Sometimes lemons can make use of
political gravity to become lemonade. Of course, behind the lemons are human
beings, who are of course innately economizers, political actors and moral
agents. When accosted by proposals that additional governmental sovereignty be
delegated from state governments to the federal level, state-government
officials feeling the gravitas of narrow self-interest are inclined to resist
even if the transfer is in the political and economic interest of the union as
well as all of its states. I am of course describing a drawback that goes with
state governments having too much power in a federal system, whose interests are
not always identical with those of a particular state or even those that
pertain to the state level as distinct from the federal level. I submit that a
federal system in which such dynamics are ignored in favor of focusing on particular
issues, such as the E.U.’s increased need for defense given Russia’s unprovoked
invasion of Ukraine, can gradually slip “off the rails” toward dissolution or
consolidation. By ceding the E.U. itself (i.e., the federal level) additional authority,
including for revenues and expenditures, the European Council, which is
composed of the state governors, could “kill two birds with one stone,” as that
saying goes. Those birds would be unbalanced state power in the E.U. at the
expense of a common purpose, and Russian President Putin’s military adventurism
in Eastern Europe.
The full essay is at "E.U. Defense."
