Be Fruitful and Multiply

John Locke claimed that “the main intention of nature” is “the increase of mankind and the continuation of the species,” the “preservation of all mankind” being a “law of nature.”[1] Centuries later, Locke’s assumption that an increased population necessarily makes the preservation of the species more likely could be challenged in a way that he could hardly have imagined. The human population reached 8.16 billion at the end of 2023, as compared with only 2 billion of our species having been alive in 1900. The exponential increase of energy-consuming organic hominoids has undoubtedly been a cause of the increased carbon emissions arising from human sources, and therefore of climate change in the Anthropocene. The biblical permission to be fruitful and multiply may have come from an eternal source (i.e., Yahweh), but that the divine decree is to be applied regardless of the size of the population as well as the impact that the human imprint is having on the environment, including the climate, is, I submit, a faulty and foolhardy assumption to make in the twenty-first century. The decree in the biblical narrative could be interpreted as a mandate that the Hebrews, freed from slavery in Egypt, follow to fully occupy the promised land.  Empirically, it may even be time for humanity to take stock of its increased numbers globally.

By suggesting that the human population has grown too much, given the finitude of our planet’s resources, I do not mean that wide swaths of the human population on this planet should be plagued, starved, or blown up. Such a specious ends-justify-the-means rationale for harm is the theme of one of the DaVinci Code movies, wherein the bio-destructive antagonist is clearly crazy. Even the Rev. Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), relegated to Nature the clean-up role of using disease, famine, and increased conflict to get the number of humans on Earth back within ecologizing constraints, which is to say, to get human population down to a number that is consistent with the resources on Earth. In the twenty-first century, we might add, and does not ruin the planet in the process. Theoretically stated, a population growth rate that is behaving like a maximizing variable in mathematics, even if the derivative is negative (i.e., the rate of acceleration is decreasing), is a problem because such a variable has no problem piercing an ecosystem’s boundaries. Yet this is not done with impunity from Nature, according to Malthus.

According to one scholar, Malthus’ main theme is that a species’ population “inevitably grows beyond what the food supply can sustain.”[2] I have also read elsewhere that Malthus only claims that a population can grow beyond what the food supply can sustain. Even this throws a wrench into the deist assumption that a divine designer can be inferred from the order in Nature, so Malthus’ claim was controversial in his day.

Mitigating Nature’s devices to restore a population to good measure, Malthus admits that “the discrepancy between food and population spurs” industry, which in turn can enhance food growth and production such that the gap is closed.[3] But with the population at over 8 billion in 2024, I suspect that Malthus would have warned of impending natural limits to resources such as land and water (especially in the midst of climate change) as being something hard that even human enterprise must accept; the planet’s resources are, after all, finite. Furthermore, even if scientific advancement can render one resource more efficiently used and even augment it, another resource could then become a bottleneck, or hard constraint.

Whether as a divine decree or a natural, non-deist process, a larger human population is not necessarily beneficial for the species. Antedating Malthus’s work on population by about a half-century, however, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “invokes the invisible hand in arguing that the earth’s increasing fertility benefits humanity as a whole, despite [economic] inequality and the monopolization of land ownership by a few. The landlord can only eat a tiny portion of his land’s produce, the rest of which feeds the people who provide his luxuries.[4] The rich, despite their ‘natural selfishness and rapacity,’ are thus ‘led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants; and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.’[5] The rich man, motivated by ‘luxury and caprice,’ rather than ‘humanity’ or ‘justice,’[6] thus promotes a salutary ‘end which was no part of his intention.’”[7] In other words, industriousness has the unintended presumably beneficial consequences of advancing civilization and increasing the human population. Whereas a civilizing influence is arguably good under any circumstance, Smith’s assumption that increasing the size of the population is not in our day as unqualifiably beneficial as Smith assumed it to be in population growth from prosperity being limited to being in proportion  to its additional largess.

