Not too long ago, European integration promised peace, prosperity, and the sustained betterment of the human condition. As of spring 2025, the Brussels-led bloc appears poised to change beyond recognition. Led by politicians of questionable reputation — and even worse characters — like Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen (once in the running to succeed former chancellor Merkel, but she was too incompetent and corrupt, hence she was ‘exported’ to Brussels) or ECB head Christine Lagarde (a convicted felon), as well as the festering corruption at the heart of the EU’s parliament, the purported European dream is turning into a nightmare before our very eyes. Rosy-eyed prospects for the ravaged Old World are rapidly giving way to increased centralisation and militarisation while the European publics are bamboozled into acquiescence by the appearance of a lawful and, above all, legitimate progress under the conditions of presumed normalcy.
While the latter sentiment might appear plausible at first sight given the realities of our post-pandemic condition, this essay seeks to show that what is currently going on is a lot of things, but it ain’t normal. Whereas it is perfectly obvious that there is no such thing as a constant salience to any body politic over time, ‘Europe’ — by which is meant the EU/EEC — is changing so swiftly these days that it is, in fact, becoming increasingly hard to keep track of the multi-dimensional, all-out assault on the constitutional foundations of the various EU member-states. What is going on these days, then, may be characterised as an EU leadership class that is both speeding up long-held aims of creating an ‘ever closer union’ as envisioned in the 1983 Solemn Declaration on European Union while, at the same time, also seeking to broaden and deepen its reach. This two-pronged pursuit feeds rising anti-EU sentiment, fuelled in part by the (re)surgence of what is typically (mis)labelled (right-wing) populism. This cacophony of developments points to a perplexing conundrum: if EU expansion is supposedly the resolution to many, if not all, of the continent’s woes, why these dissonant tones?
This essay relates four key policy decisions that are both here to stay and whose implications transcend the bloc’s boundaries. In the first part, a key aspect of the EU’s Covid Pandemic management, namely the adoption by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the ‘digital Covid certificates’ as worldwide standard. In the second part, we take a close look at what Politico recently, and fairly tellingly, considered Europe’s ‘Hamiltonian moment’, by which is meant the ongoing efforts by Brussels to turn the European Union into a federalised super-state with increasingly centralised command-and-control structures. Due to its length, I have elected to split the essay in two, and in the second instalment, two further milestones are examined: on the one hand, we shall discuss the implications of the EU Commission’s declaration, via a little-noticed press release in autumn 2024, of (de facto sovreignty): Brussels may now issue bills and bonds, i.e., collateralised debt obligations in the name of the entire bloc. Lastly, there is the tightening of control over the bloc’s peoples via yet another EU-level bureaucracy in statu nascendi, the Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism, or AMLA. All that is required to launch a veritable armada of administrative penalties is—the suspicion of potentially illegal intent. Needless to say, this is only possible to do by doing away with due process as it is commonly understood, the presumption of innocence, police investigative procedures, and the independence of the judiciary of the various member-states on the other hand.
All four policy decisions have a few things in common: they are all manifestations of political blinders and (para)ideological convictions held by politicians, journalists, and experts alike. These result in a profound, and growing, disconnect between an increasingly detached leadership class whose influence(-peddling) over mainstream media reinforces the growing gap between Brussels and ‘the European peoples’. In combination, the former manifest as confirmation bias (’see, it worked in this context, let’s try this elsewhere’) while the intermingling of Eurocrats, experts, and legacy media creates the functional equivalent of Plato’s Cave. Needless to say, voices that are deemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘out of bounds’ are rarely, if ever, heard, hence the seemingly endless ‘surprise’ of these very same elites when the electorate votes for the wrong candidate. As more and more national sovereignty is vested in EU institutions, and with most of the bloc’s thinking classes holding largely similar views about the benefits and wisdom of doing so, the ballot box remains one of the last opportunities to express dissent.
