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On his first visit to the Turkish capital since becoming prime minister in May, 2010, David Cameron of the EU state of Britain likened the state of France’s opposition to Turkey’s bid join the EU to the French veto of Britain’s bid to become part of the EEC in the 1960s. I contend that his is a faulty comparison. Britian and Turkey do not occupy the same situs with respect to Europe. Notwithstanding the claim by some that not being on the contenent renders the British non-Europeans, Britain is in Europe. British culture is European. In contrast, only ten percent of Turkey is on the continent, and the Turkish culture is dissimilar to that in Europe.

Cameron also pointed to Turkey’s role in NATO, particularly with respect to the alliance's role in Afghanistan.  However, Turkey made it clear that it will not join EU sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. Turkey does not have the same interests as do the states in Europe. For European leaders to essentially use Turkey as a state in order to have more influence in the Arab world is problematic. First, the Turks would not necessarily be welcomed by the Arabs as intermediaries, given the history and perceptions between the two groups. Secondly, the accession could force the EU to take an active role in resolving the Kurd issue in eastern Turkey (and northern Iraq). Rather than giving the Europeans more influence in the Middle East, having Turkey as a state could put the EU in a mire it can ill-afford, given its own challences within the current EU. In short, European strategic over-reaching could compromise what has been accomplished thus far in terms of European integration.


To add a very large Middle Eastern state to a union of European states would compromise, and perhaps buckle, the EU.  Already, the EU has struggled to make changes internally to accommodate its expansion to the east.  Turkey’s very different culture and interests could render the EU impotent, given the amount of power still being exercised by the governments of its states. Rather than use the EU to gain leverage in the Middle East, I recommend that Europeans solidify their “ever closer union” so it will be able to withstand the inevitable political storms in Europe.

As Britain is one of the more “euroskeptic” states in the EU, it is possible that Cameron made his statements in the hope that expanding the EU beyond Europe would effectively relegate the union into an international organization. As the EU stands now, it has an executive branch, a legislature (a Parliament and a Senate, or Council), and a supreme court (the ECJ).  From a euroskeptic standpoint, the EU’s government simply does not exist.  Admitting Turkey (and other non-European states) would make the EU more international and less of a federal union of governance. That is to say, the move would undo the EU.

To be sure, Britain is just one of 27 states in the EU. With regard to Turkey’s accession as the 28th state, 35 “chapter,” or subject areas, would need to be agreed on. As of July, 2010, only 13 had been opened and only one — research and development — had been provisionally concluded. Most of the rest were blocked — five by France — leaving the realistic prospect that only a further three could still be opened.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/world/europe/28iht-britain.html?_r=1&hp

“In a sense, Europe seemed to be living down to expectations. Earlier, the foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, warned against a 'minimalist solution' that would reduce the European Union’s 'opportunity to have a clear voice in the world.'"  Olivier Ferrand, president of Terra Nova, a center-left research institute in France, said, “It is quite astounding. . . . It is jaw-dropping. It is the end of ambition for the E.U. — really disappointing.”

I think these are rather extreme positions on the selection of Herman Van Rompuy on November 19, 2009 as the first non-rotated president of the European Council.  Moreover, I don’t think the E.U. is going the way of the dinasaur just because Van Rompuy was not well known at the time of his selection.  He has written six books, is a writer of Japanese poems, has consensus-skills, and seems humble enough.  Would popular election have yielded a better candidate? As the election would have been E.U.-wide, it is doubtful that a high proportion of the voters would have been sufficiently familiar with him to make an informed decision. 

The New York Times continues, “The deal that produced the two choices emerged as a result of backroom negotiations among leaders jockeying for future and more important economic portfolios that could be more powerful in the enlarged European Union, which is still more of an economic union than a political one and looks to remain so.”  However, the E.U. includes a popularly-elected Parliament. Is a parliament not political? Is a parliament not a government body?  Perhaps, moreover, we should simply say that transfers of sovereignty are now economic in nature.