In Wealth of Nations, “Smith argues that the accumulation of capital and the increase of national wealth help ‘the great body of the people’ to ‘thrive,’ and that population growth is ‘the most decisive mark of prosperity.’”[8] This result of thriving is constrained rather than unlimited, for Smith maintains that, “’Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence.’”[9] An increase in population is an unintended beneficial consequence only in some relation to a period’s economic prosperity. But Smith undercuts Malthus’ claim that industriousness can catch food production up to a given population level because the prosperity resulting from the increase in industriousness or productivity causes the population to increase, albeit proportionately rather than maximally. Prosperity begets more people, perhaps to such an extent that the benefits from improved food-production productivity may not be enough to feed the larger population. Admittedly, Smith’s claim that family planning can be used to keep the standard of living up during a period of industriousness—rather than decreasing as the economic benefits of the additional industriousness are spread thin (i.e., decreasing GNP per capita) as the population increases due to the prosperity—could also mean that the proportioned population growth does not outstrip the enhanced food production. Perhaps it can be realistically said, therefore, that closing the gap between food availability and population can be expected to be problematic.

Similar to the idea that a tax cut can “pay for itself” by stimulating economic activity (GNP) and thus generating more tax revenue going into government coffers—a theory that has been empirically disproved since Reagan’s tax cuts in the U.S. in 1981—growing ourselves economically out of a gap between food production and the global population is too idealistic. Once that population reaches a certain level, “hard” constraints in terms of resources, which were not something that Malthus would have considered given the low population of humans on Earth in 1798 relative to the planet’s abundance, can become relevant in functioning like a “brick wall” that even scientific and technological advancement cannot penetrate. Yet Smith had written of an upper-bound, or “full complement,” of “riches” that is “allowed” in a geographical area by “nature,” such as in the soil, there, but this is geographically limited whereas in the twenty-first century, the human impact on the worsening conditions of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans could essentially move that brick wall closer in, hence narrowing the distance that human industriousness can go.[10] There is a big difference, in other words, between the limits to industry given the nature of a local ecosystem and running up against the limits of resources globally, such as in having drilled up all of the deposits of oil in the earth.

Unfortunately, reducing the extent, or depth, of the human imprint on the planet, whether in terms of the population or its offshoots such as pollution, warmer oceans (and air), and soil erosion, is an externality as far as markets, whether competitive, oligarchical, or monopolistic, are concerned. The political muscle of large concentrations of private wealth, whether of billionaires or large corporations, can styme government regulatory action to protect the overall good. Plato and Aristotle claimed that a passionate crowd is the downside of a demos (i.e., democracy), but perhaps today plutocracy, or the rule of (privately held) wealth, is the downside or even the inexorable eventual result of representative democracy.

So, where are we as a species if even the unintended beneficial consequence in the efficient allocation of resources, goods, and services in a competitive market is not enough to outweigh the baleful consequences of self-interest not only in terms of maximizing the chances of self-preservation, but also the preservation of one’s genes in offspring? Even in their 80s, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, two famous Hollywood actors, became fathers yet again. Lest it be contended that they were selfish in knowingly fathering children that could not be expected to know their respective fathers for many years, the obverse possibility, namely, that science may one day extend the human lifespan even possibly indefinitely, could mean that population size could jump like the burst of new acceleration of a rocket from its second state igniting and adding a jolt of added thrust. No one would seriously contend that economic industriousness could close the gap between such a population size and the natural limits of the planet’s resources.

I submit that countries with low or even declining birth-rates should not feel the need economically or normatively to promote population growth by public policy. Furthermore, China, much of Africa, and especially India should take more seriously the interest of the species in prudently getting its population size down to size while doing so is still possible, and, absent these regions taking an interest in the good of the species, multilateral global governance should be strengthened particularly in terms of enforcement powers in the interest of the species. In this regard, the United Nations is a bad joke—an embarrassment, actually. For the species cannot rely on Smith’s unintended benefits of competitive markets to redress externalities; even Smith recognized the need for government, and he even warned of the likely collusion between business and government at the expense of labor, and, I might add, of the species itself.  For short-term economic prosperity to be more pressing than the longer-term interests of the species can be reckoned as a vulnerability in the very constitution of the human mind itself, and of course corporations like to invest in elected representatives and people tend to vote, both with their wallets and purses in mind.

