Thursday, July 30, 2026

The European Civil Protection Pool: Insufficient for the E.U.'s Civil Protection Mechanism

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.

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

A Temporary Alignment of Politics and Religion: The U.S. Senate Sanctions Russia after a Funeral

It is easy to point to instances in which elected government-officials stage political theater for effect, for in the domain of politics, perception has a political currency that can leave a real imprint almost as if the staged were actual rather than pretense. When the leader of one group takes over as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from a person of another partisan group, for example, it is customary for them for the mallet literally to be handed over. In the U.S. Senate, its president, who is also the Vice President of the U.S., may sit in the presider’s chair during a vote if a tie is expected; the Senate President can vote only to break a tie. A certain depth of political meaning can go along with the actual presider presiding. Sometimes, however, an arrangement can have a depth of meaning as well as carry actual political weight. The Senate’s vote on additional economic sanctions on Russia on July 28, 2026 is a case in point, for the synchronicity itself could have caused goose-bumps on exposed skin. Even so, even profound political meaning (and fulfilment) is a far shot from religious belief and experience. Distinguishing these is important in this case, for the day of the vote included a very relevant funeral at the National Cathedral that many senators no doubt attended, and could be expected to ponder their own mortality and what may lie beyond.

The vote took place just hours after the funeral of Sen. Graham of South Carolina; that he, along with Sen. Blumenthal of Connecticut, had been the main Senate negotiator on the underlying deal with the White House meant that the timing of the vote was no accident and could be expected to be felt emotionally by the senators voting in the affirmative. As if this alignment were not laden with enough political-emotional meaning for the senators, the sitting president of Ukraine was watching the vote in the Senate gallery in the chamber, and such a relevant and high-status presence is itself remarkable. Referring to Zelensky, Sen. Blumenthal remarked, “watching his face when he was in the gallery as we were voting was truly a moment of joy.”[1] The word truly may be overused by politicians, but in this case, it is easy to believe the senator that the presence of the president of Ukraine enabled the 86 senators voting in favor to feel even a profound sense of meaning in what they were doing for an invaded people and its government. That Sen. Graham had been the chief negotiator of the legislation and many of his colleagues had been at his funeral just hours earlier may have added a sense of multi-layered significant meaning to the vote. The life/death element added to a sense of profound political meaning in a political act may even intimate a religious element in the mix.

Senators with a heightened sense of religiosity may have wondered whether a deity had weaved together the day’s events, and even been behind the passage of the legislation itself. The late senator is in heaven, a senator may have believed, and is looking down on what we’re doing in the chamber during this vote, and perhaps he even feels vindicated in his “hawkish” defense stance because the sitting president of Ukraine is even sitting in the gallery watching the vote! Unlike political meaning and significance felt profoundly, however, religious meaning and significance are qualitatively different. This means they are different in kind, rather than just that they are felt more deeply. To say that the late senator was in heaven is at best a loaded, controversial question; to posit the late senator’s soul has made it to heaven, assuming there is such a thing as an afterlife, goes far beyond anything that we can know, at least while we are corporeal.

To be sure, it could be that very moving political and religious meanings that affect a person profoundly are the same psychologically, rather than the religious sensibility being felt closer to one’s core sense of one’s being. Even so, the nature of the phenomenology of religion—the domain of religion—is very different than what the world of politics is. The political domain is entirely within our realm, and thus potentially is entirely within the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. From the perspective of the religious domain, the world of politics is entirely within Creation, rather than transcending it. Religious belief and experience, however, are “open-ended” in that they are oriented to a reality, point (e.g., an entity, such as a deity) that is inherently beyond those limits that pertain to Creation. This is the main idea of the sixth-century Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius.

For all that a senator’s sense of inner-fulfilment politically might be authentic, such as in casting a vote in favor of economic sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine unprovoked and thus in violation of international law (and in intentionally bombing civilian housing, a war crime), the experience at Sen. Graham’s funeral that a senator may have had in viewing one’s life, and life itself, as relative, and thus perhaps in yearning for a sense of inner peace that is based beyond, is fundamentally different. A senator would not ponder the afterlife anything like how the prospects of a pending piece of legislation would be assessed. Even though legislative Whips can be quite good at forecasting votes, none of us has any idea what, if anything, lies in store for us after we die. It follows that attempts to base a political system on any religious belief, which of course transcends human cognition, perception, and emotion by definition, is fraught with difficulty, to say the least. Even if seemingly successful, the output, such as the doctrine of the divine right of kings, can be said to be dogmatic in the sense of being too arbitrary to warrant any claims of being known rather than just a matter of belief.  


1. Mary C. Jalonick, Kevin Freking, and Lisa Mascaro, “Senate Takes First Steps on Russian Sanctions as Zelenskyy Watches from Senate Gallery,” APnews.com, July 28, 2026.


Tuesday, July 28, 2026

E.U. Federalism: On SIS Counterterrorism

The FBI was created in 1908, more than a century after the U.S. federal system of dual sovereignty had gone into effect in 1989; before then, the U.S. had been a military alliance and then a confederation of sovereign countries (under the Articles of Confederation). An ahistorical American mindset tends to overlook the international beginnings of that political union, and especially that the federal system designed in the Convention in 1787 incorporated both national and international elements into the federal level. This history bears not only on the American federal system, but also in how it can be accurately compared with the E.U.’s system, which also divided governmental sovereignty between the federal and state levels, and whose federal level also contains national and international elements, institutionally. Unfortunately for the E.U., the destructive technology available in the twenty-first century, as in advanced weaponry for mass destruction, has put pressure on E.U. officials to federalize intelligence-capabilities that could otherwise take over a century, as in the case of the U.S., to be federalized from the state level. Such pressure could exacerbate fears that the E.U. might be headed like a fast train to becoming a central state, consolidated at the expense of even its distinctly federal elements—for the U.S. had arguably consolidated too much, given its empire-scale, since at least the end of World War II.