At the same time, given the realities of what legal scholars call ‘transposition’ — by which is meant the ex-post rubber-stamping of national legislation (sic) after Brussels decided (typically by executive fiat) — voting is increasingly turning into an action of last resort. Albeit chastised by virtually all legacy media outlets and actively dismissed by the present’s milieux juste, or ‘uniparty’, criticism of what Brussels does is typically derided in equally idiosyncratic ways. As the TU Dortmund’s recent ‘Journalism&Democracy’ study showed, for instance, two-thirds of German journalists position themselves as being left to far-left of centre, thus resulting in biased mainstream media reporting. That kind of coverage is the primary source of the information for fellow journalists, staffers, and politicians alike. In short: those who are deemed to lack the insights, connections, and salaries of the EU’s thinking classes — Europe’s equivalent of what Hillary Clinton infamously chided as a ‘basket of deplorables’ in 2016 — are voting ‘wrongly’, it is often said in a tone of resentment and condescension.
With these preliminaries settled, this essay discusses what are arguably the EU’s most consequential policy decisions of the past couple of years whose relevance transcends the bloc’s borders: first, the institutionalisation of a ‘domestic’ passport to restrict freedom of movement deriving from the bloc’s Covid policies; and second, the creeping militarisation of the bloc via the Commission’s unilateral abrogation of key aspects of the foundational treaties. The looming arrogation of de facto sovereignty via issuance of bills and bonds in the name of the EU and the push towards command and control of all payments are the subject of the second instalment of the present piece. While the first instalment relates issues that largely fall into the castegory of ‘domestic’ affairs, the second part covers what Politico recently, and fairly tellingly, considered Europe’s ‘Hamiltonian moment’. I have endeavoured to furnish the reader also with a few concluding lines at the end of the second part.
‘Never let a crisis go to waste’: The Normalisation of Covid Passports
The abomination with the many names — which we shall label ‘Covid Passport’ here — will stay with EU residents well beyond the end of the WHO-declared ‘Pandemic’. Introduced over several months under various names, public health (sic) authorities across the EU/EEC/Schengen area launched a ‘digital Covid certificate in order to facilitate safe free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic’ in summer 2021. While the EU’s thinking and chattering classes celebrated its eventual adoption by the World Health Organization on 1 July 2023, its introduction inaugurated ‘vaccination status’-dependent restrictions of access and outright discrimination, such as a ‘ban for unvaccinated Italians from social life’ or ‘from using public transport’ in 2022. In a quite ominous Orwellian distortion of reality, none of the issues that public health officialdom was later forced to admit — most prominently, the admission by Pfizer executive Janine Small that the mainly used modRNA injections do not prevent transmission and the statement by Emer Cooke, head of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), that ‘no safety signal for increased mortality with any of the authorised COVID-19 vaccines has been identified to date’ (that is, by 20 April 2023) — changed the EU’s self-congratulatory stance.
Thus, while the EU’s temporary Covid Passport regulation expired on 30 June 2023, ‘on 1 July 2023, the WHO took up the EU system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics’. In other words: what happened in the EU didn’t stay in the EU.
If anything, both the EU and the WHO have learned their lesson — as the newly inaugurated ‘Global Digital Health Certification Network’ (GDHCN) further explains,
there is a recognition of an existing gap and continued need for a global mechanism that can support bilateral verification of the provenance of health documents for pandemic preparedness and continuity of care.
These Orwellian language games do not stop at this rather insufferable corporate/NGO boilerplate verbiage, however, as the core ‘benefits’ of sharing one’s personal medical data with the WHO are said to include ‘obtain[ing] agency over [one’s] own health information’, enable healthcare providers to ‘more easily verify health records’, and, most troublingly in light of the experiences with the restrictions on the freedoms of movement and association imposed during the so-called Pandemic, ‘governments can provide standards and mechanisms to issue and verify that records are linked to authorized institutions’. In other words: authorities may change access rules on the go. If you are inclined to disbelieve me, check out the WHO’s recent ‘Polaris’ exercise and the after-action reporting courtesy of IFLScience.com.
Thus, while the ‘emergency’ phase of the last WHO-declared ‘Pandemic’ was ended by the EU in late April 2022, Commission chief Von der Leyen endorsed the ‘move from emergency mode to a more sustainable management’, as Politico reported at the time. Consequently, EU institutions signed off on extending the EU Digital COVID Certificate for another year until 30 June 2023. On the very next day, the EU’s new arrangements with the WHO entered into force, and the rest, as far as time-worn adages go, is history.
