About European Sovereignty

Abstract 

The coining of the concept of ‘European sovereignty’ by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 has prompted a heated debate, reviving disputes over supranationality, the nation-state and democracy that have resonated since the inception of the European project. Macron’s intervention came at a time when a flurry of crises compelled the European Union to move from its ambition of being a ‘normative power’ to living through its ‘Machiavellian moment’, against the backdrop of the rise of new global powers and existential threats for the security of the Union and its member states. But the term ‘European sovereignty’ is a misnomer. The real issue is one of power, not of sovereignty. Power proceeds from command, hardly an attribute of the complex shared decision-making process of the EU, leaving the objective of becoming a fully-fledged power out of reach for the European polity.

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A few months after his election in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron declared at the Sorbonne that ‘only Europe can guarantee genuine sovereignty, namely our ability to exist in today’s world to defend our values and interests. There is a European sovereignty to be built, and it needs to be built.’Footnote1 A year later, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, in his State of the Union speech, noted that ‘the geopolitical situation makes this Europe’s hour’, exhorting the continent to take ‘destiny into its own hands’ and ‘play a role, as a Union, in shaping global affairs’, while also cautioning that ‘European sovereignty is born of member states’ national sovereignty and does not replace it’.Footnote2 The Franco-German Treaty of Aachen, signed in January 2019, calls for a ‘united, efficient, sovereign and strong European Union’. But what does ‘European sovereignty’ really mean?

The notion of sovereignty as an intangible prerogative of the nation-state is rooted in centuries of European statecraft. Since ‘sovereign equality’ was adopted as a core foundation of the post-Second World War international order under the United Nations Charter, however, the process of European unification has deconstructed the concept in seeking a balance between the sovereignty of member states and supranational federalism. The shocks and crises the European polity has endured – the main ones stemming from the demise of the Soviet Union – have both increased that tension and but-tressed the federalist project. While the EU has succeeded in developing tools and policies that have helped it leverage access to its immense internal market, its ability to be a significant actor of world politics remains questionable, especially in the field of hard security.

The reasons lie in the diversity of historical experiences and national interests of its constituent nations, as well as in their unpredictability. They also relate to the status of the United States as a European power – the guarantor of last resort of security on the continent – and to intricate governance mechanisms in which command, a core component of power, is conspicuously absent. This landscape is unlikely to change any time soon. In a time when the rules-based international order is fraying, Europeans should not obfuscate their aims with confusing if grand notions of sovereignty, but instead clarify those aims and precisely identify the tools needed to reach them.

The concept of sovereignty

The sixteenth-century French philosopher Jean Bodin defined sovereignty as ‘the absolute and perpetual power in a commonwealth’.Footnote3 Endowing the sovereign with command authority of last resort, this concept of sovereignty provided the legal framework for the nation-state, equating it with its independence from any foreign entity. It became the cornerstone of the Westphalian order.

Thomas Hobbes considered sovereignty indivisible, but saw the consent of the subjects as its basis. A century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau went further and cast sovereignty as the expression of the people through the ‘general will’, which yielded the founding principles of modern democracy. His reading posited freedom, guaranteed by law, as a limit on the arbitrary exercise of power. But it was Montesquieu who conceptualised the division of sovereignty by splitting the powers of the state and balancing them through a legal framework.

His writings inspired the American federalists, who applied that concept with an eye to uniting the 13 colonies into a federation. To win the battle against the anti-federalists, who favoured a treaty-based confederation, Alexander Hamilton and his federalist allies argued that sovereignty belonged to the people, who delegate some of its prerogatives, such as security and commerce, to the federal authority, while leaving the residual ones to the states. Some 75 years later, the American Civil War brought that elegant solution to the brink of collapse. Other countries, notably France, went through painful processes to find a workable balance between the people and the authority entitled to act on their behalf.

Post-war Europe: federalism vs intergovernmentalism

After the Second World War, the broad aspiration to an order based on the rule of law spurred some Europeans to imagine, building on a UN Charter that the upcoming Cold War would soon weaken, a united Europe. In his 1946 Zurich speech, Winston Churchill famously called for a ‘sovereign remedy’ to the tragedy that had engulfed the continent – ‘a kind of United States of Europe’.Footnote4 In 1948 at The Hague, the ‘Congress of Europe’ provided a matrix for further developments, at the same time revealing the rift between federalist aspirations and a ‘unionist’ approach based on intergovernmentalism. It also fostered the rejection of absolute sovereignty and the power associated with it, perceived as responsible for the excesses and horrors of war.

