THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. Reforming Europe in a time of war

85 It is sufficient to note that this reform was conceived and drafted prior to expansion, based on the experience of an EU of 15 Member states rather than one trying to operate with almost twice that number. And now, with the European Council’s promise of expansion to in- clude Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia (European Council, 2022b: 11 and 13), we face the prospect of an EU with at least 36 Member states. At the same time, the multi- lateral international environment dominated by theWest and its values and standards, and partially governed by international institutions and international law, no longer exists (Barbé, 2020: 349). The Treaties were designed to cope with a different reality, and some parts of them are not applied because they have been rendered obsolete, with the gaps being filled by informal and sometimes haphazard solutions. This is true with regard to everything relating to Eco- nomic and Monetary Union, with the Treaty maintaining the fiction that all Member states will join the euro, or for ordinary, legislative procedure which is so slow and complex that it has been set aside in favour of trilogue or tripartite meetings . And this is without mentioning the large number of issues where action is taken despite the lack of any express legal basis in the Treaties. The Treaties do not allow us to confront many of the challenges we currently face, as the most recent crises have demonstrated. The political will and consensus be- tween states and institutions have made it possible to find solutions outside the Treaties by approving secondary leg- islation and using informal instruments or even other inter- national treaties.This approach characterised the response to the financial and economic crisis, giving rise to economic governance, or the COVID pandemic, during which the boundaries of the Treaty competences were ignored in or- der both to combat the pandemic and to implement the recovery fund through the issue of EU public debt. Prioritising solutions over the application of rules can be dangerous, as demonstrated by the Ruling of the German Constitutional Court of May 2020, which found that, in purchasing bonds, the European Central Bank had exceeded its competences (Maduro, 2020). In any case, if we want to continue arguing that we are a democratic system based on the Rule of Law, we have to cease to act on the basis of exceptionality and instead revise the Treaties so that all European political actions are contained within the parameters of legality. Moreover, the political demands we have faced in 2022 require that we address this reform as a matter of urgency. In March, the European Council rapidly re- sponded to the consequences for the EU of the war in Ukraine, in its triple dimension of energy, the economy and defence, implementing an action plan known as the Versailles Agenda (European Council, 2022a).The objec- tives agreed and the measures to implement for 2030 are adequate, necessary, urgent and very ambitious, but now that it is time to implement them through legislation, obstacles have started to appear. In all three cases the EU has very limited competences or decisions are sub- ject to unanimous approval by the Council, which slows down decision-making and permits vetoes in defence of national interests or even of spurious ones. And in the spheres of the economy and defence, there is no link to the European Parliament’s decision, a democratic deficit that is difficult to justify. It is important to stress that unanimity is one of the EU’s key political vulnerabilities, which prevents it from acting autonomously as it enables an external state to control European political decision-making from outside through the use of Trojan horses. There is solid empirical research showing how powerful external states cultivate one or more Member states with the aim of ensuring that they veto any Council decisions that could be inconven- ient (Orenstein and Kelemen, 2017). We have to be very clear, then, that unanimity is the Achilles heel of the EU. And it is only going to become more difficult to maintain the necessary unity of 27 member states against Russia as more problems emerge. The other political process which ended in 2022, the Conference on the Future of Europe, also implicitly calls for reform of the legal and constitutional basis of the EU. European institutions agreed, when they called this short-lived institution, to follow up its recommendations