As a post-script to this first part, mention shall be made of the EU Digital Covid Certificate’s Wikipedia entry — which doubles as a repository of common knowledge — which merely states the following:
With 51 non-EU countries and territories connected to the system in addition to the 27 member states, the EU Digital COVID Certificate is a global standard for COVID-19 certification … The EU Digital COVID Certificate system expired on 30 June 2023.
We may therefore conclude this first part noting the absence of its successor, the GDHCN (Global Digital Health Certification Network) and giving a voice to how Stella Kyriakides, Commissioner for Health and Food Safety since 2019, described this transposition of EU law (sic):
By using European best practices we contribute to digital health standards and interoperability globally … a powerful example of how alignment between the EU and the WHO can deliver better health for all, in the EU and across the world.
Needless to say, the ‘collaboration between WHO/Europe and the EU is more than just political and technical’, as WHO Regional Director for Europe Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge described it in February 2024. It also consists of ‘growing financial cooperation’ and ‘the shared values’, said to ‘drive our collaboration’. Hence, whatever you and I may think and (dis)like about the Covid Passport, that shameful tool of evidence-free population control and denial of access based on one’s ‘vaccination status’, it is here to stay. As mentioned earlier, adoption by the WHO signifies that the EU Commission’s ‘digital solution’ to Covid containment was adopted seamlessly by the World Health Organization, thus permanently institutionalising what was imposed as a temporary emergency measure.
In short — and with explicit reference to the underlying financial entanglements (incentives) betweent the EU and WHO — if the EU’s website had a dedicated entry entitled ‘mission creep’, there would hardly be a more apt example. While you and I may have thought public health officialdom is done here, these digital ‘vaccination’ passports are here to stay. And so are the Orwellian distortions of yet another key term to which we turn next.
War is ‘Sustainable’, According to the EU Commission
Among the key features of the European Union is the special status of the various treaties, which the bloc considers foundational: ‘Treaties are the starting point for EU law and are hence referred to as primary law.’ They are accompanied by legislative and non-legislative acts referred to as ‘secondary law’, which include regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations, and opinions (while this author has written about this issue elsewhere, careful attention to this taxonomy is warranted). This kind of information is necessary to understand what has transpired since the last EU elections in spring 2024 and the beginning of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term.
As reported by the Berliner Zeitung in early December 2024, ‘a “new era of European defence and security” is upon the peoples of Europe, ‘in order to be able to defend Europe “against Russia and other powers” [meant is, of course, China, according to the bloc’s Foreign Commissioner Kaja Kallas, my addition], additional funds totalling at least 500 billion euros over a period of ten years are necessary’. While 50 billion euros of additional defence spending per year is not nothing, it does not alter the balance of power in a meaningful way. What this move means, however, is a fundamental re-ordering of the EU’s primary law, the treaties, as outlined in the ‘Strategy for the defence industry at EU level’ (EDIS).
Published in March 2024 — and thus months before the elections, which took place from 6-9 June 2024 — the EDIS paper
… announces actions that bolster the EDTIB [European defence technological and industrial base] through ‘increased, more collaborative and European investment from Member States’; strengthen the European defence industry’s ability to respond quickly and adapt to any situation; mainstream a culture of defence readiness across all EU policies; and join forces with the EU’s global, like-minded, and strategic partners.
Mention is made of the formalisation of NATO’s spending target (two per cent of GDP), which occurred in 2014 at NATO’s summit in Wales. Since EU countries are, on average, about a third short of that spending target, this policy decision adds another 175 billion annually over the next ten years, which brings ‘defence’ spending in the EU close to US levels (at least in nominal terms). The main alteration to the EU treaties, however, is tucked away in the following paragraph:
In terms of industrial gaps, the EDTIB is fragmented on both the demand and supply side. According to the investment gap analysis, the primary source of demand for domestic defence industries are their national governments, which also set the export regulations and oversee the entire procurement process for defence equipment. This has caused national defence companies operating in small markets to produce products in quantities that are wholly insufficient for the current geopolitical environment.
