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While EU member states as a whole have agreed to the draft resolution, there has been a certain amount of opposition and a number of EU nations have voiced concerns about what they see as the next step towards a European super-state which they fear will erode national sovereignty within Europe and remove the need for independent foreign policy. Britain in particular is concerned that the new powers will undermine its role on the UN Security Council and reports have surfaced that British Foreign Secretary William Hague – who is a strong critic of centralised European power – was forced to back down in his stance against the proposal after EU diplomats stated that the creation of the UN role was part of the Lisbon Treaty’s vision for the European External Action Service, the bloc’s diplomatic corps. “It’s rather an out-dated view that Britain and France should be concerned by EU power affecting their status on the UN Security Council,” Michael Emerson, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, told Deutsche Welle. “In reality, it should be turned on its head. An expanded EU role could enhance both Britain and France who are too small to be heard on the international stage on their own these days and in fact they have been using the EU as a necessary vehicle with which to achieve their own goals because of this for some time.” Peter Schmidt, an expert on EU-UN relations at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, thinks the new arrangement won’t have any real consequences. “Britain and France, the European members of the Security Council, won’t see their powers reduced or usurped, at least not yet,” said Schmidt. “In reality, both France and Britain still behave in major matters like independent, sovereign states. As for the concerns of other European nations who fear for their sovereign rights, they will go on behaving like nation states, but will be ready to let an EU representative speak if they agree on a common position.”

Analysis:

It is not true that EU states are independent, sovereign states, as significant transfers of governmental sovereignty to the EU have already occurred. It is true that the states still manage most of the powers of diplomacy, but even here the economic aspects of foreign policy have been largely assumed by the EU governmental institutions.  What I am getting at is the following: just because the particular enumerated powers are different in the case of the EU and US does not mean that the EU’s states are thereby somehow not states in a federal union.  The important point is that in both unions, governmental sovereignty has been split, or divided, between the union and states.  To be sure, the two federal systems have different balances of power, but the dual sovereignty in both means that they are both federal systems.  Hence, just as the US is represented in the UN, so too should the EU.  For France and Britain as well as the EU to be represented “over-counts” the EU, in effect.  It would be like having Texas, California, and the US represented in the UN Security Council.  Hence, the EU should replace its state governments in the UN, instead of being added to somehow sit besides them.  In both scale and as polities, the European and American states are equivalent.  The proposal for a kind of liminal status for the EU at the UN evinces the lack of clarity that is extant on what exactly the EU is.  To be sure, EU states such as Britain have a vested interest in sidelining the EU, even though—as Britain is too small to influence international affairs on its own—such a strategy is actually contrary to Britain’s interests.  It is arrogance, rather than political realism, that is guiding Britain’s approach to the EU’s proposal at the UN.

Britain has gone from being the host kingdom of an empire to being a state in an empire-scale (and level) union.  France and Germany also have been host kingdoms of empires. So too has Austria/Hungary.  Yet even with this history and the present political identification of Europeans with their respective states, the EU is a federal system of government characterized by dual sovereignty (which Kenneth Wheare claims in Federal Government is the defining feature of modern federalism). Far-sighted Europeans might recall that when the US was young, most of its residents identified themselves with their respective states rather than as Americans.  To be sure, the independent and sovereign states that had their own citizens (as well as armies and citizenry) and formed the Articles of Confederation of the US in 1781 had had relatively short histories, but the state governments were fully sovereign and very aware of this fact as their respective citizens ceded some of their governmental sovereignty in ratifying conventions to a new federal union government, which was very limited in its powers—as is that of the EU today. So the Euroskeptics are wise to worry about consolidation, given the ensuing history of the US, but unwise to assume that holding the EU back is an effective counter-measure and also in their interests.  Rather than denying what the EU is, euroskeptics should put their efforts into devising checks and balances that will protect a balance of power between the state governments and that of the union.  Such efforts would pay off not only for the EU, but might also be of value in the US if the Americans come to realize that the EU exists and what is it. Only from such a basis of comparison will the Americans be able to learn from the federalism of the EU in order to back off from consolidation.