When it comes to the opaque but consequential workings of the European Union, conservatives—nay, anyone not a Euro-federalist—would do well to follow the number one axiom of Euro-realist scrutiny: demand much from the EU, but expect little. When those workings involve a progressive national government like Spain’s, this rule applies doubly.
On February 14, the rule served me well as I testified before the EU Affairs Select Committee of Spain’s Parliament, the bicameral panel overseeing the transposition of EU directives into national law. The subject of the hearing was Spain’s upcoming turn, in the latter half of 2023, at holding the rotating presidency of the EU Council, the forum gathering the bloc’s heads of government and every portfolio’s relevant minister. The MP who invited me was VOX’s backbencher José María Sánchez García, a much lower profile in the media than his legal chops and political acumen would warrant. Formerly a magistrate in Spain, then at the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) in Luxembourg, a University of Sevilla professor and a partner at a blue-chip law firm, Sánchez deserves credit for risking his august credentials in service of a party which the country’s left-liberal establishment deems beyond the pale. When a Basque nationalist MP labeled me a “far-right voice,” Sánchez rose to defend me.
The occasion of the hearing wasn’t insignificant. Spain has held the EU Council Presidency only five times in the past since joining the bloc in 1986. It won’t foreseeably hold it again for another thirteen years, if not more, in the likely scenario of EU enlargement to either Georgia, Moldova, or the Western Balkans. The powers conferred by the Presidency are substantial, particularly if —as a plurality of EU citizens annually polled by Eurostat seem to do—you deem the Council to be the institution that encapsulates what little democratic legitimacy the bloc as a whole can claim. (The European Commission represents voters’ will only indirectly through the spitzenkandidaten process, and although it does so directly, the European Parliament is being rocked as of this writing by a series of corruption scandals largely unprecedented in EU history.) When Sweden’s current turn lapses in late June, Spain will be tasked with planning and presiding every monthly meeting of each one of the Council’s nine configurations by subject area, as well as representing it before the other two institutions—the Commission and the Parliament—in tripartite negotiations called ‘trilogues.’ Even its tenth configuration—security and defense—usually out of the presidency’s reach, will be chaired by a Spaniard, High Representative Josep Borrell.
This high-stakes opportunity for Spain to lead the Council’s deliberations will also be punctuated by elections at home, as was already France’s case during its presidency in the first half of 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Those races will happen both regionally in May (with the right-of-center PP and the right-wing VOX largely expected to win joint control of several Spanish regions) and nationally in December (where the outcome is less certain). The telegenic PM Pedro Sánchez and the ministers of his government—a coalition of socialists, the far-Left, and the Left-regionalists—are widely expected to make electoral hay out of the opportunity to stage-manage high-level diplomatic agreements (as they already did with NATO’s summit in Madrid last summer, culminating in the alliance’s new strategic concept). To put a cherry on top of it all, Spain’s presidency will be the last of the current so-called ‘institutional cycle,’ with elections to the European Parliament slated for May 2024 that may upset the present power balance in the hemicycle, and consequently alter the Commission’s orientations through the spitzenkandidaten process in due course. Therefore, the expectations run high that Spain will see pending EU bills through to final approval before Brussels switches its colors.
Countries awaiting the opportunity to impose their will upon fellow member states once their turn comes at assuming the presidency will be sorely disappointed by the hardball nature of real-world diplomacy. The country presiding over the Council isn’t guaranteed to see its preferred policy outcomes necessarily materialize in practice, but simply to set the agenda—to steer the Council’s discussions in the role of what the academic literature calls an “honest broker.” This requires paying due heed to every country’s posture and growing familiar with the rationales behind them. This leaves scarce little room for narrow-minded pet projects. Spain, for instance, beyond marshalling the EU’s continued support to Ukraine, is widely expected to prioritize the bloc’s relations with Latin America, which Borrell labeled the world’s most “Euro-compatible” region in a recent speech. But even then, it will message that priority as benefitting the wider EU rather than Spain’s narrow linguistic and cultural ties with the region. Every other expected priority concerns not itself alone but the bloc as a whole, from finalizing the European Green Deal’s pending components to implementing the EU’s so-called “Pillar of Social Rights” and shepherding a new EU-wide agreement on asylum and migration.
So where did that leave my testimony? I chose to highlight three areas I would recommend any Spanish government to act on, provided—not so evident a hypothetical—they subordinate this opportunity to the national interest. The first was the least obvious. In late 2020, the Council reached an agreement on the so-called “conditionality mechanism.” Poland and Hungary had previously threatened to apply their mutual veto to it, but three concessions were made to secure their vote. The mechanism would only be applied if (1) all appeals at the CJEU were resolved, (2) the Commission published appropriate guidelines, and (3) no other tool existed for the same goal. The third condition remains unmet. The Commission’s rule-0f-law mechanism (not the same), as part of which it annually publishes tailored recommendations to each member state on the matter, makes the conditionality mechanism both redundant and unnecessarily coercive. Whereas the threat of conditioning EU funds has only been leveled at Poland and Hungary, Spain could foreseeably join the rule-of-law renegades one day. While the odds are low that Sánchez will make a move, the issue will be particularly salient for a likely future right-of-center successor government that chooses to cross the EU ideologically on any issue.
