On America’s Thanksgiving Day,
2025, Dmytro Kuleba, a former foreign minister of Ukraine, was asked whether Ukraine’s
government officials could trust American officials negotiating with the Russian
officials, given the fact that Steve Witkoff, the U.S. Envoy at the time, had
recently been caught coaching Kirill Dmitriev, a top Russian official, on how
to get U.S. President Don Trump on the side of Putin even though the ongoing
Russian invasion of Ukraine was still in violation of international law, which,
by the way, trumps historical reasons, such as a lost Russian empire. Stalin’s
forced famine in Ukraine during the 1930s would seem to nullify any imperial
claims from the past. Kuleba relied to the journalist’s question with, “Not
really, but we do not have another America.”[1]
He was really giving Europe a wake-up call, but the problem there was not a
lack of consensus, but a structural deficiency in the federal system of the
European Union.
Far from being able to
diagnose what aspects of the E.U.’s federal system were holding the Union back
from protecting Ukraine from an American-Russian one-sided plan to end the ongoing
invasion, Kuleba said rhetorically, “Isn’t it embarrassing that almost four
years into the war, European leaders are still jumping from one topic to
another, from sending peacekeeping forces to reassurance forces to strengthening
the Ukrainian army.”[2]
While it may be tempting to criticize state-level officials for being “all over
the map” on what the E.U. should do regarding the American-Russian negotiations,
as well as on Russia itself, moreover, such divergence of opinion is only
natural. In the U.S., for instance, polling officials from the 50 states would
not likely find even a consensus. For example, the leaders of Arizona and
Massachusetts may have been as far apart from each other on whether to help
Ukraine militarily as the leaders of Hungary and France. If this comparison itself
“touches a nerve,” I contend that a festering, subterranean category mistake is
the root cause of the pain.
E.U. citizens had a solid
basis for being frustrated, for although “two top E.U. aides joined
negotiations with Ukrainian and American delegations in Geneva . . ., European
leaders have been largely side-lined from the talks.”[3]
As for the Coalition of “the willing,” which consisted of 33 sovereign
countries, depending on a bloc rather than on the E.U. to safeguard Ukraine’s
geopolitical and military interests, or treating the E.U. as if it were a
bloc, can be reckoned as borderline foolishness when up against an active
theatre of combat.
Kuleba’s point in lamenting
that Ukraine did not have another America in Europe may imply that the E.U. could
and even should be another America capable in terms of raw power to be a
counterweight to American foreign policy in the world. This is not to say that “another
America” would be a replica of the United States, for the European Union,
although another empire-scale federal system characterized by dual sovereignty
(and thus not a confederation such as U.S.’s Articles of Confederation
(1781-1789)), contains differences. For example, whereas the U.S. Senate
represents the member-states at the federal level, the European Council and the
Council of Ministers represent the state governments at the federal level in European
Union. Yet the U.S. House of Representatives and the European Parliament are
much more alike counterparts, representing U.S. and E.U. citizens,
respectively. The political genus of empire-scale and level federalism of dual
sovereignty (i.e., state and federal) can indeed support institutional and
procedural differences in the basic, or constitutional, law. Whereas the U.S. in
the twentieth century had become too consolidated, the E.U. in its first few
decades in the next century has been too state-heavy, as the U.S. was for many
decades since it split the atom of governmental sovereignty in 1789. Even
though the E.U.’s federalism contains more safeguards protecting the states
from federal encroachment than did the U.S. even when the governments of the
member states selected U.S. senators, those E.U. safeguards arguably have
paralyzed the E.U. on the world stage.
In particular, the veto power
of each state government in the European Council and the Council of Ministers, and
the refusal of every state to delegate more governmental sovereignty to the European
Commission to conduct foreign and defense policy, are why the E.U. president
(i.e., of the federal executive branch) and the federal foreign minister were
not able to defend Ukraine from the ongoing invasion for years, and to become
directly involved in the negotiations to end the invasion. Put more bluntly, by
even just threatening to use the state’s veto, the governor of the E.U. state of
Hungary was holding E.U. policy and power regarding Ukraine and Russia hostage.
Even with regard to the frozen assets of Russia’s central bank, E.U. officials
were having trouble using that as political leverage to shift the negotiations
more to Ukraine’s favor. It is not that President Von der Leyen was weak or not
astute politically, or naïve on defense; rather it is the case that a federal
system in which governmental sovereignty is held both by state governments and
the Union is incompatible with the confederal device of the state veto
at the federal level.
A dean of the Global Affairs
school of Boston University told me in 2024 that the E.U. was a mix of confederal
and modern (dual sovereignty) federalism. I countered that the two types of
federalism are mutually exclusive. To conflate the two, such as by granting the
federal institutions some governmental sovereignty while giving each state
government a veto over such sovereignty, is self-contradictory and thus
inherently implausible. To be sure, the E.U.’s states could look at the process
of consolidation of power at the federal level in the U.S. and want
institutional and procedural safeguards against such federal encroachment from
happening down the road in the European context, but I submit that such safeguards
can exist without hamstringing the E.U. internationally.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
