Leyen Defies EC Commissioners

Arriving in Montreal for the Canada-EU Summit yesterday, EC President Ursula von der Leyen doubled down on the words "associate member":

Of course, Canada cannot become a full-fledged member of the EU because of geography, but we both want to bring our relationship to the highest level possible. This is why we are discussing the idea of Canada becoming the first associate member of the European Union. Our idea is simple: it is an ‘association without accession'. But we can replace accession with a ‘common ambition and vision'. We can build a partnership that comes closer to membership than anything we have done before. So how do we get there? First, it means closer alignment on policies. We can work on everything, from AI and climate to energy and security, you just name it.

This simply clarifies one of the issues that was in the news yesterday, the EU requirement that Canada effectively double its carbon tax to match the EU's. Canada will have to bring itself into alignment with pretty much every tax and regulation within the EU in order to trade with it.

The opinions I linked yesterday characterized the objections by several major EU members to the term "associate member" as a political setback for Leyen, but she's going full speed ahead on using the term and defining it as she means it. What are the political options within the EU if it chooses to oppose this? There's a procedure for removing the EU President, but it also involves removing the full set of EU Commissioners. The European Parliament can remove the President of the European Commission and the whole Commission by a motion of censure, whixch must pass by a two-thirds majority.

In fact Leyen has survived four such motions so far in her tenure, most recently in January of this year. But four censure motions are more than for any other EC President: the prior record was three, held by Jacques Delors in the early 1990s. However, no EC President has ever been removed.

This brought me to the same question regarding the closest historical equivalent to the EC President, the Holy Roman Emperor and a reddit thread, Could a Holy Roman Emperor be removed?

There was no “constitutional” way to get rid of an emperor. An emperor could lose the support of the pope and/or the German nobility, which happened a couple of times, but they couldn’t really be removed.

. . . In 1198 the German nobles couldn’t agree on who to elect as the new king of Germany. One faction elected Henry VI’s brother (and Frederick’s uncle) Philip of Swabia, but another faction elected Otto of Brunswick, the nephew of Richard I of England (Otto’s father was married to Richard’s sister). Innocent claimed he had the power to choose one or the other as emperor, and he was clearly in favour of Otto - it would not be in the interest of the pope to have Frederick ruling in Sicily and his uncle Philip ruling in Germany. But Innocent never crowned Otto as emperor and let the conflict drag on until 1208, when Philip was assassinated.

Otto was finally crowned emperor in 1209. But then Otto tried to capture Rome and tried to invade Sicily, so Innocent excommunicated him. The Germans decided to elect Frederick as king of Germany instead. In 1212, Frederick, who was now 18, was installed as king of Germany and king of the Romans, and crowned emperor by the pope.

. . . Otto of course did not accept this and he continued to act as emperor. From his point of view Frederick was just a rival claimant - just as the emperors sometimes tried to appoint an anti-pope, now the pope had essentially appointed an anti-king.

. . . Sometimes historians say Otto “resigned” or “abdicated” but that’s not exactly what happened, he just lost control of the Empire, lost of the support of the pope and the nobles, and lost the actual physical insignia of the Empire, so for all practical purposes Frederick was the emperor. But since there was no precedent for replacing an emperor like this, could he still claim to be the emperor or not? In the end it didn’t really matter[.]

I'm inclined to follow the historic parallel and suggest that whether or not Leyen is eventually removed. it doesn't really matter. Here is Sundance's assessment of the EU at Conservative Treehouse:

As readers are well aware, Europe is on the cusp of an irreversible economic downward spiral. Low growth, high inflation, and the entire continent is crippled by short-sighted energy policy and subsequent deindustrialization that is creating significant debt burdens. In short, the EU is contracting.

The #1 issue that makes the downward spiral irreversible is their entrenched advocacy for the net zero ‘climate change’ agenda, which is now triggering carbon taxes and various carbon border adjustment mechanisms on trade. Their energy policy is killing their industrial capacity, and the overall European Union is in a self-fulfilling crisis.

On top of the economic mess is the ever-worsening mass migration problem that will eventually topple several key European capitals.

What puzzles me about the commentary I've seen is that it recognizes two things. first, that the EC is divided over the issue of "associate membership", but nobody knows what that means or what agenda it entails -- but second, Leyen and Carney have their own kissy-kissy separate agenda, and they aren't really saying what that means, either. If these two undefined agendas collide, we're probably talking about another attempt to remove Leyen, except removing Leyen by definition involves remov\ingf the whole slate of elector princes EC Commissioners as well, excpet it's the elector princes EC Commissioners who are divided.

Both the EU and the Holy Roman Empire are and were meant to rely on collegiality, the appearance of unity, as a principle of governance. When differences can't be resolved via back-channel dealings, it leads to problems, but also, trying to maintain a face of unanimity on issues like climate, deindustrialization, and migration just delays the inevitable confrontations.