E.U. Statehood for Canada: Not So Fast

Even as the federal president of the U.S., Donald Trump, campaigned in 2024 in part on Canada becoming a member of the U.S., statehood in the E.U. was being discussed in 2025 on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Besides being perhaps a knee-jerk political reaction against Trump, the prospect of Canada becoming an E.U. state faced a few major hurdles—one of which being the E.U.’s Basic (aka constitutional) Law. Accordingly, working instead toward a closer trading relationship was a more realistic route.

The full essay is at "E.U. Statehood for Canada."

Turkey on Cyprus: Sidelining the E.U.

Imagine if Japan had invaded and claimed (and successfully held) an island of Hawaii as a protectorate and a separate country due to the number of Japanese living there, and thus not as a part of Hawaii even though the U.S. recognizes all of Hawaii as a member state.  Let’s say furthermore that the UN has proposed the unification of Hawaii as a republic composed of two federated states. Hawaii would be akin to Belgium in the E.U.—a federated state of two sub-states in a federal union. This arrangement would fit with Althusius’ early seventeenth-century theory of federalism based on the Holy Roman Empire: each level of political organization is a federation. While this exists in the E.U., none of the U.S. states is itself a federation of states. So, the UN’s proposal that Cyprus be united politically and be composed of two states even as the E.U. already recognizes the entire island as an E.U. state is not outlandish to a European eye. The problem with the proposal lies instead in Turkey, and this in itself can be interpreted as an argument against Turkey’s accession to E.U. statehood.

The full essay is at "Turkey on Cyprus: Sidelining the E.U."

On the Ethics of the E.U. (or Germany) Making Large Cypriot Bank Depositors Pay

After an initial assessment of Cyprus’s bank shortfall of around €17.5 billion in January 2013, the matter of a bailout came to a head two months later. The sticking point was whether depositors in Cyprian banks would be charged a one-time levy as the Cypriot part of the bailout. The E.U. and the European Central Bank, backed up internationally by the IMF, insisted that the bailout be limited to €10 billion, with the remainder of the shortfall’s bailout, over €5 billion, being necessarily supplied by Cyprus through a levy on depositors. Not having been culpable in the Cypriot bankers’ decisions to buy Greek bonds, the depositors spontaneously rose in protest. For a time, that seemed to work. The Cypriot legislature initially rejected the troika’s proposal. In the end, the Cypriot legislature narrowly approved the loan agreement 29 to 27 in late April, 2013. The question I address here is whether the obligations assumed on the Cyprus side are ethical or unethical.

Cypriots protesting a proposed levy on all bank accounts.  CNN

The full essay is at Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available at Amazon.