The second item I highlighted was unanimity, a sacred principle increasingly in danger. By design, the EU is constantly compelled to reassess the balance between the breadth and the depth of European integration. Presiding over the EU Council will afford Spain a unique chance to steer that reassessment in line with the interests of small and mid sized nations like itself. To begin with, Spain can reaffirm that the EU’s gates remain wide open to all candidate countries willing to sustain their work towards meeting the bloc’s membership criteria—currently Georgia, Moldova, and some Balkan countries, but also Ukraine. Yet when they do join, a chorus of large countries led by Germany and France are likely to demand in return that voting thresholds at the Council be lowered. Enlarging the EU, their rationale goes, requires at the same time making collective action easier. Currently, that threshold is unanimity in all key policy areas—security, budget, foreign policy—but Germany and France claim that replacing it with qualified majority voting would ease the EU’s ability to act jointly, making it quicker and more flexible. Depriving the little ones—such as Spain—of the ability to block actions they deem contrary to their interests, however, would make the EU less democratic.
And lastly, I entreated the assembled MPs to consider a national priority the EU’s long-stalled effort to reach a new framework for asylum and migration. The issue couldn’t be more salient for us Spaniards, who often find ourselves between a rock and a hard place on this issue. On one hand, Spain is a gateway to Europe for the many thousands of young Moroccan migrants who reach the Canaries by sea every year. Although these flows have yet to rival the 2015 surge of arrivals through Serbia fueled by Syria’s civil war, they have been increasing since COVID , and will stay on that path as our economies recover. On the other hand, in the absence of the agreement I pressed for, other EU member states have been exasperatingly loath to share Spain’s burden.
Since Pedro Sánchez is unlikely to step into the vacuum by beefing up border patrols the way Matteo Salvini famously did in Italy’s case, it is even more paramount for Spain’s interests that a new durable framework be approved with solid burden-sharing provisions and a pathway to homogenizing the EU’s different asylum systems. In the unlikely case that he chooses to make them a priority for the presidency beginning in under five months, I doubt Sánchez would score wins in each of these issues. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t at least try.
Spain’s European Moment
When it comes to the opaque but consequential workings of the European Union, conservatives—nay, anyone not a Euro-federalist—would do well to follow the number one axiom of Euro-realist scrutiny: demand much from the EU, but expect little. When those workings involve a progressive national government like Spain’s, this rule applies doubly.
On February 14, the rule served me well as I testified before the EU Affairs Select Committee of Spain’s Parliament, the bicameral panel overseeing the transposition of EU directives into national law. The subject of the hearing was Spain’s upcoming turn, in the latter half of 2023, at holding the rotating presidency of the EU Council, the forum gathering the bloc’s heads of government and every portfolio’s relevant minister. The MP who invited me was VOX’s backbencher José María Sánchez García, a much lower profile in the media than his legal chops and political acumen would warrant. Formerly a magistrate in Spain, then at the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) in Luxembourg, a University of Sevilla professor and a partner at a blue-chip law firm, Sánchez deserves credit for risking his august credentials in service of a party which the country’s left-liberal establishment deems beyond the pale. When a Basque nationalist MP labeled me a “far-right voice,” Sánchez rose to defend me.
The occasion of the hearing wasn’t insignificant. Spain has held the EU Council Presidency only five times in the past since joining the bloc in 1986. It won’t foreseeably hold it again for another thirteen years, if not more, in the likely scenario of EU enlargement to either Georgia, Moldova, or the Western Balkans. The powers conferred by the Presidency are substantial, particularly if —as a plurality of EU citizens annually polled by Eurostat seem to do—you deem the Council to be the institution that encapsulates what little democratic legitimacy the bloc as a whole can claim. (The European Commission represents voters’ will only indirectly through the spitzenkandidaten process, and although it does so directly, the European Parliament is being rocked as of this writing by a series of corruption scandals largely unprecedented in EU history.) When Sweden’s current turn lapses in late June, Spain will be tasked with planning and presiding every monthly meeting of each one of the Council’s nine configurations by subject area, as well as representing it before the other two institutions—the Commission and the Parliament—in tripartite negotiations called ‘trilogues.’ Even its tenth configuration—security and defense—usually out of the presidency’s reach, will be chaired by a Spaniard, High Representative Josep Borrell.
