Lawfare Daily: Teun Janssen on Ukraine and a Big Europe

[Intro]

Teun Janssen: And it helps already existing new member states as well, grow their economy. So it's a, it is a transformative experience. You actually finally have non-corrupt judges. You have a well-functioning, you know, internal market. You have a, a budget you can use to spend on railroads, on bridges, on other infrastructure. You know, you can, you can pay for good teachers for schools. It's, it's a transformative experience.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes with Teun Janssen of the European Parliament.

Teun Janssen: And in the end of the day, you're gonna have this Frankenstein monster of a package deal of enlarger union, but also a reformed union where everyone gets a little bit what they want, even if it's imperfect. That I think is why enlargement is such a secret superpower. It transforms candidate countries, it transforms the EU, and it's the only way to really fix the European Union.

Benjamin Wittes: With the U.S. stepping back from support of Ukraine, Europe is having to step up. How is it doing? How much can we expect it to do? And can we really expect Ukraine to become an EU member in the near future?

So I wanna start with just a sense of what you do, because that is not for an American policy audience gonna be an obvious thing. You are the Ukraine staff expert at the European Parliament for a party called Volt. What is the Volt party? And explain to us what your role is.

Teun Janssen: Yeah, I mean, in EU we are really obsessed with bloated acronyms that imply a lot, but don't actually mean anything.

So I'm technically an accredited parliamentary assistant or an APA, but it's basically fancy name for a policy advisor. And similarly as you would have on the Hill, in the Senate, you would have staffers, policy advisors for individual members of, of parliament. That's me. So I advise my boss Reinier van Lanschot on everything related to his two committees that I'm working on. So that's constitutional affairs and defense.

And yeah, I mean, Volt is, it's, you know, usually you would have basically the way it's being so structured here, you have delegations from different member states of the European Union. And they, you know, they send people to the European Parliament to join bigger ideological groups, right? So you would have Greens from Germany, Greens from Portugal, Greens from France, and they all joined the Green group together. And that's sort of the European group that they formed 'em.

We're a bit different because from the onset we are, are organized in the European way. So we have chapters, we call 'em in 30 plus European countries. We have 34,000 members across Europe. And we have three elected members of Parliament, of the European Parliament now from Germany. Two from the Netherlands. But we are federalists, right? So we would rather have Europe being one united democracy and not sort of a consolation of member states trying to work together.

So that's from the answer, very, a little bit different. But I, yeah, I advise him on his policy work. I write speeches help negotiate laws, write texts, that kind of stuff basically.

Benjamin Wittes: Your particular focus is on European support for an integration with Ukraine.

The reason I wanted to talk to you was that, you know, we have this question in the United States, which is with our administration pulling back from support for Ukraine. It's not clear at this stage how much they are pulling back, but they're clearly not reliable in the space. The fate of Ukraine in the war, necessarily to some degree determines is going to be determined by to what extent Europe is willing to and can step up and provide a great deal of assistance that previously the United States was supporting.

And so the question of EU-Ukrainian relations becomes a very acute one, and I wanted to talk to you first of all about what is reasonable to expect Europe to do, and secondly about this process of European, of European accession for Ukraine, which is related to, but different from the NATO accession question.

So let's start with the first one. You know, we hear a lot of different things about European capacity to mitigate the effects of U.S. withdrawal from the conflict. I'm curious in the biggest picture sense where you think Europe is and what you think it is both willing and able to do.  

Teun Janssen: I think we're now on our what, 12th or 13th wake up call, supposedly, if I've listened to Politico and the FT or whatever. Look, I mean, you can keep hitting the snooze button, but fundamentally some psychological question.

So the quite psychological question is, do Europeans conceptualize of their own continent, their own geographical space as a space where they themselves are in charge of their own destiny? Or like Donald Tusk basically said, right, are 500 million Europeans going to rely on 350 million Americans to keep us safe from 150 Russians? That's the big fundamental psychological question.

And the most frustrating thing is that, I mean, think about the European Union. It's economy, what, 15 times the size of Russia. We have four times the amount of people. We have way more advanced economies, technological bases, defense, industrial bases. And we have a productive, innovative population, which is free to, to move around and to innovate and to be themselves. That's our, our main strength.