European statesmen thus strived to harness both sovereignty and power. In 1951, six founding countries’ two main raw materials of war were pooled under the European Coal and Steel Community, which was intended to become the crucible of the European project. But in 1954, the French National Assembly refused to ratify a treaty to Europeanise the armies of those six countries. From then on, European integration proceeded on a strictly economic track – a common market, a customs union, an agricultural policy and the mutualisation of civilian atomic energy.

Sovereignty remained a source of friction between European institutions and their member states. In 1964, the European Court of Justice asserted the primacy of European treaties and related laws over national law.Footnote5 In 1965, however, with the ‘empty chair crisis’, French president Charles de Gaulle rejected a new level of integration and supranational rule by switching from unanimity to majority voting on important issues, as proposed by the Commission of the European Communities. After a six-month stalemate, the ‘Luxembourg compromise’ restored the de facto veto power of any member state deeming one of its ‘vital interests’ threatened by the majority vote of other member states. This compromise flattened the trajectory of supranationalism, essentially freezing the balance of power between the European institutions and the states.

Reflecting the early polarisation between European federalists and unionists, scholarly debate has pitched functionalism – later ‘neofunctionalism’ – against intergovernmentalism. The former school of thought, led by Ernst Haas, supported movement towards supranational governance.Footnote6 The latter, influenced by Stanley Hoffmann and David Calleo, was premised on the resilience of nation-states and their capacity to remain the crucial actors and orchestrators of European integration.Footnote7 While developments like the Single European Act of 1986, which allowed for the mobility of goods, services, people and capital, were broadly consistent with the neo-functionalist approach, the reservation of ‘regalian’ prerogatives such as border control, defence, diplomacy, policing, justice and taxation by national governments reflected the strength of intergovernmentalism. Though Europeanised under the Schengen Agreement in 1985 and the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, these mechanisms were prudentially characterised as intergovernmental cooperation schemes.Footnote8

Sovereignty, democracy and the elusive European demos

The main debate about sovereignty continued to revolve around its internal dimension – that is, the tug of war between supranational authority and the nation-state. However, an increasingly organised and sometimes populist citizenry is now challenging elite-driven schemes. Domestic politics has framed the handling of the several significant EU crises during the past decade, including the eurozone rescue, the 2015 migration crisis, Brexit and the war in Ukraine.Footnote9 What has emerged is not a European demos, but rather national constituencies and eurosceptical parties skilled at engineering discontent and, under the banner of sovereignty, wresting authority from Brussels.

For their part, scholars of international law have observed that ‘the EU cannot make a convincing claim to sovereignty under international law, [which] does not vest non-state actors with sovereignty’.Footnote10 Others point to the indivisible nature of sovereignty, not to be shared, divided or even transferred, and member states’ monopoly on the use of force on their territory, the right to control their borders and their recognition as states by other states, none of which the EU enjoys. The state, they emphasise, is the polity of last resort, and therefore retains the right to withdraw from those treaties, as illustrated by Brexit. One commentator has asked, sardonically, ‘where is the sovereign in this call for European sovereignty?’Footnote11 Another has noted that ‘foreign-policy elites’ are pushing the concept of European sovereignty with ‘little discussion of whether it expresses the will of the people of Europe’.Footnote12 Furthermore, the coexistence of sovereignties points to ‘the limits of this European voluntarism [which] are also to be found in its internal contradictions’.Footnote13 The discourse of ‘European sovereignty’ will sooner or later collide with the wall of state sovereignty, starting with France’s. Beyond the fragility of an order susceptible to challenge by member states and their constitutional courts regarding the boundaries of national sovereignty, critics of the idea of European sovereignty point to the lack of clarity about whether it entails greater unity or further integration.Footnote14

Yet other scholars, drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Neil MacCormick, have stressed the obsolete nature of traditional sovereignty, which they say is ‘no longer capable of explaining the contemporary globalized world consisting of overlapping legal orders’.Footnote15 They argue that this fragmentation requires a reinterpretation of the traditional conception of sovereignty towards a post-traditional one, ‘severing the allegedly inherent link between State and sovereignty, as well as, consequently, that between sovereignty and territory. As a result, not only States as territorial entities are sovereign, but other functional entities, which exercise certain functions over designated fields, can be sovereign too.’Footnote16

This movement ‘from singular to pluralist sovereignty’ allows for the interpretation of the EU as a polity perfectly adapted to a post-sovereign world. And in fact, an accumulation of ‘exclusive competences’ – customs union, competition policy, trade policy, monetary policy for the euro-area states, fisheries – exercised under the Union’s own legal order does seem to define ‘a core of European sovereignty’ whereby the ‘Union takes on, at least for the competences entrusted to it, the shape of a federal state’.Footnote17 Furthermore, these policies are financed by a ‘significant budget’ amounting to 1% of European GNP, to be doubled under the recovery plan agreed in July 2020 and financed by substantial European public debt.Footnote18

A coming of age for the EU?

