Domestic governance is perhaps
more difficult than international relations in that real enforcement mechanisms
are in force only in the former. Flaunt a UN resolution and that feckless
organization is unchanged; if a state official flaunts a federal law, on the
other hand, the viability of the federal system can collapse as governors and
legislators in other states get the same idea. Before long, the states are once
again sovereign. Unfortunately, it is easy to get distracted by political
theater and miss such existential threats from the point of view of the
viability of a system of public-sector governance. Yet we depend so much on
governments, so to tamper with necessary beams (or cards, as in a house of
cards) is quite dangerous. Along with the governors of Hungary and Slovakia,
Poland’s top official knowingly compromised the viability of the European Union
(E.U.) in 2023, but, unfortunately, I don’t think many people stood up and paid
attention to the danger. Political theater staged for election purposes is more
tantalizing, which raises the question: who in the E.U. was watching the
proverbial store?
In response to Ukraine’s
President Zelensky’s depiction of Poland’s government as engaging in “political
theater” in making a “thriller” in objecting to the E.U.’s lifting the ban on
Ukraine crops traveling through and being bought in the union, Poland’s Prime
Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to the Ukrainian “never to insult Poles again.”[1]
To remark that a politician, especially one up for re-election, is using hyperbole
to appease Polish farmers for electioneering purposes is not to insult the
Polish farmers or the Polish people as a people. So it is outlandish, not to
mention a bit strange, that Poland’s prime minister told journalists, “The
Polish people will never allow this to happen, and defending the good name of
Poland is not only my duty and honor, but also the most fundamental task of the
Polish government.”[2] If
so, then the Polish people had a terribly reckless judgment concerning the
rationale for war and the prime minister lapsed terribly in not knowing that
the primary responsibility of a government is to protect a people from being
attacked from abroad. Retaliating for one insult is not generally viewed
by political theorists as a legitimate (and even smart) reason to go to war. Furthermore,
“Never insult us again!” strikes me as childish. Were Zelensky to resort
to that jejune mentality, he might have replied, sticks and stones may break
your bones but names will never hurt you, and then stuck out his tongue
just for effect.
One of the benefits of representative
democracy is that reflection by elected representatives who enjoy the
buffer of a term in office can hold statescraft off from the momentary
excitements of a mob. Both Plato and Aristotle viewed the mob as the bad form
of democracy. To Plato, reason in a just person and polis controls the
appetites, or emotions. Indeed, structures of governance, both public and
private, are instituted in order to subject flaring passions to reasoned-out
routes. As a E.U. state, Poland committed an egregious error when Morawiecki
refused to recognize the federal (i.e., E.U.) change of policy lift the ban on
Ukrainian grains in the E.U. In this respect, the prime minister’s political
tactics could compromise the viability of the E.U. as a system of public-sector
governance (i.e., a system of government). The E.U. is hardly alone; the U.S.
has also been susceptible to resistance from the governments of member states.
In 1832, the legislature of South
Carolina decided that it could lawfully void any federal law from being valid
within South Carolina; it was a matter of that republic defending its interests.
President Andrew Jackson sent troops to the wayward member state, whose
government had even drawn up an “exit” document, which was used in 1861 to exit
the U.S. In 2023, Alabama ignored the U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming “a
lower court that had ordered the state to redraw its seven-seat congressional
map to include a second majority-Black district or ‘something quite close to
it.’”[3]
After the decision in June, the Alabama legislature “again approved a
congressional map with only one majority-Black district.”[4]
Just as the history of the E.U. has included instances in which state
governments, and even state supreme courts, have ignored decisions by the
European Court of Justice, the government of Alabama was saying, in effect,
that rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court could be ignored. Considering that this
was hardly an open question, considerable gall as well as denial went into the
recalcitrance of the state officials. The judges of the lower court whose
ruling the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed wrote, “We are deeply troubled that
the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the
remedy we said federal law requires.”[5]
Flouting federal law is no small matter, as the supremacy of the federal
judiciary in adjudicating on federal law had long been established by U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Marshall’s ruling in Marbury v. Madison (1803).
