Is Scholz drawing the right European policy lesson from the Ukraine war?

Occasionally, the EU finds itself completely unable to make any decisions at all because of the unanimity principle, sometimes decisions take an infinitely long time, and often only the lowest common denominator is agreed.

It is revealing what kind of decisions have been blocked by the veto of individual member states in recent years. Here are some examples:

• In June 2017, Greece prevented the EU from making a critical statement on China in the UN Human Rights Council.
• In February 2019, Italy blocked a decision by which the EU wanted to recognize Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.
• In November 2019, Hungary blocked a condemnation of a US decision to no longer consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal.
• Another interesting example is provided by the five EU member states that have refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence since 2008.

The reasons for this do not lie in the Kosovo question itself, but in possible feared secondary effects on their own domestic political situation – think of the Catalonia issue in Spain or the Cyprus issue in Greece.

Resistance to majority decisions justified in many ways

Inherent in all of these events is that the blocking member state was usually not concerned with the right or wrong decision of the EU, but with domestically motivated decisions that had almost nothing to do with the actual issue.

A frequently voiced argument against majority decisions is that foreign and security policy affects the core area of ​​national sovereignty, especially when it comes to military operations. Admittedly, the EU treaty has taken good precautions here in two respects. Article 31 gives each member country the opportunity to pull the emergency brake and reject a majority vote “for fundamental reasons of national policy”. In addition, the same article explicitly excludes military or defense decisions from qualified majority voting.

The resistance to the introduction of majority decisions is often justified by the concern that in future the alliances of the big players, particularly dominated by Germany, will outvote and overrun them, or in any case ignore them.

This is a particularly important argument at the moment because German hesitation in taking military support measures for Ukraine and in the energy dependency on Russia caused a visible loss of confidence, especially among our eastern partners. Why, it is argued, should we little ones let Germany outweigh us, when Germany has ignored our warnings about Russia and Nord Stream 2 for years?

How, then, could the lingering misgivings of those opposed to majority voting be gradually overcome? Anyone who now calls for the introduction of qualified majority decisions in EU foreign policy would certainly suffer a belly flop. A better start could be to take steps to prevent the individual veto – see the individual cases cited above.

There are a number of conceivable options, of which only two are listed here:

• Whoever uses the “constructive abstention” does not have to implement the relevant decision nationally, but accept that the decision is binding on the Union as a whole.
• The “veto escalation”: The EU could decide, without changing the treaty, that in the event of an individual veto, the decision is automatically escalated to the next higher level. A foreign minister’s veto would mean that the process would automatically end up with the European Council of heads of state and government. Suddenly, the veto is no longer politically completely free – some foreign ministers will think twice about burdening their own head of state with such a situation if there is no doubt that very central national interests are at stake.

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If Olaf Scholz wants to put his – correct – proposal into practice, he must not stop at keynote speeches in view of the deadlocked positions. On the contrary, he can only expect a breakthrough on this issue if he breaks the current deadlock in Brussels head-on and courageously with an innovative step: he could, for example, formally declare at the next opportunity in the European Council that Germany should a situation arise 26 to one will refrain from inserting a German veto and instead choose the “constructive abstention”, combined with the invitation to the partners to follow this – good – German example.

That would be an important European political signal, a real liberation to win back trust in European politics and to take an important step towards the EU’s “world political capability”. In this way, Berlin would also strategically underline its claim to leadership in Europe, which was already formulated in the coalition agreement.

The author is a former ambassador to Washington and headed the Munich Security Conference. He writes this column every 14 days.

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