The European Parliament has just doubled down on its efforts to turn the EU into a federal superstate by overhauling the bloc’s fundamental treaties that govern the internal power dynamics between Brussels and the member states.
The Parliament’s constitutional affairs (AFCO) committee adopted a set of proposed treaty changes last week, put forward by the so-called ‘Verhofstadt Group’, a circle of MEPs led by the infamously Eurofederalist Guy Verhofstadt from the liberal Renew group.
The new package of concrete constitutional proposals comes as a direct follow-up to a previous report already adopted by the entire plenary last month, which called for restricting the Council’s legislative powers, scrapping its rotating presidency model, and stripping member states of their veto rights while strengthening the Parliament itself.
The September resolution also envisaged giving voting rights to mobile and stateless EU citizens through a new “European citizenship”; lowering the voting age to 16; introducing European referenda; and creating an entirely new, advisory body made of randomly selected individuals, called the “European Agora”—all in the name of giving “democracy an update … permanently, by means of treaty change.”
With the majority of MEPs on board, the AFCO committee was ready to put forward concrete plans for these exact changes in this new report, calling the Council to “immediately and without deliberation submit the proposals” to the member states, so that a Convention to amend the treaties can be set up as soon as possible, the first time since the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon.
The co-rapporteurs even proposed rewriting the fundamental values specified in the Treaty of the European Union, changing “equality between men and women” to “gender equality.”
The report was adopted by the committee with 16 votes in favor and six against. It was no surprise that only the two conservative parties (ECR and ID) voted against it (just like last time) since the package was co-written by all other parliamentary groups, including every leftist party and the center-right EPP.
The ECR was at least able to observe the negotiations of the co-rapporteurs within the Verhofstadt Group, but according to the ECR shadow rapporteur, Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, the ID’s shadow rapporteur, Gerolf Annemans, wasn’t even allowed in due to the left’s cordon sanitaire against his party.
In a recent in-depth interview published by Remix, Saryusz-Wolski explained that the proposed treaty changes mean no less than a push to create a European superstate and reduce the role of member states to that of German Länder or Swiss cantons. The fact that virtually no one knows about it is deliberate, he added, and makes it even more infuriating.
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.
If the changes put forward by the 120-page report are implemented, member states’ competencies will be “residual and partial” at best, Saryusz-Wolski explained.
The current treaties include a so-called principle of conferral, meaning that the EU has only those powers that have been conferred to it by the member states and reinforced by unanimous Council decisions.
The Verhofstadt Group’s proposal, in contrast, would transfer 10 concrete policy areas under EU competence. Two (climate and environment) would be exclusive to Brussels, while eight others (including public health, external border control, foreign affairs, and defense policy) would be “shared competencies” with the Union having priority in exercising them.
Any major decision—including subsequent treaty changes—would only need four-fifths of the member states on board, which means no one would be able to prevent further centralization attempts on its own. This one, of course, would still need unanimous support in the Council to be adopted, which gives us hope as several countries (such as Hungary and Slovakia) are certain to veto it.
Saryusz-Wolski, however, still believes it’s just a matter of time until this unprecedented power grab proceeds. The MEP explained that the history of the treaty changes “proves that even the most resistant give way and yield under pressure over time,” just like Britain, France, and the Netherlands had in the past, even without the powerful tools the Commission has at its disposal now.
The arsenal of means of extortion and blackmail is much larger today and it is actively used. … Back then, the Commission could not block funds, as it does today. It could not put a member state up against a wall on contrived charges concerning the so-called rule of law, for example.
Nonetheless, this will be a long battle and it has only just begun. First, last week’s vote in the committee has to be followed up by a vote in the plenary at the end of November, although the package will have no problem getting adopted there either, which will put it on the Council’s table.