This is literally the money paragraph: it means, in no uncertain terms, that the EU Commission desires the agglomeration of these many small defence industrial bases of the various bloc members into a gigantic, EU-wide cartel, or trust (monopoly). In practice, EU leaders recognise that they would need to implement unified command and procurement structures to act (more) forcefully on a global scale. The EDIS paper also outlines how this is to be achieved:
EDIS proposes a Defence Industrial Readiness Board, which would include representatives of the Member States, the EU High Representative and the Commission. The board should carry out the EU defence joint programming and procurement function called for in the defence investment gap analysis. The proposed EDIP regulation would formally create the board, which would also assist in the EDIP’s implementation.
At this point, please allow me to outline what is happening: a new institutional framework (‘board’) will be set up, which calls out the problem (‘investment gap’), proposes ‘regulation’ (that would be ‘secondary legislation’), and ‘assist in [its] implementation’. If you held concerns about the EU’s so-called ‘democratic deficit’ in the past, this joint command and procurement structure turbocharges these problems.
The EU has no separation of powers (in constitutional terms), and the envisioned EDIP policy is poised to formalise, via bureaucratic streamlining, this situation by creating a new directorate (‘board’) that will be issuing ‘regulations’ (that would be the EU Commission’s prerogative) based on its own ‘analyses’, and ‘assist’ in their ‘implementation’. In other words, this new institutional setup will permit the Commission to bypass existing procedures and creates a mechanism by which an unaccountable entity (the ’board’) will spend on defence projects without any oversight by, let alone accountability to, anyone. Talk about judge, jury, and executioner being the very same (legal) person.
Having reached this junction, questions about the financing of these measures arise, and, expectably, the EDIS paper also proposes how to do this: ‘EU Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton (poised to join Bank of America) pitched a debt-financed €100 billion fund during an event in January 2024 to boost joint procurement of defence products.’ While this sounds eminently reasonable, there are explicit clauses in both the Article 41 (2) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and Article 173 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) that forbid joint debt-based financing of military expenditures (here and in the following, emphases mine):
Art. 41 (2) TEU: Operating expenditure to which the implementation of this Chapter gives rise shall also be charged to the Union budget, except for such expenditure arising from operations having military or defence implications …
As for expenditure arising from operations having military or defence implications, Member States whose representatives in the Council have made a formal declaration under Article 31(1), second subparagraph, shall not be obliged to contribute to the financing thereof.
Art. 173 (2) TFEU: This Title shall not provide a basis for the introduction by the Union of any measure which could lead to a distortion of competition or contains tax provisions.
Article 41 (2) TEU basically affords any member-state an opt-out option (in addition to a clear ban on joint defence spending), adding that no member-state may be compelled. Article 173 TFEU, by contrast, functions in a way reminiscent of the US Commerce Clause, which is pertinent as joint procurement of military hardware in contexts that are ‘fragmented on both the demand and supply side’ and ‘defence companies operating in small markets’. In other words: the creation of a cartel-like defence-industrial base with joint procurement and acquisition mechanisms, surely constitutes ‘a distortion of competition’, to say nothing about the lingering questions about their financing.
Speaking of paying for these military investments, the Berliner Zeitung also explains how the EU Commission plans to avoid any legal challenges that might arise: ‘Brussels wants to classify armaments as sustainable [orig. nachhaltig]’, thus ‘not only polish[ing] the image of arms manufacturers, but manufacturers of tanks, missiles or even nuclear weapons could in future hide in “sustainable” share packages and funds without investors realising it’. Courtesy of an enquiry of left-wing MEP Fabio de Masi, here is how the EU Commission is bending the true and generally accepted meaning of (primary) law:
The framework for sustainable finance aims to incentivise investment in activities that contribute to the EU’s environmental objectives, it says. And ‘defence companies’ could, ‘just like companies from other sectors, report investments in the greening of their buildings or in transport solutions based on the taxonomy, for example’… The fact that armaments are also categorised as sustainable shows ‘that the military-industrial complex has Europe firmly in its grip’, said De Masi…Von der Leyen’s Green New Deal is above all a deal for lobbyists who want to greenwash the dirtiest business, war, via taxonomy. ‘This shows the madness: nothing is as harmful to the climate as war and destruction, but the main thing is that the tank saves fuel or the missiles are produced in a more climate-efficient way,’ said De Masi.