One might ask: who would have a vested interest in perpetrating such a subterfuge wherein governmental institutions, whether intergovernmental (e.g., the European Council) or national (e.g., the E.U. Parliament) are to be portrayed as solely economic in nature? According to The New York Times,  “The leaders of Europe’s most powerful countries, France and Germany, did not want to be overshadowed. Nor apparently did their foreign ministers.”   After the European Council elected Van Rompuy, Gordon Brown, the then-current British Prime Minister who had been pushing for Tony Blair (his precursor), told reporters that the posts are only ceremonial anyway since the state governments are still in control.  However, is Van Rompuy's role in presiding over the European Council merely for show? Is there not power in chairing a political institution? Furthermore, are the heads of the state governments in charge of the E.U. Commission, the E.U. Parliament, and the European Court of Justice? Even within the European Council where the governors of the states sit, qualified majority voting on most issues means that any given state government is not in control. We can conclude that E.U. level officials are not mere gloss on a window, and that the member states have indeed transferred some of their governmental sovereignty to the E.U. Government. Lest is be thought otherwise--that the E.U. does not have a government, there is a saying in English: If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, odds are it is a duck.  It might be useful to ask why it is in the interest of some that the obvious conclusion be withheld.

My only caveat concerning the selection of Van Rompuy is that the consensus maker was not the sort to make transparent the "duck" subterfuge and denial, which had gone unchecked at the expense of greater European integration. In other words, the E.U. needs its own leaders who can garnish attention for the E.U. itself (i.e., apart from its state governments) because if integration falters, the danger will be dissolution unless or until more governmental sovereignty is transferred to the E.U. As for Van Rompuy's low name recognition outside Belgium at the time of his selection, let’s not forget that few, if any, presidents of the U.S. Senate (the Vice President of the U.S.) have been known at the beginning of their respective terms. Of course, outside of breaking tie votes, the president of the U.S. Senate (whose members are the member states of the union) is more ceremonial than is the president of the European Council.  In fact, senators regularly stand in for the presiding officer when the U.S. Senate is in session, whereas Van Rompuy himself presides over sessions of the European Council.  Also, the European Council is possibly more powerful among E.U. governmental institutions than the U.S. Senate is in the U.S. This is probably so because the state governments in the E.U. have more power at the E.U. level than the American state governments do in the U.S. This could explain why Van Rompuy's position, the President of the European Council, is powerful (because the Council he chairs is powerful) even if Van Rompuy had been an unknown outside of Belgium and was not an attention-getter in the media (e.g., unlike Tony Blair).

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/world/europe/20union.html?_r=1&ref=world

In other posts, I have argued that the EU and the US are of the same political genus or level.  That is, both are modern empire-level Unions that contain polities on the scale of the early modern kingdom.  In other words, the American states are roughly equivalent to the European states.  I have also argued that once this basis of comparison is established, useful comparisons (and contrasts) can be made.  Contrarywise, likening apples with oranges is apt to lead to erroneous conclusions (which has been the norm).   In the March 2, 2010 issue of the NYT, Roger Cohen illustrates how useful EU-US comparisons can be.  He is careful to compare the EU now not to the current US, but to the US a few decades into its founding.  One would not compare new with old wine; new should be compared with old when it too was new.   The US under its Articles treaty (and before that as a military alliance) was far less integrated politically and economically than the EU is today (which is roughly at where the US was in 1790). 

Lamenting the concern of the EU states that have done a better job than others (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) on debt-management, Cohen sees a parallel in the early US.  He writes, “More than two centuries ago, the newborn United States faced a similar crisis of integration. With the Constitution approved, Alexander Hamilton, as treasury secretary to President George Washington, grappled with proving that the government of the 13 states that now existed on paper could function in practice. The economy was a shambles, beset by debt incurred in the fight for liberty. In 1790, Hamilton set about establishing the financial credibility of the federal government. Central to his proposals was that the government would assume the debts of the states. This precipitated the “assumption” crisis because different states had different levels of debts and had proved more or less conscientious in paying them off.”  Cohen maintains that a similar “assumption” crisis would befall the EU as states like Finland and Germany brissle at the EU assuming the outstanding debt of some of the Southern states (notably Greece).

Cohen goes on to note that the “assumption” crisis was resolved in the US by creating Washington, D.C. near Virginia to appease Madison and Jefferson (the US’s institutions had been in New York City).  Cohen doesn’t see any such deal in the works in Europe, so he concludes that the tensions between having a centralized currency and federal (i.e., EU and state-level) fiscal policy will continue.  Comparing oranges with oranges (which is rare…at least during the winter of 2010 given Florida’s cold weather then), he argues that “Greece is a far smaller economy than crisis-hit California, but thanks to Hamilton, California’s travails are absorbed within a huge economy where most taxing and spending is done by the federal government. Athens agonistes has no such cushion.” This is a very good point.  After the earthquake of 2010 in Chile, I was thinking along similar lines (i.e., the difference that a SAU would make for Chile’s recovery). 

