fashioned on NATO’s Article 4 that member states would trigger in the event of
a hybrid attack.”[1]
She thus ignored the E.U. itself, addressing instead the relationship between
the E.U. states and the international alliance. By implication, the E.U. itself
is weakened rather than strengthened. This is ironic, for she also said, “And
in the cold fragility of today’s world, only Europe can provide true sovereignty
to Europeans.”[2]
Voiding the veto power of the state governments in the European Council and the
Council of Ministers on defense would go towards providing such true
sovereignty at the federal level; outsourcing to NATO would not.
Similarly, the president “offered to create a tailor-made status of ‘associate
membership’ to bring Canada even closer to the bloc.”[3] Such
a “status” would undermine the equality between Canada and the E.U. that is implied
and thus proper for “an ‘alliance for the future’ to deepen EU-Canada
cooperation in such areas of economic security, intelligent manufacturing,
cutting-age technology, defence, energy, critical minerals and batteries, as
well as the Arctic region.”[4]
Canada’s tension with the U.S. on tariffs and the E.U.’s interest in retaining
Greenland provide the subtext behind the proposed deepening of “EU-Canada
cooperation,” but the president overreached in suggesting that cooperation
itself should or does entail any sort of membership, and as if the
E.U. were a bloc rather than a political union of states, and the word “membership”
does not apply to states. In short, cooperating with another country is not to say
that it is or should be a member or state, and in fact being a part even with
an associate status is inconsistent with the equality that is implied in “E.U.-Canada
cooperation.” Ironically, rather than the E.U. coming up on top as having
Canada as a possible associate member, the E.U. is weakened because in having
members the union is self-relegated as if it were merely an international bloc
of countries like BRICS.
Thirdly, even though President Von der Leyen “framed the summer of 2026
as the ‘summer of truth’” in terms of “wildfires, retreating glaciers, water
shortages, crop losses and extreme heat that have wrecked havoc” in the E.U.,
with the continent warming twice as much as the globe as a whole, her response was
to be a European Heatwave Plan, which would “address early-warning systems,
health preparedness, urban adaptation, and protection for vulnerable groups.”[5]
Federal legislation bearing on the states could have been proposed that goes far
beyond mere preparedness. Again, she was unwittingly enervating the Union by
putting the states out in front, in the driver’s seat as it were.
With the military threat from a belligerent Russian president to the east,
climate change from above, and a distancing U.S. administration to the west, and
the prospect of the accession of additional states at home, the E.U. could no
longer afford the veto mechanism that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán had so abused with
impunity at the cost of the common good of the E.U., but the State of the Union
speech did not include the rather obvious reform to qualified-majority voting
on all competencies. Furthermore, no substantial federal legislation was
proposed in defense (even of Ukraine), foreign policy, and to combat climate
change by reducing carbon emissions throughout the E.U. Such a reform, which
gives the E.U. some more governmental sovereignty even at the expense of that
of the state governments, could put the E.U. in a strengthened position
internationally such that the Union could pressure the U.S. administration to
ease up on Canada in terms of tariffs. A strengthened E.U. could arguably be
better for Canada than getting an associate membership status in a Union
misconstrued (and thus internally weakened) as an international organization.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