But as usual, we have two problems, which is that Europeans perpetually underestimate themselves. And Americans, I think perpetually misunderstand the European Union. And, and we'll get to the part about the accession bit because I think that sometimes a thing is really overlooked. But if you think very clearly of like, okay, what could we have done and what can we still do Europe, even in the worst case scenario where let's say, and, and the NATO summit wasn't an absolute disaster.

It could have been, but it wasn't because if you subscribe to Mark Rutte’s strategy of sucking up, if that's the thing that works, he did it perfectly well. I'm, I'm not so sure that's the way you should go about it. But okay, let's say we bought time and in five years time, Europe can take charge of its own defense.

Even then we're not asking the fundamental question, which is, I mean, if the Americans are going to withdraw major troops from, from the European soil in, in their force posture review is done in the summer, what are we going to do? What's our emergency plan? How do we make NATO function without America at the top?

So, especially when you think about command and control, strategic enablers and the, and the 50 or so brigades that we would need to have. There's currently no plan, right, to fill that gap as Europe without the Americans. So that, that remains the big issue, I think.

And there are stuff we can do right now to, to help Ukraine and put them in a position to actually come out on top. And actually I would, I would still say win this war. And it's things that are very much in our own hands. One is you got the frozen asset discussion. The Russian frozen assets, there's 300 billion of them. 220 billion are on the clearinghouse in Belgium. Why haven't we pressured the Belgians government more to just release that funds? It's a classical thing in Europe where because the 27 countries having to agree gets lethargic, gets delayed, nothing happens. That's a lot of money just sitting there. And you can make the aggressor pay for their own war. That's one.

Two is Danish model. So we had this model right where we directly invest in Ukraine's own defense national capacity. Basically because it's three times cheaper to produce an out in Ukraine than it is in France. It's closer to the, to the Eastern flank. So it's logistically easier and they have less stringent rules or procedures for their procurement rules because they're at war. Right? So let's do more of that. It's, it's peanuts. It's, I think now we're spending 10 billion euros in this Danish model format which is around half of Ukraine's defense national capacity. Let's scale that up. It's not that much money.

And maybe another one is and I'll get to the accession bit at the end, but the other, the third one is we're afraid, I think psychologically to do what we could do even without you guys, which is this discussion, this reassurance force, for example, but also the Sky Shield.

Tomorrow we could have 200 fighter jets or so patrol Western Ukraine sky from NATO air bases in Eastern Europe or inside Western Ukraine. Russian fighter jets haven't gone that close since the beginning of the war to Western Ukraine. So they'll be out of reach and we could help stabilize a big part of the front so that Ukraine can actually put most of its air power and its troops to the front line and, and wouldn't have to worry about those parts where there's no active fighting currently.

So that's a lot of stuff we could do today but we're not doing it. And it reassurance force is the big one because after months of planning, and I remember in February we were so close to actually saying yes, Europeans are in charge of our own destiny. We can do it. We have the forces. We can go in, we can do this mission.

The French and British were signaling, we can have 30,000 troops in the ground. But then the fundamental question, is the U.S. ready to provide a backstop? And the answer was no. And then the answer could have been okay. It's gonna be an imperfect war to fight. If the Russians test our, kind of reassurance force, people will die, they'll be at risk. Right?

But at the end of the day, you could do it. You could do it through joint expeditionary force, another format doesn't really matter. But we have AWACS, we have ISR. We have other stuff that we could do to, to get that mission done. But psychologically Europeans were not willing to say, we step in and we do it.

And that's the big fundamental issue of when you ask me, why aren't we doing more? It's, it's the end debt. We have all of these things we could do.

Benjamin Wittes: Let's stay on this for a moment. There's also the question of just supplying Ukraine, right? So the U.S. wasn't getting involved in a, in any kind of kinetic sense either, but it was a source of an enormous amount of military money.

Accepting your point that there is a giant reservoir of cash and for the form of frozen assets sitting around the corner from you that is theoretically touchable, but in fact is not politically touchable right now. To what extent is Europe as a matter of either defense, industrial base or in the form of cash, really in a position to resupply Ukraine as, you know, China is, or, or, or North Korea is supplying Russia and you know, the Iranians provided a lot of drones? If we get out of this business, to what extent can Europe, just on the supply side, keep Ukraine in the game?

