In the first two decades of
the twenty-first century, one trend in the American retail sector involved the
creation of a status that had not existed: customers as “members.” The jargon was
essentially marketing because managers in corporate headquarters realized that customers
would doubtlessly appreciate the more exclusive label of “member” because clubs
have members. Would the American political elite pick up on the trick and refer
to citizens as members of the U.S. even though such a label so applied would
not make sense? Meanwhile, to differentiate the E.U. from the U.S., Europe’s
political elite regularly referred to E.U. states as member-states even
though the same label could be applied to U.S. states. States of both unions
are represented at the federal level, and thus are indeed members, whereas to
be a customer is not to be a member of a store. When Canada’s prime minister,
Mark Carney, sought closer relations with the E.U. due to his trade-fight with the
U.S. in 2026, he discussed with European leaders the possibility of Canada
becoming an “associate member” of the E.U. even though no such status existed.
The implication is that E.U. states, unlike U.S. states, are not really states,
but rather are members. This implication exposes the underlying category mistake
that denies that states pertain to federal systems whereas countries are
members of international alliances and trade blocs.
On September 13, The Wall
Street Journal reported that Carney had been “exploring closer ties with the
European Union, including becoming an ‘associate member’ of the bloc.”[1]
Creating such a status would be difficult because the E.U. did not have members;
rather, the political union, which is not an informal network of sovereign
countries (i.e., a bloc), has states. In fact, the E.U. is beyond being
a confederation of sovereign states, as the U.S. had been under its Articles of
Confederation; both the federal and state levels of judicial, legislative, and
executive governance have some sovereignty. This is what distinguishes a
federation from a confederation in modern parlance. So, the E.U. has
semi-sovereign states, and thus not “members” as if the E.U. were a bloc or
international alliance or trade group.
At the time, Canada was a
member of the British Commonwealth of former colonies, so Carney can be viewed
as misapplying that relation to the European Union. Similarly, when David
Cameron was the prime minister of Britain, he carelessly quipped that the E.U.
was just one of the international networks that Britain happened to be in. A
federal union that itself is semi-sovereign (enumerated powers or competencies
having been transferred from the states) is not a network. It would
appear that political category mistakes abound when it comes to the European
Union. Like the U.S.’s federal level, that of the E.U. is semi-sovereign and
thus that union is not international. Technically, both the U.S. and E.U. have
international and national elements/principles of governance at the federal
level, but neither union can be labeled as international. Hence the words “member”
and “associate member” do not apply to states in either union.
The root cause of the
linguistic category mistakes is ideology. Specifically, what had been known as “states’
rights” in the nineteenth century in the U.S. was effectively renamed in the E.U.
as “Euroskepticism” two centuries later. The ideology seeks to minimize the governmental
sovereignty that has been transferred to the federal level; referring to E.U.
states as members intentionally gives the false impression that the states were
still fully sovereign. Mislabeling the E.U. itself as a bloc is from the same
motive. Whereas members of a bloc are free to act as they please, semi-sovereign
states in a federal system in which the federal level’s institutions of public
governance also have some sovereign powers are bound by them. It is from
precisely that ideology that Viktor Orbán’s state of Hungary wantonly violated
E.U. law.
The Wall Street Journal fell
for the ploy of implying that E.U. states are actually members. Noting that the
status of associate member did not exist in the E.U., the newspaper indicated,
according to Euronews, that “the EU could be open to creating special
membership arrangements” for Canada.[2]
Euronews followed the sentence with another: “The EU and Canada want to bolster
trade ties of goods, services and workers, particularly in areas including
energy, artificial intelligence, defence and critical minerals.”[3]
The E.U. and Canada are represented here as equal parties, however, rather than
one being in the position amenable to being an associate member (or state) of
the other. Put another way, Canada and the E.U. were negotiating on trade as equals,
as per the (limited) governmental sovereignty that both had at the time. If Carney
wanted Canada to be an E.U. rather than a U.S. state, Canada and the E.U. would
no longer be on the same level because Canada’s accession would have to be
approved by the European Union, and Canada would then be a part of the
whole rather than another whole. The notion that Canada would merge with
the E.U. (or the U.S.) and yet be a state, or worse, a member, is internally
inconsistent. So too is the claim that a federal union of states has members,
and therefore possibly associate members too. Perhaps Guam (and other U.S.
territories) should be labeled as an associate member of the U.S., as if the American
states were members of the U.S.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