A prime objective of the post-war European project is peace based on the rejection of raw power. The failure of the European Defence Community in 1954 reinforced the point in effectively exempting Europe from providing for its external security, which during the Cold War was handed over to NATO. That development left the European Economic Community, set up in 1957, ample room to lay the foundations of peace among its six members. As former EU commissioner Pascal Lamy observed, ‘the building of peace was the beating heart of the European project, designed to neutralize geopolitical rivalries … to immunize its members against a relapse into a devastating will to power … and to live up to the legacy of the Enlightenment and its quest for perpetual peace’.Footnote19

The success of the European project fostered the belief that its model – based on taming national sovereignties, managing disputes through the rule of law, and economic and, increasingly, political integration – would be a road map for peace. A robust and efficient Atlantic Alliance supported by well-armed nation-states could contain the existential threat from the Soviet Union. Heralded as a triumph of the West, the end of the Cold War deepened the view that liberal values would prevail. Drawing on Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of G.W.F. Hegel, Francis Fukuyama explored the possibility of the convergence towards an order based on these values, boosted by free trade and globalisation, and guided by the rule of law. Strengthened by the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the EU seemed to be the appropriate vehicle, endowed with the capacity to shape the world order as a ‘normative power’ by leveraging access to its huge market and its regulatory clout.Footnote20

This outlook held up well into the first decade of the new century, as the countries freed by the collapse of the Soviet bloc joined the EU. But the expanding polity also came to be tested by a succession of mostly exogenous crises, starting with the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Russia launched an offensive against Georgia in 2008. In 2014, Moscow failed to prevent Ukraine from establishing a closer relationship with the EU, met with a popular uprising, and in response annexed Crimea and covertly occupied parts of eastern Ukraine. To address the 2015 refugee crisis, the EU effectively outsourced the protection of some of the EU’s external borders to a third country, Turkiye.

These successive shocks rocked the EU to its core, prompting a reappraisal of its fundamentals and postulates. As Daniel Fiott observed, the EU came to realise that it ‘is more a product than a shaper of its strategic environment’.Footnote21 Since the European project had been predicated from its beginning on a gradual erasing of borders among its members, its champions were inclined to consider them taboo. Outer boundaries too tended to ‘blur in the limbo between civilization and barbarity, a never static line constantly extending eastward without a clear delineation’.Footnote22 Many Europeans assumed Europeanisation to be ‘the transposition by our neighbours of the European values into their political and legal norms, a force radiating outwards’.Footnote23

This mindset has underpinned the EU’s policy on enlargement and neighbourhood. But the European polity has now reached what historian John Pocock has called the ‘Machiavellian moment’ in which it must confront its ‘temporary finitude’ and attempt ‘to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events’.Footnote24 Thus, Hans Kribbe notes that Europeans are bidding farewell to the ‘idea that the world will eventually become “as us”’ in the realisation ‘that it is not unipolar anymore, and organized around the West or its ideas, but around divergence, a deep divergence since there is no mechanism, no principle, no rules all parties can agree on’.Footnote25

The election of Donald Trump and his shambolic presidency further challenged Europe. After the 2017 NATO and G7 summits, Angela Merkel, then chancellor of Germany, stated that ‘we Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands’ and ‘fight for our own future and destiny’.Footnote26 China’s growing assertiveness prompted the EU to assess it, in March 2019, as a ‘systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance’.Footnote27 One international-law scholar observed that the power of the notion of sovereignty ‘comes from its capacity to express an important (although lessthan-glorious) reality: the EU is in crisis and its very existence as a polity is at risk. The assumption that the European construction is in danger is omnipresent in the EU sovereignty discourse.’Footnote28

A semantic and political conundrum

Before Macron ushered in the concept of European sovereignty in his Sorbonne speech, a more modest notion had appeared in the European discourse: strategic autonomy. Coined in 2013 to describe a goal for the European defence industry, it was used in the EU’s ‘global strategy’ of 2016 to encompass security more broadly. A qualifying term – ‘appropriate level’ – left room for different interpretations.Footnote29 Macron mentioned six fields in which the EU should tilt towards sovereignty: security and defence; borders and migration; Africa and the Mediterranean; sustainable development; digital technologies; and industrial, economic and monetary policy.