Teun Janssen: So, yeah, that's, that's a fundamental one. So I think a few weeks ago I saw a post, I think Michael Weiss on, on BlueSky or something, and it, it showed that actually already right now because of different efforts that started too late, but they're up and running Europe right now produces more artillery shells, at least 155 millimeter than Russia can produce including through supplies by North Korea and others. So we are already basically at that level. I think the disparity is also narrowed in the past few months to, to, to an acceptable one at least in some sense. So there, there, there is that.

The big problem is that and that's exactly it frames in the discussion we had the NATO summit where everyone's obsessed with talking about, oh, we need 5% 'cause Trump asked for 5%. And if we only get, say, get to meet 5%, then he will leave us alone and stop asking those difficult questions and we can continue to enjoy our aperol spritz on the beach and, you know, relax like Europeans love to do and take their long summer holidays, right?

That's what the idea is. We're not talking about, actually, we're, we're spending the money on. So 5% is a lot of money. If every European Union member say, we get to 5%, we would spend way more than than the U.S. does. But then what are you spending it on?

And I, and I hear from the defense industry saying, okay we need 1 billion, but we're getting 10. What do you want it for? What, what's the actual order? What, what, what, what is the aggregate demand that you need to buy the capabilities to be able to autonomously defend Europe from, from Russia without the Americans?

And there you get into this discussion of we're not really, actually, I know we have these NATO capability targets and they're classified, but we need to have political discussion in Europe of saying, what do we actually need to buy? And then you can convince citizens that it's worth it to spend the money on that. Because frankly, I mean, think about something we could really do. We have like 17 different tank types in Europe. We have 30 different types of frigates you know, an impossible amount of different equipment types, right, 200 plus.

Why don't you just have the European Commission say, okay we know what every member state needs in terms of numbers of aircraft. Just aggregate the demand and go on markets and purchase on behalf of everyone else. Let then the commission buy on behalf of member states like we did for, for gas, for example, during the energy crisis, partially, like we did with vaccines during COVID.

And that saves billions of euros, right? You could save 150 billions or so just by doing that. And then you have interoperability 'cause you have one tank type like you, America has with the Abrams. We would have like the same, you would have only one medical headquarters. You would have standardization terms of munition. So you could save so much money.

And then you can also convince citizens more that it's worth it. And when I'm, what I'm seeing at polls, I, I, it's a weird, crazy mismatch that most Europeans, 75% of them actually want to common European defense. Whatever that means in practice, right? But they mean at least this, I think. But politicians and a lot of policy people don't really, really, really get that yet. But that's exactly what you can do.

So, there is lots of money we don't need to spend as much as we're currently aiming for. And again, the, the amount of money we're talking about matches what Trump wants. It's not what we actually need for our own defense. The stuff you would need to, you know, procure satellite systems, ISR, a command structure that's compatible under NATO, these kind of things. I think we need to start more, start talking more about that than, than that decision.

And I, I, I'm part of the Greens, right, and it, it makes a lot of sense that I'm also have colleagues that are really awkward or, or uncomfortable with the idea that we would have to, for example, take money away from funds reserved for the green transition, or social policies or education, which makes a lot of sense. They're right, I think. But why would we have to look into, you know, scraping money off of other things that are meant for our children's future when we can save money by doing it together?

And finally, there's one other thing, which is the tool you use to raise the money. So the easiest way would to have Eurobonds. So you would say, okay, the commission goes in international capital markets and creates debt, Eurobonds, right. Which have the lowest interest rate possible because then you combine all the member state into one interest rate.

You could have a lot of demand for it. We saw as already with the recovery fund during COVID, there's a lot of demand for Eurobonds. And then you could watch more affordably, spend money on jointly procured equipment types. But again, that's something very politically sensitive, including in my own member state, the Netherlands, to do that, right? And in Germany.

But that, that is the solution. You would save money, you would standardize, make interoperable militaries, and you would at the, at the bonus, make euro a global reserve currency just as the dollar is weakening, basically because of Trump's antics. So again, that's the kind of stuff I think we have to be talking about a little bit more.

Benjamin Wittes: What about in the extreme short term? I mean, you know, the Russia/Ukraine front is not collapsing by any means, but Russia is slowly making progress at enormous cost to its own personnel. You know, you could imagine the erosion of that front accelerating if it is not kept in supply, if Ukraine is not kept in supply in the immediate short term. I'm curious, you know, a lot of what you're describing in involves sort of substantial structural change over time. What is Europe's capacity to step up in the next year or so, or over the next few months?