A German citizen having some association with Lebanon intentionally drove into a crowd of people at a gay Pride festival in Berlin on 26 July, 2026, killing one person and injuring at least 29 others. “Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” the state’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.[1] The suspect, who would be killed by police after a manhunt, “had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group,” according to prosecutors.[2] Even though the problem facing Europeans regarding the presence of socially-conservative Muslims in the relatively open society of the E.U. had obviously not been solved, questions also swirled regarding the all-but-absent E.U. intelligence on the culprit. I contend that the state-biased federal system itself—one that the U.S. also had for over a century at the very least— is culpable.

Even though the Schengen Information System (SIS) “enables police, border guards and customs officers . . . to access real-time alerts on wanted criminals, missing persons and individuals linked to terrorism and other serious crimes,” the alerts are state to state, and even include four countries, so culprits can slip through the cracks.[3] “According to the European Commission, counterterrorism remains primarily the responsibility of individual member states,” with the federal level being limited to facilitating “cooperation through intelligence sharing and common security tools.”[4] Even though the Schengen Information System is “the EU’s common security database,” it allows state authorities “to identify and locate terrorist suspects,” a Commission spokesperson said at the time of the attack. The donut hole in the federal system is evident in the absence of federal authorities and with authority and a “EU-wide intelligence register showing how many people are under surveillance for suspected involvement in Islamic extremist networks,” as each state applies “its own legal definitions, surveillance thresholds, and monitoring practices.”[5] This problem should be obvious, and yet the state-centric bias in the Europeans’ approach to federalism at the empire-level (i.e., consisting of kingdom-level polities) had preempted any fruitful attempts to fill in the hole at the federal level such that it’s role would be more than coordinative.

In the parlance of American history, the anti-federalists (i.e., Euroskeptics) had successfully resisted the creation of an FBI-like agency at the federal (i.e., E.U.) level. That the weapons available to the bad guys had become considerably more dangerous than eighteenth-century muskets did not matter to state officials anxious to preserve their turf from what they would view as encroachment by the Commission. It is precisely this institutional and personal (power) conflict-of-interest that keeps the E.U. from moving to a balanced system of federalism. Such a balance requires more from the federal level than merely a coordinative role, especially if the operative network (i.e. the SIS) is not even limited to E.U. states!

To be sure, a glance over to Hong Kong since China regained control of the “special administrative area” could bring fears that a centralized intelligence operation run by the E.U. could result in “no dark corners” (i.e., security cameras covering every public area) in the E.U. and federal agents too numerous to count (even if they could be recognized) in every E.U. city. Furthermore, Edward Snowdon, once a NSA contractor in the U.S. had made public just how invasive the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had been in collecting data often without warrants even on American citizens.  E.U. citizens in turn could legitimately be worried about giving their consent to the Commission being expanded to include a NSA-comparable agency. Even just in using some words here that are likely to be “picked up” by the NSA or FBI, or even the CIA even though I am an American citizen within the U.S., I empathize with the fears of E.U. citizens who may have heard of the Pride attack yet still resisted calls to strengthen the E.U.’s intelligence capabilities at the federal level.

Whereas the overly-consolidating tendency of the U.S. at the expense of its federal system inhibits the member-states from acting as a collective check on excessive power at the federal level, the E.U. states were, at least as of 2026, fully able to act as a check should the Commission be charged with doing more than cooperative work in the intelligence field. Whereas in the U.S., it was tenuously assumed that the separation of powers within the federal level would protect citizens from inappropriate intrusion by federal intelligence agencies, E.U. citizens could count not only on the Parliament and the Councils to check the Commission, but also on the state governments to leverage their direct involvement at the federal level, via the Councils, to check the federal executive branch from over-reaching. In this respect, the E.U.’s federal system is healthier, but that assumes that more power is given to the Commission to be checked! It makes little sense to trumpet the ability of the states to act as a check on the Commission on X if the power to do X is still held by the states.

At a more abstract (i.e., federal theory) level, the coordinative role of a federal level is consistent with a confederal system in which, as in the U.S.’s Articles of Confederation, all governmental sovereignty is held by the states. Having federal institutions (and officials) do more than merely coordinate state activities is consistent with “modern” federalism, meaning federalism with dual sovereignty—at least some autonomy is reserved for the states and some for the Union itself. At the empire-scale (of territory), a political union benefits from diverse laws set by its parts as well as unified laws reflecting the common good of the whole. Dual-sovereignty not only allows for both, but also gives each some governmental autonomy from the reach of the other. As of 2026 at least, reliance on the SIS can thus be viewed as founded on a category mistake—taking the E.U. to be a confederation of still-sovereign states rather than a federal system in which both E.U. and state governmental institutions have some sovereignty. Qualified-majority voting alone is enough for dual-sovereignty to be demonstrated as extant in the E.U.’s federal system; exclusive competencies of the Commission add even more support. In short, matching the federal role with the E.U. as federal rather than merely confederal would enhance the security of E.U. citizens because the E.U. would be doing more than coordinative work as state officials of various states variously decide on thresholds for intelligence, and thus on what can be shared with other states.  


1. Stephen Sorace, “Berlin Pride Attack Suspect Killed in Police Confrontation: AP,” Foxnews.com, July 26, 2026.
2. Anna Weglarczyk, “Berlin Pride Attack Sparks Fresh Questions over EU Intelligence Sharing,” Euronews.com, 28 July, 2026.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

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