How the EU became a subdepartment of NATO

Wolfgang Streeck on how the European Commission used the proxy war in Ukraine as a way of surreptitiously achieving further supranational integration at the cost of greater vassalisation

Regular readers will know that one of the topics that I keep returning to is the evidently self-abusive behaviour exhibited by European nations since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war.

As I wrote a while back, the unwavering deference of European countries to US strategy in the management of the conflict — placing heavy sanctions on Russia and joining NATO’s proxy war by providing ever-growing levels of military aid to Ukraine, while ruling out any possible diplomatic solution — is almost inexplicable from rational, self-interested perspective, given how it clearly runs contrary to, and has already heavily jeopardised, Europe’s strategic interests from an economic, security and geopolitical perspective.

In that article, I put forward several explanations for this apparently irrational course of action — first and foremost the massive influence still wielded over Western Europe by the US almost 80 years after the end of the World War II, particularly via the European Union.

In a recent paper the role of the European Union in the war in Ukraine, however, Wolfgang Streeck makes a compelling argument that I hadn’t really considered, namely that, from the perspective of the EU establishment, subordination to the US-NATO strategy in Ukraine, and the pursuit of the proxy war against Russia, was a way of surreptitiously achieving the age-old goal of further supranational integration and centralisation (while simultaneously boosting the EU’s role as an auxiliary of the US and NATO).

The paper begins with an account of the condition of the EU before the war, which it describes as overextended and stagnant with respect to the EU’s proclaimed finalité, the “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”:

The EU in the run-up to the war

By the time the war over Ukraine broke out, the European Union (EU) was a disorderly assortment of the remnants of various incomplete attempts at what had been called “European integration” — a vast supranational would-be state that had become practically ungovernable due to overextension and the extreme internal heterogeneity that had come with it.

Already before 2022, hopes for an integrated Europe superseding Europe’s historical nation-states — the EU’s much-vaunted finalité of an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe — had almost disappeared, reflecting not least the growth of the Union, mostly for geopolitical purposes, from six to 27 members (even 28, until one of its three biggest member states, the United Kingdom, seceded), including countries as different as Denmark and Romania, or Portugal and Poland. Tensions between member states such as Germany, France, Italy, and Poland had risen on a growing number of issues.

[Meanwhile, the various crises of the 2000s had] laid bare the EU’s lack of technocratic problem-solving and political governing capacity, which made its member states and governments even more conscious of their national interests and the differences between them.

By the early 2020s, it was obvious that this could not continue forever, the EU living from hand to mouth politically, consuming its dwindling supply of legitimacy without being able to replenish it. One symptom was fast-rising electoral support for so-called right-wing populist political parties and movements in several member states that are sharply critical of the EU.

As far as the Ukraine crisis is concerned, in the decade leading up to Russia’s 2022 invasion, the EU certainly played a role in sowing the seeds of the conflict, especially in the lead-up to the 2014 US-led coup — first by insisting that Ukraine cut its economic and political connectivity with Russia in exchange for access to the EU market (and one day, potentially, EU membership), then by challenging the legitimacy of the Yanukovych government.

Yet the EU’s role, especially, especially in the months leading up to Russia’s invasion, remained marginal vis-à-vis that of the US. In the critical months during the fall and winter of 2021/2022, there was, as far as is known, no consultation by the United States of European governments or, for that matter, the EU. The US’s approach to the EU was well summed up by Victoria Nuland in a 2014 leaked phone conversation: “Fuck the EU”. As Streeck notes, “the EU and its members seem to have been confined to the sidelines” throughout the entire crisis.

After Russia’s invasion: the EU eyes an opportunity for greater centralisation

Following Russia’s invasion, however, the EU, through the European Commission, adopted a much more activist role — albeit not to achieve greater “strategic autonomy” for the EU in dealing with the Ukraine crisis, but rather to use the crisis to push for further supranational unification and centralisation:

With the start of the war, the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen acted as an extended European arm of NATO and the United States, putting its resources at their service while working to unite its member states behind the Western war effort.

Lacking jurisdiction under the European treaties on military and defense matters, the Commission sought to identify gaps in the capacities of EU member states and NATO that it could offer to fill, hoping thereby to enhance, or restore, its governing capabilities as an international institution.

Among its first steps was to work out, in close cooperation with the United States, a wide range of European sanctions on Russia and countries supporting it, with the aim of decisively weakening Russian economic and, as a result, military power. In effect, this moved the EU into the position of an economic policy subdepartment of NATO, assisting it on its special area of expertise. Sanctions included asset freezes and travel bans, banking and central banking restrictions like exclusion from the SWIFT system, export controls and import bans, and embargoes on Russian energy.

In von der Leyen’s own words, the sanctions were meant to “systematically degrade Russia’s industrial and economic base”. We know how that worked out: two years later, the Russian economy was growing, including Russian oil exports, while large parts of Western Europe had moved into a recession.

Another way in which the EU was and is supporting the Western war effort is by helping sustain the morale of the Ukrainian people.

For this, von der Leyen untiringly kept declaring the firm determination of the EU and its member states not to let up short of a full military victory of Ukraine over Russia, whatever it would take, using rhetoric often more militant than that of the United States. In the same vein, von der Leyen continued to hold out the prospect of full EU membership for Ukraine, in line with the association agreement of 2014.

Promises of accelerated accession came with long-term commitments to economic support for the recovery of Ukraine after and indeed already during the war. In her 14 September 2022 State of the Union Address, von der Leyen announced that the rebuilding of Ukraine would begin immediately, noting that it would require “a comprehensive Marshall Plan” for which the EU would “present a new Ukraine reconstruction platform”. Almost two years later, she repeated her promise, stating that, “We will completely rebuild Ukraine once the war is won. The European Union stands firmly by Ukraine, financially, economically, militarily, and most of all, morally, until [Ukraine] is finally free”.

In making these long-term, and very costly, military-financial commitments to Ukraine, von der Leyen wasn’t just “locking in” the EU’s participation in NATO’s proxy war against Russia, but was also using the crisis to claim for the Commission powers and competences unforeseen by the EU treaties, not only on military and defense matters — over which it has no jurisdiction — but on fiscal issues as well, by committing member states to future expenses that will likely be used to justify the taking on of more EU-level (“federal”) debt, despite the fact that the European treaties explicitly prohibit fiscal risk-sharing across countries. As Streeck notes:

More than two years after the war began, there has been no discussion on the problems that admission into EU membership of a country like Ukraine, with its needs for long- term financial support, first military then economic, would cause for the EU’s internal politics and finances.