However, Cohen falters from his otherwise excellent basis of comparison.  Ignoring the governmental sovereignty that the European Court of Justice has ruled belongs to the EU over its state governments (and constitutions), he  views the EU as simply “the halfway house of monetary union, fiscal divergence and à la carte national politics.”  In actuality, the EU is far more—just ask a European whether he or she has encountered any of the EU’s laws and regulations (which go beyond monetary union).  I suspect that Cohen is thinking of the EU only in terms of its monetary authority and generalizing that to “what Europe is.”  His ending line, “The differences between America and Europe go beyond the political to their very nature,” can be interpreted as a denial of the EU-US basis of comparison that is the basis of his comparisons (oranges with oranges).  If the EU is merely economic whereas the early US was political and economic, then the EU and US are not of the same political genus, which would render comparisons between them questionable at best.  But the EU does have political or governmental institutions, such as a court (the ECJ) and a parliament.  The ECJ functions as the Supreme Court (even ruling against state constitutions at odds with EU law in an EU enumerated power).  Furthermore, the EU Parliament has a role in the enactment of laws that cannot be reduced to state laws.

Undoubtedly from his truncated view of the EU,  Cohen generalizes too much in concluding that “ever closer union” will not occur in the EU because of the differences among the state governments’ respective debt-levels (relative to the state economies).  The EU is much more than a currency, I would argue, and other lines of integration will not necessarily be impeded by monetary divergences.  To be sure, political differences from the latter may spill over onto other policy domains, but I believe that Cohen is being to much of a monetary reductionist in casting doom on the EU as a whole.

Comparing the EU now to the US in 1790, there are more adequate structural safeguards against consolidation at the Union-level of government than there were in the US.  For example, the heads of the state governments sit on the European Council whereas the counterparts in the US sent delegates to the US Senate (which represents the state governments even today).  The US could learn a thing or two from the Europeans and replace the US Senate with the Governor’s Association.  More balance in power between the state governments and that of the Union would be more likely as a result.  Of course, that the EU began with regulations and is only now picking up powers that are more typical for the Union level could mean that the EU could consolidate power from its state governments (esp. as Europeans gain more of a sense of being Europeans…perhaps in 100 years or so…as was the case in the US).

My advise to the Europeans is: don’t be afraid to deny all that the EU has become, and redouble your efforts to safeguard the state governments from an encroaching EU government.  These to things sound contradictory, but they are not.   For only by realizing what the EU is politically (i.e., a federal government) will you realize how important it is to construct a federal structure that works against a consolidation of power far from the people of Europe.  Of course, this does not mean starving the EU, for then dissolution and possible future wars would be likely.  So it is a federal balance that should be strived for, and you can structure your Union (and its states) in such a way that balance is achieved (you are not yet there) and maintained.  US History provides a case study of what NOT to do if this is your goal.  We have really screwed up federalism here (and most of us don’t even realize it).  Hopefully, by comparing the EU with the US you can do better.  Maybe that will prompt folks like Cohen to look at Europe and say, “Hey, we can do that too. Afterall, the US is a Union of states too.”   It is of course possible to re-trace and correct for a wrong turn federally speaking.  Anyway, bonne chance, mes Amies!  Gut Gleuck! Viel, viel Gleuck!

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/opinion/02iht-edcohen.html?hp

Thousands of Romania’s Roma, also known as Gypsies, have been heading for the relative wealth of Western Europe, and setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” are. Migration within the 27 nations of the European Union has become a combustible issue during the economic downturn. The union’s latest expansion, which brought in the relatively poor nations of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, has renewed concern that the poor, traveling far from home in search of work, will become a burden on wealthier countries. The migration of the Roma is also raising questions about the obligations of Romania and Bulgaria to fulfill promises they made when they joined the union. Romania, for instance, mapped out a strategy for helping the Roma, but financed little of it.

Nicolas Sarkozy of the state of France has demanded that the Romanian government do more to aid the Roma at home. He vowed to keep dismantling immigrant camps and angrily rejected complaints from EU Commission officials that the French authorities were illegally singling out Roma for deportation. Mr. Sarkozy has tried to revive his support on the political right by deporting thousands of them, offering 300 euros, about $392, to those who go home voluntarily, and bulldozing their encampments. The European Commission has threatened legal action against Paris over the deportation, calling it disgraceful and illegal.

