During the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787, delegates from the sovereign states feared that foreign states would seek to divide their American counterparts to the extent that the United States could split apart. So the delegates voted to move foreign policy from the state to the federal level. Unlike this case, government officials of the E.U. states held foreign policy closely rather than ceding it to the federal level. Whereas in the American case the delegates could adopt a federal perspective as distinguished from the immediate interests of the respective state governments, the state officials in the European Council can be taken even as personifications of their respective state interests. Foreign powers can take advantage of the state officials’ conflict of interest to the extent that the very functioning of the European Union is compromised.
China provides a case in point. Unlike his predecessors, President Xi had by 2017 demonstrated a strong inclination to have China assume a major geo-political role in the world. “Xi’s aggressive diplomacy largely comes from his own aspirations, beliefs and strategic requirements,” said Shi Yinhong, a scholar of international relations in China.[1] The interests of other countries are noticeably absent in Xi’s (or any president’s) considerations. In fact, Xi’s forceful diplomacy could be expected to be to the detriment of foreign powers, including the E.U.
In line with President Xi’s “global ambitions” at least through 2017, China may have been “trying to divide the European Union by cultivating poorer [states] like Hungary and Greece and using them to block policies supported by richer [states] that hurt Beijing.”[2] In pursuing this strategy, Xi could bank on the resentment of poor states such as Greece toward the largest state, Germany, for having been able to dominate federal policy on the debt crisis. In other words, the largest (and richest) state had enough power at the federal level to make sure that E.U. policy on Greece’s debt would reflect Germany’s interests. That a few large states might dominate was a concern of the American delegates at the convention—the result being that every state has the same number of votes in the U.S. Senate.
It seems that state as well as federal officials in the E.U. had not read Madison’s Notes to the Federal Convention, and thus could be unnecessarily blindsided by the efforts of China to divide the Union and of the state of Germany to forge E.U. policy in the state’s own interest. Xi could strategically use resentment among the other states against Germany to thwart not only the foreign policies of the large states, but also the very functioning of the Union. Put another way, the European Union has been ripe for an outside “divide and conquer” strategy.
European officials could counter China’s strategy by transferring more foreign-policy competencies to the federal level, addressing the conflict of interest that state officials have in the European Counsel (i.e., effectively reducing the interest of the Union to that of the specific state), and giving small states an institutional or procedural safeguard against a large/rich state being able to dominate federal policy.
1. Jane Perlez, “Xi’s Global Ambitions Tempered by Leery Allies,” The New York Times, October 23, 2017.
2. Ibid.