This writing draws on my multidisciplinary studies that unfortunately kept me out of the much-siloed ivory towers of American provincialism that have been so populated by epistemological and administrative pedestrians of incrementalism. To be sure, seeing connections between seemingly far-ranging academic areas is not much valued by folks whose eyesight has been trained on minute analytical distinctions that fail the “so what” question yet satisfy Adam Smith’s claim that specialization of labor boosts productivity in business. Even so, I have been writing publicly to apply my eighteen years of formal university education and four more of post-doctoral study under a scholar of historical moral, political, and religious thought for the good of humanity in spite of our species’ narrowness and yet paradoxical arrogance that functions as if on stilts during a flood. Why the inclusion of benevolentia universalis in addition to my interest in connecting seemingly unrelatable ideas or theories and making societal (and global) blind-spots transparent is a question that I have not so far been able to answer. From my multidisciplinary perspective, from theology to political economy, I am struck by how interrelated human phenomena are, and by how much flies under the proverbial radar screen at least in societal public discourse. Both the interrelatedness and the societal and global “blind spots” pertain to population and climate change, as well as to ethics and political economy; Smith’s field, after all, was moral philosophy rather than economics, the latter of which, as a field, subsequently materialized in large part because of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Why does anyone seek to contribute to the species in spite of its stubborn, selfish refusal to change—to develop—even for its own good? Entrenched ignorance on stilts during a flood is not a very attractive beneficiary of charitable benevolence, and yet perhaps instinctually we feel the urge to help the human gene pool to persevere. Perhaps my judgment is overly negative or pessimistic. Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own time. Such creatures tend to dig and travel cognitively, whereas most people remain in their hometowns. Perhaps I have been writing for another and you are along for the ride. Nevertheless, I do hope that my thinking stimulates your own, because I believe our species very much needs new thoughts this century.

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1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), First Treatise, sec. 59 and Second Treatise, sec. 7.
2. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 291n31.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 124. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
5. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
6. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
7. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.9.
8. Ibid., p. 127. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.viii.21-23, 43.
9. Ibid. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.viii.39-40.
10. Ibid., pp. 126-27. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.ix.14.

China Castigates the E.U. on Taiwan

“Act prudently.” This was the warning addressed to the E.U. by China’s president Xi after the European Parliament voted 432 to 60 on October 24, 2024 on a resolution urging China to immediately cease its “continued military operations,” “economic coercion,” and “hostile disinformation” directed at Taiwan.[1] Whereas in the West, warning by shouting and slamming a fisted hand on a tabletop may be viewed as signaling vehement protest, the relative soft-spoken, be prudent connotes a very serious threat. The early twentieth-century U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt, would likely miss the force of Xi’s intent to retaliate against the E.U. should it interfere with China on Taiwan. If my reading of Xi is correct, (and this may seem a leap), then the world coming to grips with constructing a global order commensurate to address global risks, such as climate change, starvation, and war in a nuclear age will face entrenched resistance in departing from the noxious principle of absolutist national sovereignty that has stymied collective, multilateral action. How dare you even hint that you will encroach on China’s sovereignty! This is essentially what President Xi was saying. Even in the post World War II global order of sovereign nation states, China’s claim that its sovereignty includes Taiwan is dubious, which in turn can be taken as evidence that resting the global order on the sovereignty of nation-states is problematic. In short, that principle allows for over-reaching without accountability.

In reacting officially to the E.U.’s resolution, China got right to the point, “warning that ‘the Taiwan question concerns China’s sovereignty’ and ‘it is a red line that must not be crossed.’”[2] The pith in the determination alone suggests that China would fight “tooth and nail” to hold onto all of its sovereignty rather than delegate some portion of it to a multilateral entity on the global level even so carbon-emission targets could be enforced on otherwise self-aggrandizing economic nation-states.

In explaining its warning, China also stated that it “strongly deplores and opposes this egregious breach of the one-China principle and interference in China’s internal affairs.”[3] But at the time, did the China-Taiwan dispute fall under China’s internal affairs? On the one hand, the UN Resolution 2758, which had been adopted in 1971, recognizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and removed the seat that had been assigned to the “representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” (in other words, Taiwan).[4]  Even in 2024, “the E.U., the U.S. and most” of the unitary single-states in the world maintained diplomatic relations only with the government of mainland China, “leaving [Taiwan] without official recognition.”[5] The resolution does not imply, however, that China has the UN’s permission to invade Taiwan, as the resolution does not even mention Taiwan (or the Republic of China). The E.U.’s resolution says as much, as it recommends “Taiwan’s meaningful participation” in international organizations.[6] It would be silly to say Taiwan can participate, but not exist apart from mainland China.

