The European Commission will prepare reforms to accommodate more than 30 EU member states in the near future, including measures to further centralize the EU decision-making process, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in the final State of the European Union address of her term on Wednesday, September 13th. The speech, which primarily focused on past achievements and ambitious promises, made clear that the EU chief is courting support both in Brussels, and with the voters at home, in favor of her possible re-election next year.
It was predicatable that von der Leyen would use the EU’s most important speech as her personal campaign kick-off event, especially since the Commission set up a new website ahead of the address dedicated to detailing the EU’s achievements from last year. Under the motto “Promises kept,” the site showcases everything von der Leyen wants to make sure Europeans give her credit for. And this is what exactly happened on Wednesday.
Enlargement (and federalization)
It was clear from the start that Von der Leyen was to recommit to Ukraine’s place in the EU, as she’s done manytimes before, but she rarely talks about large-scale, long-term enlargement projects. Today, the most striking segment of the speech was her commitment to EU enlargement and—as a necessary step on the way—deeper integration.
Her discussion of enlargement was flavored with a strange imperial grandeur.
I started by speaking of Europe responding to the call of history. And history is now calling us to work on completing our Union.
In a world where size and weight matter, it is clearly in Europe’s strategic and security interests to complete our Union.
A Union complete with over 500 million people.
Significant enlargement of the EU, of course, never worked without reforming the EU’s internal mechanisms to avoid chaos and general inefficiency. Von der Leyen was quite upfront about this too, saying that “convention and treaty change” is very much on the table. The one thing she did not emphasize, however, was that treaty change is always a one-way street: deeper integration means centralization and—ultimately—federalization.
But, she added, the EU should not wait for a treaty change before starting to prepare for enlargement. “That means answering practical questions about how a Union of over 30 countries will work in practice. And in particular about our capacity to act.” She did not elaborate much, but the message was clear: sooner or later, Brussels will take away member states’ veto right in the Council.
We need to look closer at each policy and see how they would be affected by a larger Union. This is why the Commission will start working on a series of pre-enlargement policy reviews to see how each area may need to be adapted to a larger Union. We will need to think about how our institutions would work – how the Parliament and the Commission would look.
It’s true that an EU with 30-35 members would have a hard time reaching a unanimous agreement on most issues. But von der Leyen never asked whether the EU needs to regulate most issues in the first place. It seems that she simply takes it for granted that Brussels will become more and more powerful over time, while national sovereignty slowly erodes.
Green and Digital
In the main part of her speech, the Commission president focused on three main policy areas—although she mentioned at least a dozen others—from the past year with which she felt the Commission made the biggest breakthroughs, including the Green Deal, digital transformation, and global security, including Ukraine.
Regarding the Green Deal, von der Leyen boasted “shifting the climate agenda to being an economic one”—meaning the EU now aggressively incentivizes anything that’s labeled ‘green’ and punishes anything that isn’t—in order to save the planet. She celebrated the ambitious climate targets the EU adopted with regard to reducing emissions and increasing the use of renewables, without saying a single word about nuclear power, the only source of energy that’s simultaneously clean, cheap, secure, and sustainable.
Staying with the topic, von der Leyen also talked about the protection of nature and biodiversity. She started by making a gesture of goodwill toward the EPP by acknowledging the concerns of farmers, but made clear that the controversial Nature Restoration Law will stay on the agenda. Then she talked about the preservation of forests—just one day after the Parliament adopted a new directive to subsidize biomass, which could easily trigger large-scale deforestation across the bloc.
Shifting her focus, von der Leyen said “Europe has become the global pioneer of citizen’s rights in the digital world” by the adoption of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and other similar legislation, claiming that they will foster a sense of safety and trust in the online sphere. That may or may not be true, but it’s also undeniable that the DSA allows Brussels to severely restrict the freedom of online speech at will.
Geopolitics
On the other hand, there was much less to show off with regard to the EU’s third flagship legislative package, the Migration Pact, which—with its controversial ‘mandatory solidarity’ mechanism—is still blocked by two members of the Council after the others attempted to push it through by changing the voting rules at the last minute. Von der Leyen urged the member states to finalize the pact soon, while acting like there was no disagreement whatsoever.
Instead of migration, von der Leyen spent more time on the EU’s geopolitical ambitions by essentially giving a subtle sales pitch to the third world on why they should choose Brussels instead of Beijing as their primary investor, promising trade deals and giant development projects to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “Europe will always work with [the emerging economies] to reform and improve the international system,” she pledged, using the familiar language of the BRICS’ recent Johannesburg Declaration.
While talking about China, she also promised to stand up to Beijing’s unfair trade practices and to defend the European markets from the artificially low prices of the state-owned Chinese industries. When later asked how the EU is supposed to remain competitive with all the green regulations in place, she simply ignored the MEPs’ concerns altogether.
Regarding Ukraine, von der Leyen promised to extend the temporary protection of Ukrainians within the EU, to provide more arms and ammunition through the ASAP initiative, and to keep funding the country with an additional €50 billion throughout the next four years. “This will help build Ukraine’s future to rebuild a modern and prosperous country.”
In the meanwhile, she said Europe needs to provide “credible security commitments in a world where deterrence matters more than ever,” perhaps by beginning to build the powerful “Defence Union”—meaning a common European army—she also believes to become a reality once it reaches 30+ members.
Sounds good, but…
Naturally, the three-hour debate that followed the address was much more nuanced than the speech itself. One by one, MEPs stood at the podium to point out von der Leyen’s ‘utopistic’ thinking, accusing the Commission president of abandoning pragmatism for pointless ideology.
Conservative MEPs stressed that Europeans face much greater “existential problems” than just climate change, such as inflation, de-industrialization, and “unfettered mass migration,” yet the Commission seems to be preoccupied with its green agenda out of pure, “irresponsible hubris,” as the German Jörg Meuthen put it.
Others, like Jordan Bardella and François-Xavier Bellamy, frequently raised the fact that the EU appears to have abandoned nuclear energy and instead has deepened the cost-of-living crisis by pushing costly and inefficient renewables. Replying to von der Leyen’s thinly veiled threats against countries that won’t fall in line, Balázs Hidvéghi talked about the ongoing “ideological jihad against conservative governments,” and argued for a “Europe of nations” instead of a federalist future.
Ultimately, there were some optimistic voices on the right who believe that change might be just over the corner. After years of ideologically driven and since failed policies, “realism has gained ground,” the Dutch MEP Rob Roos said, expressing hope that the 2024 elections will bring about a conservative majority in the parliament and with it a “renewal of democracy.”