At this point, we can observe the true nature of the Janus-like, two-faced EU deus ex machina: while Art. 41 (2) TEU (‘primary law’) is crystal clear about the ban on joint military spending, Brussels may also refrain from preferential treatment of certain over other companies (e.g., big over small arms manufacturers) and/or facilitate their cartel-like amalgamation due to joint procurement of military hardware, which goes against Art. 173 TFEU (also ‘primary law’). To resolve this conundrum, the EDIS paper thus envisions the following ‘creative’ solution:
According to Article 41 (2) of the Treaty on European Union, no expenditure that implies military or defence operations may be funded by the EU budget. However according to Article 173 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the EU is responsible for enhancing the competitiveness of European industry, which includes the European defence industry. Thus, the EU defence industry can be supported by the EU budget.
We may now piece together how the EU Commission seeks to amend its very own ‘primary law’: Art. 41 (2) TEU was supposed to be (ab)used to go around the taxpayer-financing of any of the military-industrial plans of the Commission — by resorting to debt-based financing of this entire scheme. In other words: no taxes will be earmarked for this (which would be blatantly illegal), hence permitting claims of ‘we didn’t break any of the primary law’, which, given the twisted nature of these matters, would technically not be entirely inaccurate. At the same time, Art. 173 TFEU was to be (ab)used to extend the purview of the Commission’s competition-enhancing authority from ‘domestic’, that is, intra-bloc, intent to render the EU’s defence-industrial base more ‘competitive’ on a global level.
As to the actions outlined in the EDIS paper, the Commission’s stance appears to be that ‘we just did something that’s not explicitly mentioned in any of the Treaties’, although that kind of claim is highly questionable in light of the Maastricht Treaty’s ban on the raising of shared, or pooled, debt. These clauses are so fundamental that there is a wealth of considerations available, most notably from the European Central Bank (‘five things you need to know’) and the German Bundesbank (‘Maastricht debt’). While many of these relate debt criteria, these developments have not escaped relevant commentators, such as the Centre for European Reform’s Luigi Scazzieri and Sander Tordoir who recently released a policy paper asking, ‘European Common Debt: Is Defence Different?’:
Public financing is therefore essential to boost the EU’s defence capabilities. But in many member-states, it is unclear whether political consensus for raising defence budgets in inflation-adjusted terms will be sustained in the future. Voters are unlikely to support higher defence expenditures if these are perceived to come at the expense of higher taxes or lower spending on other priorities. Faced with these challenges, European policy-makers are looking for new financial instruments to enhance their defences. One proposal is the creation of EU defence bonds. Ever since the Union’s pandemic recovery fund made large-scale common EU borrowing a reality, policy-makers have often looked to such an instrument as a solution for a range of problems. But defence is exceptionally intertwined with member-states’ national sovereignty, and the EU’s role in defence is still embryonic.
And in these few lines, the interested reader may observe the crucial, if intertwined, realities of the EU’s pandemic response that is now said to allow, via what is commonly referred to as ‘mission creep’, application of ‘pandemic’-deriving measures in other contexts even though they fundamentally contradict the EU’s primary law.
Moreover, it is quite clear that voters will likely punish politicians if taxes are spent on arms instead of, say, social programs. In other words: while the thorny legal issues any such move entails will, likely, make it through the court system in the next couple of years, including the envisioned (ab)use of Article 173 TFEU; since this entire adventure shall be debt-financed, as opposed to using tax revenues, however, literally anything the EU Commission will do to establish a bloc-wide military-industrial cartel can, and will, be done via the functional equivalence of the Commerce Clause (which affords the US Congress the authority ‘to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes’, as per Wikipedia, cited here to indicate common knowledge).
The key difference to the constitutional-republican provisions in the United States is that the EU Commission, via the to-be-created ‘Defence Industrial Readiness Board’, will hold these powers and not — Congress (the EU Commission, Council, or Parliament), which is yet another rabbit-hole that is explored in detail in part two.
(Featured Image: “Prime Minister Sanna Marin and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen meeting in Helsinki 3.2.2022” by FinnishGovernment is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)