A more fundamental problem with China’s internal affairs claim centers on the ethical conflict of interest in one party of a dispute claiming the unilateral or sole authority to decide the question. That whether Taiwan was at the time included in China’s internal affairs was not definitely answered can be immediately realized by recalling the statement of Taiwan’s president, William Lai, that Taiwan was already de facto independent and thus did not even need to declare independence from the mainland. China’s claim of internal affair thus represents an overreach in terms of China’s beliefs and perception regarding its own sovereignty, and, by implication the lack thereof of Taiwan’s own. In other words, a nation-state’s own view of its sovereignty is subject to expansiveness and this in itself can give rise to state conflict internationally. Basing a global order on an absolutist interpretation of the sovereignty of the nation-state unit of political organization is inherently problematic. The absolutist interpretation includes the conflict of interest such as the one that China was exploiting in presuming to have the sole authority to decide what constitutes its sovereignty even in respect to territory that is in dispute with another nation-state. This is like a corporation’s management declaring that it would take over the National Labor Relations Board’s authority in the U.S. and rule on complaints made by the company’s labor union unilaterally without even bothering to put of the façade of being an impartial intermediary. At the time, Starbucks’ management would have liked to assume such a role; it could have cited China on the Taiwan question.

So in addition to the national sovereignty basis of the extant global order making enforcement of UN resolutions and international law nearly impossible, absent a voluntary “coalition of the willing” among nation-states—which can no means be relied upon even on an occasional basis—the sovereignty of nation-states is itself a problematic doctrine. Interpreted to be absolutist, national sovereignty even contains an unethical conflict of interest. I have elsewhere argued that even unexploited conflicts of interest are unethical, given the foreseeable tendencies in human nature; exploited conflicts, as evinced by China, are most definitely unethical. A global order that allows for such a thing is inherently flawed; that global-scale threats to our species have both increased and become more severe in the twenty-first century just adds to the urgency in replacing the flawed system, even if China warns us to be prudent in doing so.

It would be most imprudent to let China hold the world back from catching up with the twenty-first century. It is precisely such absolutist opportunist nation-states that justify extending sovereignty beyond the regional, or “empire-scale,” historically compounded polities, such as Russia, India, the E.U., the U.S., and China to the global level.

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1. Jorge Liboreiro, “’Act Prudently’: China Slams E.U. Parliament over Taiwan Resolution, Warns of Red Lines,” Euronews.com, October 25, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, italics added.
4. Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

Facing a Hot and Hostile Planet

On October 24, 2024, Tjada McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, and formerly in the Obama administration working on global hunger, spoke at Harvard on wars, hunger, and climate change then going on around the world. The pandemic had been a setback. In a world of pandemics, climate change, war, and hunger, there is no us and them. Lest this utopia be taken too realistically, 200,000 more people worldwide were hungry after the pandemic than before it. Since 1946, the highest number of state conflicts was in 2023. It was then that Russia invaded Ukraine and Israel decimated much of Gaza. In 2024, the UN’s high court found both aggressors to be violating international law, but they continued undeterred and with impunity. In the context of an epic crisis of displacement of civilians, with 339 million people globally having to rely on humanitarian assistance in 2024, the impacts of climate change exacerbated hunger and conflict in several states, especially in Africa. I contend that a serious obstacle was systemic, specifically in an antiquated global order relying on an absolutist interpretation of the sovereignty of the nation-state. Even the E.U. was not immune.

In her talk, McKenna said that decades of conflicts on land-access in Africa had been made worse by the impacts of climate change.  By 2024, there had been four failed rainy seasons in Somalia. In northern Kenya, similarly occurring droughts followed by heavier rains causing flooding exacerbated hunger.  Progress against hunger and diseases such as polio had been made prior the pandemic, but even so, 2023-2024 could be characterized as a time of catch-up in terms of global humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, voters worldwide in 2024 were most concerned then about increasing cost of living around the world. France and Germany decreased the global aid budgets in 2024, though I contend that focusing on E.U. states without considering the humanitarian spending at the federal level had by 2024 become  incomplete as well as antiquainted. Russia, by the way, was paying Moldovan voters and feeding them disinformation so to sabatoge Moldova in gaining statehood in the European Union while political opposition to supporting Ukraine's military was building in the United States. In short, politics was staying pretty close to immediate self-interest.

Therefore, the international system based on nations acting alone in self-interest (i.e., political realism) was not enough to address the global problems of political manipulation, climate and conflict. The U.S. Congress had dedicated $1.1 billion to preventing conflict around the world in 2019, but this was just a drop in the bucket. "A recommitment to international law and the international criminal court worldwide is necessary," she said in closing.