Teun Janssen: Right. This depends a lot on the outcome of this whole ceasefire discussion and the reassurance force, and frankly seems like it's kind of stepped away. And I mean, I'll be very honest with you, I don't think it ever was really something that was really realistic because if you're gonna have Putin whose goals remains, I mean, they're imperialistic-

Benjamin Wittes: And doesn’t want a ceasefire, so there won't be one.

Teun Janssen: Exactly, exactly. There's no point. So then how do you fill that gap?

And frankly, I think that currently the biggest problem is lack of drone interceptors. I've been hearing that a lot from, from contacts in the, on the ground in Ukraine. And that's a big issue. The Shahed drones, they've upgraded them multiple times, they're getting better, they're having bigger shrapnel, top munitions. So that's something you've gotta counter.

And Ukraine has developed its own interceptor for that, but they need money for that. They need to be able to scale it up. So again, it comes back to this Danish model. You've gotta use European money to buy and to help scale up production capacity inside Ukraine. That's one way to go about it.

The second thing again, is it's, I mean, again, it's a very politically sensitive one. But you could step in and, and do this Sky Shield, right, especially now with this, Shahed drone discussion. We could provide a lot of fighter jets and missile defenses right now from, from Europe to make it clear to Putin that first we're willing to go further and we're willing to back Ukraine until a sustainable peace is reached and respectfully to intercept those those missiles.

And you know, the other thing is that in the long run, I mean, this is actually a short term thing that leads you to a long term stability. You gotta really, Europeans have to signal very credibly and clearly that Ukraine will become a EU member state very soon, so before 2030 or by 2030 which is itself actually a, a security guarantee because the EU itself has a, an article called 42.7, which is untested in this way, in this conventional way, but it's very much like NATO's Article Five, actually, broader definition, a collected defense assurance.

So it's about doing Danish model more. It's about doing the immediate stuff right now you could do to, to step in and, and provide air cover, for example. And really signaling very clearly, no, no, we are not giving up on Ukraine. They're in for the long run. That will be, I think a massive, massive support in the next year. But again, I don't see the battlefield conditions changing rapidly on either side.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Teun Janssen: With what I currently know..

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so you started by saying, you know, we have this governance structure in which, you know, the, the, everybody has a veto and we don't believe in ourselves. And then you proceeded to sketch out a lot of things that you could do if the EU was unchained by its own governance structure. And if any given country couldn't step up and say, wait a minute, I don't want to do that. You've got Hungary, you've got Slovakia, which are eager to step up and block actions of precisely the type that you're describing.

And you also have the big lumbering states you know, that are just, you know, careful, the big ship problem, right? They're not pro-Putin or anything, they're just, it takes a lot of miles to turn a battleship. So I'm curious how, in the context of existing EU governance you get any of this stuff done, it's, it's easy to sit here in a conversation with a stupid American and say, oh, we can do this and we can do this. But, can you?

Teun Janssen: So it's, it's a nice analogy of the battle ship, although I guess it's like a battleship with 14 different types of like guns on it and different missiles and everyone speaks different languages and the, and the ship cook and the captain and the, the officer, everyone speaks different languages, use different procedures to make it even more even worse.

Benjamin Wittes: And by the way, the captain of the ship has a constitutional prohibition against-

Teun Janssen: Yeah, sure, sure. So, but you know, the thing is. It, it's again, I mean, you can, lawyers can make very complicated treaties. At the end of the day, political will exist, things can move. And yes, for a long time, I mean, that's exactly why Volt was founded, actually, we were founded to make Europe, I mean, more transparent, more easy to understand for citizens, give them more power to shape Europe, but also just to make it function quicker and better.

And I'll give you one example. So just, just for accession. So for any country to join the European Union, there are 150 moments when any of the existing 27 EU countries can veto it. 150 times. So Victor Orban, he did this a few months ago actually, when there was a vote about Ukraine membership.

He said, no, no, no, I'm I'm gonna veto and then basically the commission unlocked 10 billion euros or so of frozen money that we had frozen exactly because Hungary is a corrupt governments right now. And we didn't want to give them that money. So if he does that 150 times, that's like, I'm in terrible at math, but that's 1.5 trillion Euros. Yeah. So, let's not do that, right?

So exactly in the long run, you wanna move to a system where you have that's what we actually stand for, a little bit like the U.S., you have a bicameral democrat system. So you would have what we now have with the, the member states being in the so-called council that would just become a Senate basically.