The idea of ‘strategic sovereignty’ has also arisen, initially in think tanks and later in official commentary.Footnote30 The expression has figured prominently in the programme of the German ‘traffic light’ coalition. In a keynote speech at Charles University in Prague, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave it a casual, pragmatic cast: ‘I am not interested in semantics here. European sovereignty essentially means that we become more autonomous in all areas.’Footnote31 Christoph Heusgen, a long-time diplomatic adviser of Merkel’s, disparaged the idea as ‘presumptuous’.Footnote32

The proliferation of expressions reflects both aspiration and frustration. Many tools, procedures and institutions have been set up and concept papers written to allow the EU to become a more potent and capable actor in the international arena. Since the inception of the European Security and Defence Policy – triggered by the 1998 Franco-British Saint-Malo Declaration calling for the Union to acquire ‘the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises’ – the EU has established the European Defence Agency (2004), the EU Battlegroups (2005), the European Defence Fund (2017), Permanent Structured Cooperation (2017), the European Intervention Initiative (2018), the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence (2019), the European Peace Facility (2021) and the Strategic Compass (2022).

Yet little of substance has been achieved. This is in part because the United States has been clever at clipping the Europeans’ wings. But EU initiatives must also be assessed against the backdrop of shrinking defence budgets in Europe. The European defence effort is dwarfed by those of the world’s major military powers – the US, China and Russia. In the assessment of Mark Leonard and Jeremy Shapiro, it is not only ‘inadequate relative to Europe’s security vulnerabilities’ but also ‘underfunded relative even to their original, fairly modest, ambitions’.Footnote33 Duplication and fragmentation of the European defence efforts have left yawning gaps, presumptively filled by the United States, and sanctions have been the EU’s hard-power instrument of choice. More crucially, ‘processes are proposed, principles are articulated, instruments are updated, but the whole leaves an impression of floating in a political and strategic vacuum, from which power relations, antagonisms or fault lines between nations have been evacuated’.Footnote34 Thus, notes Richard Youngs,

in most instances, it is not an absence of capabilities that has held the EU back from acting autonomously in recent years. Rather, it is political choice … In this sense, the plea for strategic autonomy rests on a faulty core diagnosis. Most frequently, the geostrategic concern arises not from the EU lacking the capacity to act but from the way that the union chooses to use the capacities it does possess.Footnote35

In this context, ‘strategic autonomy’ has become suspicious code for an emancipation project of Europe from the US in the field of defence, or has been portrayed as a way for France to seize leadership within the EU after Brexit. ‘Strategic sovereignty’ might be perceived as more neutral, as it pertains to ‘managing interdependencies in trade and critical supplies, of reframing strategic partnerships and sustaining the multilateral order that is under significant pressure’.Footnote36

Perhaps owing to the political baggage burdening both terms, the simpler notion of power seems to have discreetly crept into the discourse of the EU leadership. ‘We must relearn the language of power and conceive of Europe as a top-tier geostrategic actor’, opined EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell. He was quite aware of Europe’s ingrained weaknesses: ‘we have plenty of levers of influence. Europe’s problem is not a lack of power. The problem is the lack of political will for the aggregation of its powers to ensure their coherence and maximize their impact.’Footnote37 Charles Michel, president of the European Council, has called for the EU to be ‘a power working for a world that is more respectful, more ethical, and more just. Sovereignty, independence, empowerment … whichever word you use, it’s the substance that counts. Less dependence, more influence.’Footnote38

Power, though hard to measure, has been clearly defined.Footnote39 Raymond Aron called ‘power on the international stage the ability of a polity to impose its will on other polities. Power is not an absolute, but a human relationship.’ While security may be the primary rationale for power, Aron added, referring to Hobbes, other motivations also enter into play: ‘polities crave strength not only to deter aggression … but also to be feared, respected, admired’.Footnote40 More recently, Bart Szewczyk elucidated the difference between sovereignty, ‘the independence and supremacy of decision’, and power, ‘a decision-maker’s practical ability to control a particular outcome’.Footnote41 From this angle, power is premised on sovereignty, and sovereignty without it is a hollow theoretical concept.

As the EU was shaped by the Second World War, and evolved through successive enlargements, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the reunification of Germany, the Union is dense with pre-existing patterns of power. It includes states with different historical experiences, political cultures, demographic and economic weights, and therefore different national interests. It comprises one nuclear power that is also a permanent member of the Security Council, three economic powers that are members of the G7, 23 (soon 24) members of NATO, formerly neutral states that are suspicious of power, committed Atlanticists, smaller states with no particular strategic ambitions, and nations haunted by decades of Soviet occupation that apprehend Russia as an existential threat.