Thus far, I have presented McKenna’s views, albeit with a few caveats from myself. I submit that the talk was not utopian, for McKenna was hardly optimistic concerning countries taking on militaristic aggressors whether unilaterally or through global institutions, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. “Conditions are right for bad actors,” she said, by which we might think of Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel in going too far with impunity internationally. McKenna said the world order was cracking, especially in terms of accountability. Unabashed optimism would not be appropriate, given the failures globally in 2023 and 2024 to hold Russia and Israel accountable and stop the wholesale and deliberate militaristic attacks against civilians. 

Nor was McKenna at all optimistic on a system based on sovereign nation-states mitigating climate change. A record amount of carbon emissions by humans in 2023 had made a mockery of a global approach that relies on voluntary targets, the very notion of which presupposes the absolutist version of governmental sovereignty being applied to each nation-state. I would simply add to McKenna’s lecture more of an emphasis on the need globally to reform or reconstruct the global order, such that national sovereignty would no longer be the basis, given that inherently global exigencies had already rendered the post World War II world order deficient and obsolete. 

Russian Vote-Buying: Compromising International Law and Moldova in the E.U.

As if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were not a sufficient reason for Moldovans to vote in a referendum in 2024 to align the country’s constitution with accession into the E.U. as a state, which would entail the government of Moldova giving up some sovereignty, Russia felt the need nonetheless to buy off votes to hinder Moldova from statehood. That the pro-statehood vote won, albeit ever so slightly ahead, given the purchased votes, can be interpreted as an indication that a significant majority of the half of the eligible voters probably wanted Moldova to accede. That the vote tally did not reflect this, whether through vote-buying or disinformation, damaged both Moldova’s accession legitimacy and that of the E.U. itself. Moreover, international law’s lack of enforcement can be inferred from the sheer scale of Russia’s monetary and political invasion of Moldova. The importance of enforcement is precisely because bullies tend to overstep repeatedly rather than just once. They can smell a lack of enforcement from many miles or kilometers away.

After the referendum’s results came in, Moldovan President Maia Sandu decried the “assault on democracy and freedom” by criminal groups whose goal was to buy 300,000 votes; Moldova’s police “documented 150,000 people being paid to vote.”[1] Less than 14,000 votes made the difference in the final tally. “In any democracy,” the president said, “it’s normal to have people who have different views. What’s not normal is to have a situation where criminal groups are bribing voters.”[2] This is especially problematic if the funding source is another country’s government. According to the police prior to the election, “The persons affiliated with the criminal organization led by [Ilan] Shor [a convicted oligarch] were instructed to recruit people to participate in the electoral ballot for sums of money and to be notified on the eve of the elections through the groups on Telegram regarding the candidate to be voted for, as well as to vote with the option ‘no’ in the referendum.”[3] Additionally, the E.U.’s Commission witnessed “unprecedented interference” by Russia in Moldova.[4] Thijs Reuten, a member of the E.U. Parliament, pointed to “an investigation in the weeks and months before the election that . . . uncovered substantial amounts of money being moved, not illegally, every day on many occasions from Russia to Moldova.”[5]  A thread from vote-buying back to Russia is thus evident. If additional proof is needed, Reuten said that some “journalists went undercover in the networks that was (sic) distributing money to voters in order to use their vote or change their vote upon request of Russian actors and their allies.”[6]

In addition to the vote-buying, the disinformation campaign likely kept many eligible voters from even voting. Only about half of those eligible voted. Without a massive manipulation campaign orchestrated by a foreign government with its own vested interests in the result of the referendum, a higher percentage would be expected. By implication, even though the yes-vote won, that about half of only half of the eligible voters voted in favor of Moldova becoming an E.U. state means that only 25% of the total eligible electorate gave its consent. Such a result is spurious in terms of legitimacy. Decades after accession, a Moldovan politician could claim that Moldova should secede from the union in part because only 25% of the eligible citizens approved of statehood in the first place. So even though Moldova dodged a bullet (i.e., the yes-vote squeezed by), Russia was able to inflict damage ultimately on the E.U. itself. As the cases of Britain and Hungary show, the legitimacy of E.U. law, and the E.U. itself, was vulnerable even as late as 2024, which is just over 30 years after the E.U. began. A federal system is not the most stable of political systems, so legitimacy of a state-union relationship is crucial. Accordingly, the government of Moldova would not have been wrong were additional fortifications for legitimacy of accession sought after the referendum even though the yes-vote won.