And the European Parliament will get more powers, will be equal to the member states, and then the European Commission will become a, a government, basically. It'll be basically like a parliamentary democracy that would basically govern over the European Union, with all of its growth, but that's a long-term thing, right? It's a very long-term thing. And how do you unlock this kind of stuff right now?

There's two things. On the one hand, when things, when the shit really gets real, you've seen that member states are willing to to do quite a lot. So when Orban threatened this veto again on the accession of Ukraine, I think it's pretty clear behind the scenes that a lot of countries told him if you do that, then we are going to go out in public and say that your currency, the forint, sucks.

And we're going to signal to our investors to withdraw investments and we're going to go after you and take your vote away. And then he buckled and then he didn't do it. So you can do a lot, right, basically within the current treaties at the same time.

You see it is now with defense, you can have sort of coalitions of the willing of some member states moving faster than others, like in supporting Ukraine, like in building a European defense, like, integrating our economies further. So that's all kind of stuff that is now happening more than it used to before.

We have statements now sometimes by 26 countries without Hungary, and we call it something different. But it's the same thing, right? It's the same net result. There is one thing though, in terms, like, with Hungary, I mean, I've worked here now since September, right? And every month or so when I give some idea, like, let's do this, let's do this ambitious thing, there's always no, no, no.

We gotta wait for the Polish presidential elections that's in May. I mean, the Polish will never do something until we have those elections. And it's like, no, no, no, we, we can't take away Hungary's voting rights now because, we'll, we'll have an election next September, and surely by then, then we can just change things based on what Hungarians themselves decide.

No, no, no, no, no. We have a French election in 2027, so let's wait for the presidential elections then. And then we have an, oh no, we have to wait for the German elections until we can talk about European defense financing. You see, so you have 27 times an election that we're all waiting for. We're all anxious.

And that doesn't make the, the, the, the, the battleship you talked about. You know, you gotta have, you're waiting every every hour for, for someone else to figure out where the battleship should steer. Or what you're gonna have for dinner tonight. So that doesn't work. That's more of a long term problem.

And I think we're gonna have a basically moment where we really, really are controlling with a big, with a big threat. Like, like a, like a war or something similar like that, or enlargement, which we'll get to in a second, which will be the big thing to unlock this problem. Actually, I think enlargement is the only thing that could make, that could really fix Europe.

Benjamin Wittes: All right, let's talk about that. So, the obvious subject for enlargement is Ukraine. Ukraine wants to be a member of the EU. A large number of EU states clearly want Ukraine admitted. Putin obviously has taken in the past extraordinary steps to prevent that and considers it all but a NATO accession. What is the prospect realistically for Ukraine to be admitted to the EU?

Teun Janssen: So I think in the EU, we have politically committed ourselves very publicly to it having to happen. So if it wouldn't happen, I think it would be it would be like political suicide. That's the cynical answer to give you hope. The other thing is that, I think I said before that, you know, Europeans underestimate themselves, Americans misunderstand EU, and I think Putin as well doesn't get, or maybe he, maybe he does get it.

But he sees, you know, Ukrainian membership of the European Union. It's a civilizational choice of Ukrainians, right? They had this revolution of dignity. I called it Maidan.

Benjamin Wittes: He's not wrong about that.

Teun Janssen: No, no.

Benjamin Wittes: You know, a decision by Ukraine to be part of the European Union and the European Union to have Ukraine is a fundamentally game changing-

Teun Janssen: Of course.

Benjamin Wittes: Geographic proposition.

Teun Janssen: Yeah. And it would scare the hell out of him. Imagine a well-functioning Ukraine right on his doorstep with a good economy, you know, like a stable democracy, good rule of law. People moving around. And then you see on screens that everyone has toilets, everyone has well-functioning internet. Everyone has a good, you know, bureaucracy. He would, people would go insane. So that's exactly the threat. It's a civilizational sort of struggle.

And you know, when you look at polls, right? Every continent on the earth, I think Brazil, India countries from those continents there have been posed by ECFR, which asked the question, do you see this war between Russia and Europe as a war between Russia and Europe? Or like between Russia and Ukraine, every other continent says, no, no. It's clearly war between Europe and Russia, or conflict at least, right?