At the same time, the United States, though not part of the EU, is a major European power. This is not only on account of the Cold War, when its military presence formed the backbone of the continent’s security, but also because it is an integral part of the current security balance. It took US intervention to extinguish the Balkan wars, and many NATO allies see the United States as the main bulwark against Russian aggression, as illustrated by Finland’s and Sweden’s rush to join the Alliance after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

For decades, the constructive ambiguity ingrained in the European project enabled the EU to steer around intramural power competition and America’s security pre-eminence. Still, other European states are reluctant to accept anything that might resemble directoires from Germany and France.Footnote42 One of the most outspoken voices in this regard has been Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who lashed out at France and Germany in an opinion piece:

The equality of individual countries is of a declarative nature. Political practice has shown that the voice of Germany and France counts above all. Thus, we are dealing with a formal democracy and a de facto oligarchy, where power is held by the strongest. In addition, the strong ones make mistakes and are incapable of accepting criticism from outside.Footnote43

When ‘European’ and ‘Atlantic’ interests conflict, many European states are inclined to support the latter. The power differential between the United States and major European states is so overwhelming that there is no directoire from the former, simply leadership. NATO’s decision-making procedures take care to maintain the appearance of sovereign equality, such that the control of the Alliance by a single political authority appears to guarantee reliability. For many Europeans, America is a ‘power equaliser’ that puts Europeans as a whole in a separate category, much more undifferentiated than would be the case in a genuinely independent Europe.Footnote44

This quasi-organic relationship with the United States cannot, of course, be explained solely in terms of internal balance among Europeans. Any substantial European political assertiveness also necessarily impacts the transatlantic distribution of power. Despite some semblance of flexibility, Washington has stifled European attempts to assert strategic or military autonomy whenever it has perceived any material risk to transatlantic ties. While European states profess a principled attachment to these ties, their strength varies from country to country; they do not all share the same assessment of the risk of damaging them. Over a decade after the end of the Iraq War, the scars of the transatlantic and intra-European rifts are still visible. The fact remains that, however perversely, the United States is a fullfledged European power while the EU is not. Any move by the EU towards developing significant independent power would mean a substantial alteration of its relationship with the US – an undertaking which few European nations, with the possible exception of France, are ready to initiate.

Shared decision

Another limit to such an undertaking is the EU’s decision-making process, whose complexity opens it to all sorts of influences. The system mixes elements of federalism and supranationalism, interweaves European and national levels, and maintains ongoing negotiation mechanisms in parallel. It also involves, alongside representatives of the member states, not only the European Parliament but also myriad lobbyists and pressure groups. While this pattern is typical of advanced democratic systems, decision-making is, in the EU cluster, extraordinarily fragmented. It is less diffuse in matters involving intergovernmental cooperation. In this realm, the member states, through the European Council and the Council of Ministers, remain the primary decision-makers at high political levels. But the large number of decision-makers, the premium placed on consensus, the links among different issues and the practical need to form coalitions make unity of decision and the political command over its execution – essential ingredients of power – elusive.

Further, the openness of the system to outside influence allows the United States, without any formal participation in deliberations, to weigh in heavily on decisions of interest to it. There is no shortage of EU member states willing, for their own reasons, to lend an ear, or even a voice, to American concerns. Such practices are not dishonourable per se, insofar as there is no coherent consensus on what constitutes a specifically ‘European interest’. As Gabriel Robin observed two decades ago, ‘it is a delusion to imagine that there is an obvious and unique European solution for every political issue’.Footnote45 National interests do not smoothly resolve into European ones. Rather, each country strives to persuade others that its own political preferences best express that elusive interest.

This difficulty, inherent in the European project, is bound to worsen considerably with expanding membership. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine and Moldova have become EU candidates, and the stalled candidacies of the Western Balkan countries have been restored to the EU’s agenda. But the EU’s decision-making mechanisms have not been radically rethought to offset the fragmentation effects of successive enlargements. And the idea of extending qualified majority voting in areas hitherto subject to unanimity, such as foreign affairs and defence,Footnote46 would prompt some member states to raise issues of democratic legitimacy.Footnote47

In addition, there is no broad consensus on such fundamentals as the distribution of power between national and EU institutions. This area is replete with differing views, powered by the resurgence of populist nationalism especially during crises, such as the 2015 migration surge and the COVID-19 pandemic. While no EU member states have followed the United Kingdom’s precedent of withdrawing from the Union, some, like Hungary and Poland, have challenged European institutions by violating their treaty obligations. ‘Electoral accidents’ have become commonplace, enabling once-outlying political parties to act against the shared European future and ‘ever closer Union’ the Lisbon Treaty calls for. These parties advocate a loose ‘European alliance of nations’ that is incompatible with the objective of European sovereignty. The September 2022 elections in Italy reinforced this trend and could galvanise extreme-right parties elsewhere. Such contingencies and uncertainties undermine the credibility of the EU as a power in world politics.