Moreover, international law against such a massive and direct voter-manipulation of another country’s voters warranted real enforcement, such that were Russia to use the same strategy again, there would be negative repercussions. Unfortunately, that Russia was in the U.N. at the time does not mean that any such repercussions would be likely, as both Russia and Israel had been sailing through U.N. violations with utter impunity. If, moreover, the global system is to rely so much on the nation-state as the hegemonic and decisive unit of political organization, then the pitfalls that go with the principle of absolutist national sovereignty should not go unaddressed by the world.

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1. Vincenzo Genovese, “Moldova President Alleges Vote-Buying Tainted E.U. Referendum Results,” Euronews.com, October 21, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Turkey Abusing Asylum-Seekers: Implications for E.U. Statehood

Over 90% of Turkey is not located in Europe, and yet for years the sovereign state has sought accession in the E.U. in spite of Turkey’s non-European culture. That the E.U. did not act in a timely way on Turkey’s application can be taken as a de facto “no.” Reports of abuse of political-asylum seekers in E.U.-funded centers in Turkey may suggest that the country’s government has interpreted the delay as a “no,” or that the country is unintentionally thwarting its own chances on becoming a state in the union. The E.U. was hardly blameless, as the Commission casted off any responsibility for enabling the abuse by funding the centers where it was occurring.

In 2024, “Lighthouse Reports found systematic mistreatment across the removal centres managed by the Turkish government and backed by €213 million in E.U. funds.”[1] The investigation reported, The E.U. “is aware that it is funding this abusive system, with its own staff raising alarm about it internally—yet senior officials choose to turn a blind eye.”[2] Even though the E.U. had provided almost €10 billion to support the operation of the centres, the European Commission replied, “It is the responsibility of the Turkish authorities to thoroughly investigate allegations of wrongdoing and we urge them to do so.”[3] Absent was any recognition that funding the centres renders the E.U. responsible for the ongoing abuse too. Pointing to someone else to take responsibility for “unsanitary and overcrowded conditions in the facilities, instances of abuse and torture against migrants, and a patter of coercion to force detainees to sign documents of ‘voluntary’ returns to their war-torn nations” is too convenient to be ethically sound.[4]

The Commission’s claim that “all E.U. money provided for managing removal centres and voluntary returns in Turkey was ‘in full respect of E.U. and international standards” implies that the E.U. had a responsibility to see that the standards were being met.[5] “The E.U. executive [branch], however, insisted the ultimate responsibility to probe and crack down on violations of fundamental rights was up to the Turkish authorities.”[6] In short, the E.U. was trying to have it both ways. That Turkey had “its own set of legislation when it comes to recognition of refugees and migration management” does not mean that “the enforcement and protection of these formal rights remain the responsibility” of Turkey, even though a Commission spokesperson said that the responsibility follows from the legislation.[7]

That the E.U. was funding refugee centres outside of the E.U. suggests that the E.U. had done an insufficient job in handling asylum-seekers within the borders of the E.U.; essentially, the union was outsourcing its responsibility to protect its borders. That some E.U. states had recently violated the Shengen Agreement by setting up land-border check-points, to which residents in other states would be subject, also implies that federal action was insufficient. The insufficiency thus caused a weakening of the union’s rule of law, as state governments felt free to violate the Agreement.

Turkey was also working at cross-purposes with itself. If the Turkish government had any desire remaining for statehood in the E.U., using E.U. funds to violate international human rights, which the E.U. ostensibly values and works in support of, adds support to the argument that Turkey’s culture is too different to fit within a European union. Given internal threats by state governments to the E.U.’s decision-making process and rule of law, the union could ill-afford a leap in the magnitude of interstate differences in (political) culture. The continuance of the principle of unanimity applying to a significant number of federal competencies (i.e., enumerated domains of authority for E.U. law and regulations) was already running up against the recalcitrant will of Viktor Orbán of the E.U. state of Hungary. At the very least, that principle would need to be retired were Turkey to accede, which ironically would take unanimity to be changed to qualified majority voting on all matters at the federal level. In short, Turkey needed to get all of its ducks in a row, rather than to work against itself.

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1. Jorge Liboreiro, “Brussels Urges Turkey to ‘Thoroughly’ Probe Alleged Abuse in EU-Funded Migration Centres,” Euronews.com, October 11, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.