This high-stakes opportunity for Spain to lead the Council’s deliberations will also be punctuated by elections at home, as was already France’s case during its presidency in the first half of 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Those races will happen both regionally in May (with the right-of-center PP and the right-wing VOX largely expected to win joint control of several Spanish regions) and nationally in December (where the outcome is less certain). The telegenic PM Pedro Sánchez and the ministers of his government—a coalition of socialists, the far-Left, and the Left-regionalists—are widely expected to make electoral hay out of the opportunity to stage-manage high-level diplomatic agreements (as they already did with NATO’s summit in Madrid last summer, culminating in the alliance’s new strategic concept). To put a cherry on top of it all, Spain’s presidency will be the last of the current so-called ‘institutional cycle,’ with elections to the European Parliament slated for May 2024 that may upset the present power balance in the hemicycle, and consequently alter the Commission’s orientations through the spitzenkandidaten process in due course. Therefore, the expectations run high that Spain will see pending EU bills through to final approval before Brussels switches its colors.
Countries awaiting the opportunity to impose their will upon fellow member states once their turn comes at assuming the presidency will be sorely disappointed by the hardball nature of real-world diplomacy. The country presiding over the Council isn’t guaranteed to see its preferred policy outcomes necessarily materialize in practice, but simply to set the agenda—to steer the Council’s discussions in the role of what the academic literature calls an “honest broker.” This requires paying due heed to every country’s posture and growing familiar with the rationales behind them. This leaves scarce little room for narrow-minded pet projects. Spain, for instance, beyond marshalling the EU’s continued support to Ukraine, is widely expected to prioritize the bloc’s relations with Latin America, which Borrell labeled the world’s most “Euro-compatible” region in a recent speech. But even then, it will message that priority as benefitting the wider EU rather than Spain’s narrow linguistic and cultural ties with the region. Every other expected priority concerns not itself alone but the bloc as a whole, from finalizing the European Green Deal’s pending components to implementing the EU’s so-called “Pillar of Social Rights” and shepherding a new EU-wide agreement on asylum and migration.
So where did that leave my testimony? I chose to highlight three areas I would recommend any Spanish government to act on, provided—not so evident a hypothetical—they subordinate this opportunity to the national interest. The first was the least obvious. In late 2020, the Council reached an agreement on the so-called “conditionality mechanism.” Poland and Hungary had previously threatened to apply their mutual veto to it, but three concessions were made to secure their vote. The mechanism would only be applied if (1) all appeals at the CJEU were resolved, (2) the Commission published appropriate guidelines, and (3) no other tool existed for the same goal. The third condition remains unmet. The Commission’s rule-0f-law mechanism (not the same), as part of which it annually publishes tailored recommendations to each member state on the matter, makes the conditionality mechanism both redundant and unnecessarily coercive. Whereas the threat of conditioning EU funds has only been leveled at Poland and Hungary, Spain could foreseeably join the rule-of-law renegades one day. While the odds are low that Sánchez will make a move, the issue will be particularly salient for a likely future right-of-center successor government that chooses to cross the EU ideologically on any issue.
The second item I highlighted was unanimity, a sacred principle increasingly in danger. By design, the EU is constantly compelled to reassess the balance between the breadth and the depth of European integration. Presiding over the EU Council will afford Spain a unique chance to steer that reassessment in line with the interests of small and mid sized nations like itself. To begin with, Spain can reaffirm that the EU’s gates remain wide open to all candidate countries willing to sustain their work towards meeting the bloc’s membership criteria—currently Georgia, Moldova, and some Balkan countries, but also Ukraine. Yet when they do join, a chorus of large countries led by Germany and France are likely to demand in return that voting thresholds at the Council be lowered. Enlarging the EU, their rationale goes, requires at the same time making collective action easier. Currently, that threshold is unanimity in all key policy areas—security, budget, foreign policy—but Germany and France claim that replacing it with qualified majority voting would ease the EU’s ability to act jointly, making it quicker and more flexible. Depriving the little ones—such as Spain—of the ability to block actions they deem contrary to their interests, however, would make the EU less democratic.
And lastly, I entreated the assembled MPs to consider a national priority the EU’s long-stalled effort to reach a new framework for asylum and migration. The issue couldn’t be more salient for us Spaniards, who often find ourselves between a rock and a hard place on this issue. On one hand, Spain is a gateway to Europe for the many thousands of young Moroccan migrants who reach the Canaries by sea every year. Although these flows have yet to rival the 2015 surge of arrivals through Serbia fueled by Syria’s civil war, they have been increasing since COVID , and will stay on that path as our economies recover. On the other hand, in the absence of the agreement I pressed for, other EU member states have been exasperatingly loath to share Spain’s burden.
Since Pedro Sánchez is unlikely to step into the vacuum by beefing up border patrols the way Matteo Salvini famously did in Italy’s case, it is even more paramount for Spain’s interests that a new durable framework be approved with solid burden-sharing provisions and a pathway to homogenizing the EU’s different asylum systems. In the unlikely case that he chooses to make them a priority for the presidency beginning in under five months, I doubt Sánchez would score wins in each of these issues. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t at least try.
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