EU enlargement is vital for Europe’s long-term security, but the project also requires EU member states to give up perhaps the biggest guarantor of their sovereignty. That’s the latest claim from German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, in a recent opinion piece published on Tuesday, April 30th, celebrating the anniversary of the 2004 EU enlargement.
“In order for our Union of Freedom to accomplish this task for our generation, we must reform it. To my mind, this includes reducing the scope for vetoes in the Council,” Baerbock wrote. “We must remain capable of action also in a future Union potentially numbering over 35 members.”
Such a move would serve to isolate the more sovereigntist governments of the Union, while further centralizing power in Brussels.
To be honest, Baerbock is not the first to have this revolutionary idea. Replacing unanimity with qualified majority voting in the EU Council —effectively scrapping veto powers—has been a central theme of most EU reform proposals circulating in Brussels in recent months.
The logic is always the same: look at conservative troublemakers like Hungary and (formerly) PiS-led Poland, daring to use their vetoes to stop EU legislation that they deem counterproductive to their national interests. Imagine the mood in Brussels: ‘Now we are letting in the eight candidate countries currently in the waiting room, we run the risk of eight more leaders saying no to our liberal agenda, and we can’t have that, can we?’
Therefore, to keep the EU operational, its leaders would take away the one thing designed to protect member states’ sovereignty and the democratic choices of their people: the veto. Don’t worry, says Baerbock, it’s fair because the change would affect each country equally.
“This includes reaching decisions more often with a large majority as opposed to achieving unanimity. Even if this means that Germany–like any other member state–can also be outvoted,” the minister wrote.
Well, the fact is that Germany is not “like any other member state.” It is by far the largest EU member and therefore, its voice carries a much larger weight already,—not to mention in a future Council deprived of the unanimity principle.
In a system based on qualified majority (QMV) voting, one needs only half of member states who represent roughly two-thirds, or 65%, of the EU’s total population to pass any law. This means that while the current system gives one vote—a more or less equal voice—to each EU member in the European Council, under QMV, the larger a state, the more powerful it is relative to others.
Germany alone represents nearly 19% of the total EU population—more than the smallest 17 member states combined. In fact, the five biggest member states alone (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland) together already account for 66% of the total population, meaning that they are far less likely to find themselves on the wrong end of any vote in a QMV system.
In other words, what Baerbock is advocating in the name of freedom and democracy would be the single biggest shift away from true democratic principles in the history of EU reforms.
The problem is that she’s not alone. The left-leaning majority of the European Parliament already endorsed several treaty change proposals that include scrapping veto rights—aiming to strengthen Brussels and weaken member states to eliminate any meaningful political opposition—while justifying it with the mostly undebated need for enlargement.
As Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski explained, the people of Europe are being deliberately kept in the dark about what it truly entails:
The public is not supposed to notice that a putsch is about to take place, that the European Union as a community of sovereign states is being abolished and a superstate is being created without any consent of the people, and that the member states are being reduced to the role of German states.
This is a kind of group of political ideologues, some of whom I would even call fanatics, who want to build a superstate on the ruins of nation-states, where a political oligarchy will rule unaccountably and escape the democratic control of citizens.
Recently, even former Commission chief José Manuel Barroso spoke out against the idea of a systematic treaty change, warning that it would be “a huge mistake if now Europeans would start a fundamental revision of the [EU] institutions because of enlargement,” lest we run the risk of neither becoming a reality.
Instead, the bloc should “avoid too ambitious reforms” and “only make those strictly necessary for enlargement,” the ex-Commission president said.