Only Europeans don't see it themselves that way. But I think Ukrainians get that, Ukrainians get that this war is their only chance to make sure that that country has a, a, a future. And that's the thing, right? So EU enlargement, I mean when you think about it already sounds boring, right? It sounds very technical and it is.

Because it's like 200,000 pages of legislation first of all, that you have to adapt. So imagine it's things like you know, a carbon border tax and it's stuff like regulations for medical equipment. And it's things like, should your cucumbers be straight or not? You know? How much battery should your vacuum cleaners have? But all this stuff combines–

Benjamin Wittes: This is the final, the final victory of German and French civil law over, over U.S. Anglo-American law.

Teun Janssen: And do you think Trump has patience to read 20 200,000 page legislation or earth administration? That's the thing in a way it was the funny thing also about the U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal. So it was talked about like this big, big beautiful deal and we're gonna like, you know, massive cooperation with Ukraine.

Actually, the deal itself, Ukraine's played it very well. It was, it was kind of a light deal, but there's a very key provision in there, which is. The participants should strive to avoid conflict with Ukraine's obligations under its accession to the European Union.

Now, American negotiation probably was like, okay, let's just get that in there. Who cares? But you know what that means? It means that EU law comes above the, the deals of the, the terms of that deal, and it's a transformative experience, right?

You've seen this in countries like, like every, every time since the country joined the European Union, we saw this in previous enlargement routes, you've had the GDP, average GDP of a country increased by 12% compared to if it hadn't joined. You see, their income per capita go from upper, middle to high income in 15 years on average. So they closed the gap, you know?

And it helps already existing new member states as well, grow our economy. So it's a, it is a transformative experience. You actually finally have non-corrupt judges. You have a well-functioning, you know, internal markets. You have a, a budget you can use to spend on railroads, on bridges, on other infrastructure. You know, you can, you can pay for good teachers for schools. It's, it's a transformative experience.

So on the one hand, say it's a massive economical project, but it's also a deeply emotional civilizational choice. That's one thing I really wanna make clear I think, is that when, when you look at what happened in Maidan and in Ukraine, but also what you're seeing currently in Georgia, in many Western Balkan countries, those are people who know most what Europe is.

Because it's the opposite of what they're currently experiencing, which is Russian imperialism, which is corruption, which is chaos and destruction. And they wave European flags when they're protesting. Right? And they get hit by water cannons in Georgia, many brave women. They die in, in, in Ukraine. Many people die basically, right? Waving that flag and, and Russian sniper bullets. So that's the thing they see as a civilizational choice.

And if they would join the European Union. So it's not just that, you know, our economies would grow mutually or their economies would grow, but it would improve us because hrough their, you know, storytelling power and through their ability to sort of defend their democracy. I've been in Moldova in April. I saw this life. It's an incredibly resilient society.

We would also wake a little bit up from this authority. You know, I described that before, like going to the beach and enjoying your cocktails. Like we gotta get a little bit out of that mode, right? Especially now in this time between war and peace. So enlargement would, would massively improve the EU and the other.

And the final thing is like beyond improving the countries or joining and beyond giving the EU that strength. I think also, for example, about critical rare earth minerals that are in Ukraine. Think about the incredible market potential of having 500 million people. You know, we would become an economic superpower.

It's also the leverage to transform the EU itself. So if we're gonna go from 27 member states, like you said, that's already ungovernable with all these vetoes and this battleship, right? And mentioned going through 35. There's no way, like everyone knows here in Brussels, you cannot govern the system that way.

Think about the money we're currently spending on, on agricultural policy. Ukraine would get like 30, 40% of that money if we didn't reform. So everyone knows that we have to change the system as we also become bigger, right? We have to become bigger and better.

And that's the only way I think we're gonna be able to get to the system where you have, yes, a union that enlarges, but also a union that fixes itself because every little country would want to have something else in there. So my country, the Netherlands, until recently they said, oh, we should have an opt-out from our migration policy, oh that requires change. I, I don't support that demand, but it requires change.

The Germans would like to have stronger rule of law. The French want a permanent fiscal system. The Polish want the defense, so everyone wants a little something. And in the end of the day, you're gonna have this Frankenstein monsters of a package deal, of enlarge our union, but also a reformed union where everyone gets a little bit what they want, even if it's imperfect. And that I think is why enlargement is such a secret superpower.