To counter these centrifugal forces, Macron has called for the creation of a ‘common political culture’, and major changes in decision-making processes are under discussion. The shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine served to accelerate the maturation process and infused Europeans with a sense of threat unprecedented since the height of the Cold War. The need to act was felt so acutely as to prompt a remarkable mobilisation in a matter of days, with successive packages of sanctions against Russia and decisions to grant military and political support to Ukraine. Germany announced a ‘historical turning point’ (Zeitenwende) in its defence policy, while Sweden and Finland promptly applied for membership in NATO. After a referendum, Denmark shed its opt-out status regarding the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy.

Another spectacular result, though not widely acknowledged as such, was the heightened role that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has assumed. She has made good on her commitment to deliver European leadership. In early April 2022, she was among the first Western leaders to visit the Ukrainian capital. Overriding German, French and Danish reservations, she succeeded in getting the EU to grant Ukraine and Moldova the EU-candidate status they coveted and to reboot the stalled application processes of the Western Balkan states. In her artful and savvy diplomacy, she seems to have understood better than any other European leader the imperative of Pocock’s Machiavellian moment.Footnote48 Even so, the jury is still out on whether perceived encroachments on the prerogatives of the member states will swing the pendulum back towards tension and discord.

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The broader question is whether the EU can develop and retain authority of the same basic nature as the sovereignty a state exercises. The answer is almost certainly no. French political philosopher Julien Freund observed that ‘sovereignty is an attribute of command, and therefore it is not a power of the state but a power that makes the state. It is inherent in the exercise of command.’Footnote49 Vesting state-like power, in the sense of command, in Europe can have no other meaning than to entrust its exercise to a single political authority. That requisite transfer of sovereignty – even if each member state were to retain a residual right of secession – would change the nature of the Union too radically for virtually any contemporary European state to accept. Thus, European sovereignty is, fundamentally, a misnomer.

The EU, then, will remain unable to match the major powers, namely the US, China and Russia. But there may still be room for a more cohesive European polity with a more active role to play in international affairs. Establishing it, however, will not be easy. EU officials should, per Borrell’s exhortation, ‘speak the language of power’ not only to outside interlocutors but also to the domestic constituencies within the Union. Oblique and tortuous semantic fiddling is confusing and unhelpful. They should make it clear that power, not autonomy or sovereignty, is the issue.

Europeans must also appreciate that the EU derives its greatest strength from its unwavering use of the prerogatives entrusted to its ‘federal’ institutions: the European Commission and the European Central Bank. But those prerogatives cover only part of an increasingly multifaceted power spectrum, falling short of hard power, which remains largely consigned to member states. Notwithstanding the cohesion they have displayed during the Russian war on Ukraine, their lack of unity and constancy weakens the EU’s credibility as an autonomous actor for its own security in an ever more anarchic world arena. The Trump presidency was a serious wake-up call that cast doubt on the once-sacrosanct protection offered by the United States. Meanwhile, nativist populism has shaken American democracy to the core. The European polity cannot leave its fate to the contingencies of the US electoral cycle – or even to the Russian threat, which may divide it. Although the EU’s 2009 Lisbon Treaty introduced a mutual-defence clause, the common defence it heralds remains a remote prospect, overshadowed by the powerful machinery of NATO. While theoretically possible, a federal leap in that respect appears, under normal circumstances and for all the reasons stated here, highly implausible in the foreseeable future.

Lastly, the very existence of the EU is premised on its fidelity to the values on which it was built: freedom, democracy and the rule of law. They provide its internal cohesion and undergird its capacity to act in support of peace, lawfulness and multilateralism. Straying from core values, as some states are inclined to do, jeopardises these features. To fulfil its mission, the EU must hold them accountable and require them to comply with their treaty commitments. Only then can it remain a viable alternative to lawlessness, arbitrariness and the rule of the strongest, and the beacon of hope it was meant to be.

Acknowledgements

For their inspiring feedback on an earlier draft of this article, I would like to express my gratitude to Gérard Errera, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Dick Howard, Maxime Lefebvre, Jean Picq and Pierre Vimont.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pierre Buhler, a former French diplomat, has served as France’s ambassador to Singapore and Poland. He teaches international affairs at Sciences Po (Paris), Hertie School (Berlin) and the College of Europe (Natolin).

Notes

1 Emmanuel Macron, ‘A New Initiative for Europe’, speech at the Sorbonne University, 26 September 2017, https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2017/09/26/president-macron-gives-speech-on-new-initiative-for-europe.