This case illustrates the problem the EU has in enforcing compliance of the terms of the accession talks of new states. In addition, this case puts the power relation between the EU and its state governments under palpable pressure. Lastly, the case showcases the difficulty involved in integrating Europe.  More than a common market, the EU states have open borders.  This appreciably decreases the power, and indeed sovereignty, of the state governments such as France and Germany—governments that were hitherto used to being in the driver’s seat.  So it will be interesting to see whether Sarkozy bows to the EU government or the ECJ (the EU’s Supreme Court) when he is under what must be strong domestic pressure to get rid of the Roma.

Relative to Arizona’s new immigration law, France’s deportation of a race of people is radical. Yet whereas in the US France’s policy would produce a vitriolic response from the media and the left, in the EU it is largely the EU government that is objecting. This difference points to a difference between American and European culture.  Perhaps due to the relatively recent history of racial slavery in some of the American states, there is more sensitivity to race in the US—yet there is also racism in the US. Perhaps the racism in the US is one on one now, whereas the racism in the EU is in some state policies.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/world/europe/17roma.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

The Hungarian state government assumed the over-all presidency of the E.U. on January 1, 2011 for six months. This instantly put the question of whether some of the state laws enacted the previous year violated E.U. constitutional law.  The extent of the breach is itself instructive for us in wondering how it is that a state government could find itself so obviously in violation and yet look the other way.  In other words, this case study suggests that European integration, and federal government in general at the empire-level, is not exempted from the tensions in federalism between the state governments and a general authority tasked with holding the union together. According to The Wall Street Journal,  "In some ways the dispute between Budapest and Brussels goes to the heart of a debate over the proper distribution of power between national governemtns and the central authorities of the European Union."  Hungary's governor, Viktor Orban, stated, "The EU basically has no right to interfere" in these sorts of policy decisions. In 2008, EU government officials had criticized Hungarian officials for relying on short-term fixes rather than long-term spending cuts to shirk the state's budget deficit.

In Hungary, "crisis" taxes that fell disproportionately on out-of-state businesses doing business in the state had been enacted.  The European Court of Justice had previously ruled against such taxes having a disproportionate effect, yet somehow the Hungarian legislature missed this point in enacting the law. It should come as no surprise that officials of other state governments in the E.U. claimed that Hungary was targeting select sectors and out-of-state companies in particular to balance the state's budget. Even so, a state official in Hungary claimed that the "question is: how much economic liberty you have in the EU? We think every state does hoave economic freedom--within a certain framework, we have different methods and models."  While the notion of a shared framework allowing of diversity fits with modern federalism, the diversity cannot contradict the basic principles in the framework.  In this case, a common market requires that states do not discriminate in intention or consequence against firms based in other states. In other words, a common market requires a level playing field.

Secondly, the state legislature enacted a new media law that became quite controversial in the E.U. The law passed by the state legislature in late 2009 allowed regulators to impose fines for "unbalanced" or 'offensive" reports and sets limits for the amount of time that can be devoted to certain types of news. The law also required bloggers to register with the state government. It should be <i>prime facie </i> evident that this law goes against the E.U.'s commitment to freedom of the press.  Guy Verhofstadt, leader of one of the parties in the E.U. Parliament, stressed that no state government should be allowed to put "restrictions to freedoms that lie at the heart of our union of values." From the standpoint of republican principles alone (i.e, being a representative democracy, or "free"), a government fining journalists for being unbalanced or for their allocation of news stories is odious. That a state government in the E.U. would even attempt such a thing ought to give pause to anyone who assumes that it most of the governmental sovereignty in the E.U. should remain with the states. In other words, there is a real need for the E.U. governmental institutions to provide a check with teeth on wayward states, or the union will dissipate.

Finally, European Central Bank officials claim the Hungarian government's changing of the selection process of the state's bank's rate-setting committee threatens the bank's independence. This change of law in Hungary illustrates the difficulties involved in having monetary policy set at the E.U. level (for states using the euro as their currency) while fiscal policy is set at the state level.  Bringing fiscal policy to the E.U. institutions would give the E.U. the added puissance it would need to effectuate a viable check on state governments that for one reason or another are confused about E.U. basic law and principles.  In other words, because the state governments being on the same page concerning the E.U. and its principles cannot be taken for granted, so more power should transfer to the E.U. level from the states--though while working on institutional firewalls to keep the E.U. government from encroaching on the states such that a consolidated central state results (similar to what has happened in the U.S.). 

Source: Gordon Fairclough, "European Probe Fuels Tensions with Hungary," The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2011, p. A11.