In 2023, the governors of the
E.U. states of Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia announced that they would continue
to ban Ukrainian wheat even though the E.U. had just lifted the ban. Specifically,
the European Commission rejected the state bans on Ukrainian grains, dairy,
sugar, fruit, vegetables and meats.[6]
A spokesperson for the Commission said, “In this context, it is important to
underline that trade policy is of EU exclusive competence and, therefore,
unilateral actions are not acceptable.”[7]
Yet those states persisted. In fact, Slovakia and Bulgaria enacted bans! In so
doing, all of those states weakened Ukraine, which was defending its territory
against the Russian invasion. The states
indirectly aided President Putin.
Because the E.U., like the U.S.,
was aiding Ukraine militarily, the illegal state bans thwarted E.U. foreign
policy too. The E.U. had “decided to suspend duties and quotas on a long list
of Ukrainian exports . . . , including many agricultural goods, in a bid to
help the war-torn country cope with the economic fallout from Russia’s war and
facilitate trade for Ukrainian farmers.”[8]
So at the federal level, the decision taken involved an acknowledgement that
helping Ukraine as a matter of foreign policy to thwart Russian aggression
would entail economic costs within the E.U.
The governors of Poland, Hungary,
Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria had jointly written a letter to E.U. President
von der Leyen, “If market distortions causing damage to farmers in our [states]
cannot be eliminated by other means, we ask the Commission to put in
place appropriate procedures to reintroduce tariffs and quotas on imports from
Ukraine.”[9]
As states being directly represented at the federal level in the European
Council, the recalcitrant five were obliged to abide by federal law rather than
be sore losers when their joint request was denied. For each state had agreed
to cede some sovereignty to the E.U. even in the federal qualified-majority-voting
procedure itself—not to mention the exclusive competencies, such as trade—so
to continue as semi-sovereign states and yet act if those states were sovereign
state, just as South Carolina had done and Alabama would do, is nothing short
of duplicitous and egoist.
A federal system simply cannot
function viably if every state can decide for itself whether a certain federal
law is valid within the state’s boundaries. Such a federal system would reduce
to a confederation, in which governmental sovereignty resides with the members
(i.e., states). Just as the U.S. discovered from 1776 to 1789 in the Articles
of Confederation and the E.U. was discovering in 2023 both with regard to
raising money and enforcing federal law, a confederal system has too many
vulnerabilities to be viable except internationally. With a bicameral
legislature (i.e., the Parliament and Council of the E.U.), an executive branch
(i.e., the Commission), and a supreme court (i.e., the European Court of
Justice), the E.U. is not an international body; rather, like the U.S., both
national and international principles of governance are included in the system.
So even though not nearly as
childish as making threats on the basis of an insult erroneously inferred to be
against the people, Poland’s refusal to recognize a federal law is much more
significant than even whether Poland would permit Ukrainian wheat to pass
through (or be bought within) the state, and definitely more important than
whether someone insults the Poles. When I was a kid in America, telling Polish
jokes was a stable. In hindsight, it seems so silly, and only a fool gets upset
over childish things. Certainly, heads of governments should not. Chief
executives of governments, and CEOs for that matter, should not talk to each
other as if drunk in a bar. Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers swore like a sailor
and was very immature in his “empire building” of real estate, and his
emotional immaturity was one reason why the investment bank collapsed.
Governments, however, cannot simply collapse, and so people who represent
others have a responsibility to talk like adults rather than children. Being an
adult includes being willing to submit to constraints, such as federal laws,
and even international law were they to be given any enforcement power.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ariane de Vogue and Fredreka Schouten, “Supreme Court Rejects Alabama’s Attempt to Avoid Creating a Second Black Majority Congressional District,” CNN.com, September 26, 2023 (accessed September 30, 2023).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Robert Greenall, “EU Rejects Ukraine Grain Bans by Poland and Hungary,” BBC.com, April 17, 2023 (accessed September 30,2023).
[7] Jorge Liboreiro and Sandor Zsiros, “’Not Acceptable’: EU Decries Bans on Tariff-free Ukrainian Grain Imposed by Neighboring Countries,” Euronews, April 17, 2023 (accessed September 30, 2023).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., italics added.