2 Jean-Claude Juncker, ‘The Hour of European Sovereignty’, State of the Union 2018, 12 September 2018, https://ec.europa.eu/info/priorities/state-union-speeches/state-union-2018_en.

3 Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris: Fayard, 1986), pp. 217–18.

4 Winston Churchill, speech delivered at the University of Zurich, 19 September 1946, https://rm.coe.int/16806981f3#:~:text=What%20is%20this%20sovereign%20remedy,of%20United%20States%20of%20Europe.

5 See European Court of Justice, ‘Flaminio Costa v. E.N.E.L’, Case 6-64, 15 July 1964, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A61964CJ0006. This primacy applied only to law, not to national constitutions.

6 See Ernst Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950–1957 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958).

7 See David P. Calleo, Rethinking Europe’s Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Obstinate or Obsolete? The Fate of the Nation-state and the Case of Western Europe’, Daedalus, vol. 93, no. 3, Summer 1966, pp. 862–915. In 1999, historian Alan Milward delivered a compelling description of how the initial aspiration to a post-national polity shaped by functionalism yielded to the pressure of the nation-state. See Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999).

8 Even the adoption of a single currency under the Maastricht Treaty, through which member states delegated monetary policy to a central bank, was a transfer of competencies rather than an abandonment of the national power to mint money, which, like budgetary and fiscal policy, formally remains in the hands of national central banks.

9 In light of that transformation, ‘neofunctionalism’ has been renamed ‘post-functionalism’. See Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, ‘A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 39, no. 1, January 2009, pp. 1–23.

10 Christina Eckes, ‘EU Autonomy: Jurisdictional Sovereignty by a Different Name?’, European Papers, vol. 5, no. 1, 2020, p. 320.

11 Ségolène Barbou des Places, ‘Taking the Language of “European Sovereignty” Seriously’, European Papers, vol. 5, no. 1, 2020, p. 290.

12 Hans Kundnani, ‘Europe’s Sovereignty Conundrum’, Berlin Policy Journal, 13 May 2020, https://berlinpolicyjournal.com/europes-sovereignty-conundrum/.

13 Nicolas Leron, ‘Les faux-semblants de la souveraineté européenne’, Esprit, May 2019, p. 112.

14 It is also unclear whether European sovereignty requires amending the treaties, an issue on which Juncker was more cautious than Macron.

15 Thomas Verellen, ‘European Sovereignty Now? A Reflection on What It Means to Speak of “European Sovereignty”’, European Papers, vol. 5, no. 1, 2020, p. 309. For background, see Jürgen Habermas, Zur Verfassung Europas: Ein Essay (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011), published in translation as The Crisis of the European Union (Berlin: Wiley, 2012); and Neil MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

16 Matej Avbelj, ‘A Sovereign Europe as a Future of Sovereignty’, European Papers, vol. 5, no. 1, 2020, p. 300.

17 Maxime Lefebvre, ‘Europe as a Power, European Sovereignty, Strategic Autonomy: A Debate that Is Moving Towards an Assertive Europe’, European Issues, no. 582, 1 February 2021, https://www.robert-schuman.eu/en/european-issues/0582-europe-as-a-power-european-sovereignty-strategic-autonomy-a-debate-that-is-moving-towards-an.

18 See ibid.

19 Pascal Lamy, ‘Union européenne: vous avez dit souveraineté?’, Commentaire, no. 169, Spring 2020, https://eduscol.education.fr/document/29809/download.

20 See Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

21 Daniel Fiott (ed.), ‘European Sovereignty: Strategy and Interdependence’, Chaillot Paper, no. 169, July 2021, p. 37, https://www.iss.europa.eu/sites/default/files/EUISSFiles/CP_169.pdf.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 John Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. viii.

25 ‘L’Europe face à la puissance, une conversation avec Hans Kribbe’, Le Grand Continent, 15 February 2021, https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2021/02/15/leurope-face-a-la-puissance-une-conversation-avec-hans-kribbe. See also Hans Kribbe, The Strongmen: European Encounters with Sovereign Power (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).

26 Giulia Paravicini, ‘Angela Merkel: Europe Must Take “Our Fate” into Own Hands’, Politico, 28 May 2017, https://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-europe-cdu-must-take-its-fate-into-its-own-hands-elections-2017/.

27 European Commission, ‘EU–China Strategic Outlook: Commission and HR/VP Contribution to the European Council’, 12 March 2019, p. 1, https://ec.europa.eu/info/publications/eu-china-strategic-outlook-commission-contribution-european-council-21-22-march-2019_de.

