Veto Power Does Not Protect the National Interest
Giorgia Meloni’s Italy wants to preserve each Member State’s ability to block decision-making at the European level. A commentary by Marco Buti, and Marcello Messori
Italy’s prime minister has been remarkably clear in rejecting the abolition of the unanimity rule that currently applies to the European Union’s strategic decisions.
Breaking with Italy’s long-standing pro-European tradition, Giorgia Meloni has argued that the priority is to “defend national interests” and thus to avoid the risk that a majority of EU member states might take decisions her government does not share on issues that are crucial to Italy’s future.
This position will prevent the EU from carrying out urgent economic reforms, from enlarging to other countries (including Ukraine) without undermining its own capacity to act, and from defending its room for manoeuvre on a global chessboard dominated by power politics.
What is troubling is the identification of national interests with the power to prevent the institutions of a freely chosen community (the EU) from taking strategic decisions that are unwelcome even to just one of its member states.
This veto power is not comparable to the protection of minority positions, nor to the system of checks and balances between different forms of authority that is intrinsic to any liberal democracy.
Instead, it requires every significant initiative to be treated in isolation and turned into a search for lowest-common-denominator compromises that must not interfere with the immediate objectives of any of the actors involved.
In this respect, the fact that the European Council has occupied an ever larger space since the sovereign debt crisis of the 2010s is emblematic: its consensus-based decisions have shaped European procedures even in cases where qualified majority voting would have been possible, often producing disappointing outcomes.
The relentless pursuit of consensus, in fact, prevents cooperation and amplifies conflict.
Decision-making ceases to be a process that evolves over time and spans a broad agenda, on which solid majorities can gradually form.
Instead of cooperative relationships designed to ensure positive net benefits for each member state, decisions come to be treated as one-off games in which the player who fears losing reserves the right, case by case, to avoid the final result by “walking off with the ball”.
The fact that Italy alone has failed to ratify the revised treaty of the European Stability Mechanism foreshadowed this logic, which is now reinforced by Meloni’s definition of the national interest.
That definition suggests that Italy’s agenda is so different from that of the EU that the country is willing to “stay in Europe” only on condition that it does not have to share any national sovereignty.
Believing that such an approach amounts to safeguarding Italy’s national interest is an illusion. In the EU, issues are not decided in isolation, and in future rounds, trust among the players is likely to collapse.
Three points are enough to make the case.
First, by condemning the EU to decision-making paralysis, nationalism will not secure the space that European “nations” seek in global governance, but will instead bury the objective of European strategic autonomy and lead individual member states into an unhappy vassalage to a Trump administration.
Second, by hollowing out the modest advances contained in the European Commission’s draft, nationalism will downgrade the EU’s 2028–2034 budget from a potential incubator of European public goods to a mere prop for national budgets.
The logic of “take the European money and run” will not only render futile any attempt to issue common debt, but it will ultimately reduce transfers to member states themselves.
Third, national veto power will undermine the effectiveness of the “coalitions of the willing” advocated by Mario Draghi. Rather than serving as political condensers that launch more advanced integration processes, these coalitions would become the pathway to an à la carte EU destined to fragment over time.
There is an alternative conception of the national interest. The Manifesto for Europe, which we launched two years ago, argues that only a shared European sovereignty can guarantee the effective sovereignty of individual EU countries.
IEP@BU does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