28 Barbou des Places, ‘Taking the Language of “European Sovereignty” Seriously’, p. 292.

29 European Union, ‘Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe – A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy’, June 2016, p. 4. While ‘strategic autonomy’ was over time used with broader scope, it was further qualified in the wake of the pandemic outbreak. ‘Open strategic autonomy’ was meant to account for the need to act in concert with partners across the board, especially in the fields of economy and trade, without resorting to protectionism.

30 Fiott, ‘European Sovereignty’, p. 8. See also Suzana Anghel, ‘Strategic Sovereignty for Europe’, European Parliamentary Research Service Ideas Paper, September 2020, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/652069/EPRS_BRI(2020)652069_EN.pdf; and Mark Leonard and Jeremy Shapiro, ‘Empowering EU Member States with Strategic Sovereignty’, European Council on Foreign Relations Paper 289, June 2019, https://ecfr.eu/wp-content/uploads/1_Empowering_EU_member_states_with_strategic_sovereignty.pdf.

31 Olaf Scholz, ‘Europe Is Our Future’, speech at Charles University, Prague, 29 August 2022, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/scholz-speech-prague-charles-university-2079558.

32 Christoph Heusgen, ‘It’s Presumptuous to Talk About European Sovereignty’, Internationale Politik Quarterly, 6 January 2022, https://ip-quarterly.com/en/its-presumptuous-talk-about-european-sovereignty.

33 Leonard and Shapiro, ‘Empowering EU Member States with Strategic Sovereignty’.

34 Pierre Vimont, ‘Les intérêts stratégiques de l’Union européenne’, Le Rapport Schuman sur l’Europe, l’état de l’Union 2016, pp. 109–10.

35 Richard Youngs, ‘The EU’s Strategic Autonomy Trap’, Carnegie Europe, 8 March 2021, https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/03/08/eu-s-strategic-autonomy-trap-pub-83955.

36 Fiott, ‘European Sovereignty’, p. 2.

37 Josep Borrell, ‘Embracing Europe’s Power’, Project Syndicate, 8 February 2020, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/embracing-europe-s-power-by-josep-borrell-2020-02.

38 Charles Michel, ‘Strategic Autonomy for Europe, the Aim of Our Generation’, speech at the Bruegel think tank, European Council, 28 September 2020, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2020/09/28/l-autonomie-strategique-europeenne-est-l-objectif-de-notre-generation-discours-du-president-charles-michel-au-groupe-de-reflexion-bruegel/.

39 Some might question how the EU can aspire to act as a power as such if the very constraining of power – specifically that of France, Germany and the United States – is intrinsic to the European project. Macron’s call for European sovereignty inevitably revived these lingering suspicions. European states are quick to surmise that behind French calls for a powerful Europe is a desire to shape Europe as ‘France writ large’. De Gaulle famously likened Europe to a lever by which France could avoid being dominated by the US and Russia.

40 Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1962), pp. 82–3.

41 Bart Szewczyk, European Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and Power (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 3.

42 Lefebvre, ‘Europe as a Power, European Sovereignty, Strategic Autonomy’.

43 Mateusz Morawiecki, ‘Historical Challenges and False Directions for Europe at the Crossroads’, EURACTIV, 8 August 2022, https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/opinion/historical-challenges-and-false-directions-for-europe-at-the-crossroads/.

44 See Nicole Gnesotto, La puissance et l’Europe (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1998).

45 Gabriel Robin, Entre empire et nations: penser la politique étrangère (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004).

46 This was requested in a resolution adopted by the European Parliament on 9 June 2022. The Conference on the Future of Europe has made a similar request, Borrell has actively supported the idea and Scholz advocated it in his Charles University speech.

47 The day after the outcomes of the Conference on the Future of Europe were made public, 13 member states, mainly from Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, cautioned against ‘unconsidered and premature attempts to launch a process towards treaty change’. They also emphasised that the EU had demonstrated, during crises including the Ukrainian one, its ability to deliver within the current treaty framework. See ‘Nonpaper by Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden on the Outcome of and Follow-up to the Conference on the Future of Europe’, Europa, 9 May 2022, https://www.europa-nu.nl/9353000/1/j4nvih7l3k-b91rw_j9vvj9idsj04xr6/vlstn1p5intb/f=/non_paper.pdf.

48 See Matina Stevis-Gridneff, ‘Top E.U. Official Is Becoming an Unexpected Wartime Leader’, New York Times, 14 September 2022,  

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/world/europe/eu-ursula-von-der-leyen-russia-war.html.

49 Julien Freund, L’essence du politique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Dalloz, 2003), p. 127.