It transforms candidate countries, it transforms you. And it's the only way to really fix European Union because it's this big leverage. It's the sword of Damocles hovering over everything else, basically. Right. And I think we can do it if we're courageous enough, like in the next five years or so.

Benjamin Wittes: And what, right now, is Ukraine missing? Like what, what is defective in Ukrainian law for purposes of those 200,000 pages? Is do you need major changes in all kinds of aspects of Ukrainian law or are they mostly there?

Teun Janssen: Well, let's be honest. I mean, I'm, I'm telling you a very positive story until now, which is, I mean, that's my, my job partially, but it's also, I think, I believe that it's the truth.

But of course, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that, you know, that, that has to function better and. The whole point of it is that they've come from a long way, right? Ukraine 30, 20 years ago was in a very different place than it was now, and especially since the full-scale invasion, they have seen this accession agenda as sort of a second front in their war.

I've been to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion now three times, and I meet often with civil servants, you know, public officials. And they're often very young people, also, often women, because the men are fighting at the front. And they are completely, I mean, it's like you're meeting war fighters. I mean, they're obsessed with, they, they will work until 11:00 PM every day or until midnight to just adapt some legislation into their language or to do some reforms.

And they know that if they get this right, they have a ticket into the European Union. So for them it's existential to get it, right? Right. And it, you can also see that in the way they they, they reformed.

The big thing, for example, is justice vetting. Imagine you have a bunch of corrupt judges, 60 plus year olds. How are you gonna get them out of the system while, at the same time, replacing them with better qualified non-corrupt people? Right? You can't just say, we're gonna fire all of them because then you have no justice system anymore. And that's executive overreach, right?

Benjamin Wittes: Not, yeah. Not to mention that you don't want political control over judges.

Teun Janssen: No, no. I mean, let's put that front, front, full and center. I mean, maybe you can learn a bit in the U.S. about the way the Ukrainians do it actually, because they're very they have a very good system. They even, they even have they have this online platform called ProZorro. ProZorro is basically for every public procurement contract. Any citizen can just look online at a public procurement contract.

So let's say you, I don't know where you, where you, where you live, but you have some, you know, you have a town, there is some roundabout that needs fixing. The government makes a contract, they hire like a construction company. Everyone gets to see it online and can comment on it and can scrutinize it. And that's led to people being fired. It's led to anticorruption charges being filed.

A lot of stuff is happening. They come from a long way. But it takes time, right? It takes time to do it properly. But the beautiful thing about Ukraine, I think, is that citizens are in the driving seat. Citizens, civil society, they often do the homework for the government. They, they even had this thing where even before formally Ukraine was entering negotiation with the EU, they had already done the screening so-called themselves. So people just preemptively did that to just win a few more extra weeks or months of time, you know, waiting for these boring, slow bureaucrats in Brussels, you know.

That's the spirit of the Ukrainian society. I think it's very, very, very vibrant. But yeah, again, there's amount of problems. There's corruption, especially higher up in the, in, in, in, in the system. And there's of course issues. It, it's much more technical, right? Think for example, about agriculture.

So, products made in Ukraine are very competitive because they're very cheap. You can transport 'em pretty easily. They have fertile ground, right? So if you don't make any measurements to say adjustments, I mean, to make sure that it is not gonna flood European farmers, yeah, you're gonna have problems. You're gonna out-compete French you know, Dutch farmers basically. So you gotta think about these kind of things.

Those are technical issues. It's the same with labor market, like with transport. Truck drivers from Ukraine have very competitive.

Benjamin Wittes: Been a huge issue between Ukraine and Poland.

Teun Janssen: Yeah, Poland especially. Exactly. Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: And there's also a labor force issue, right?

Teun Janssen: Right.

Benjamin Wittes: I mean, I, I suppose if you, you know, the. Per capita, GDP in in Ukraine is, you know, very low compared to Western Europe. And if you make it possible on a free movement of people's basis for people to migrate. I, I do think you're gonna, I mean, to some degree that's already happened because of the war and because of. But you're going to have some of the issues that, you know, people already have, the EU has already had with earlier with Romania, right?

Teun Janssen: Right, exactly. And the, the, the, this is a good one. It's a key criticism as well, I think, including from my own government the Netherlands. But you know, the great thing is we've had waves. We, we've had waves before, ever enlargement, and we can just get practice, best practices out of those waves.

So we've had moments where we didn't really think about I mean, we had this big, big bang in 2004, we call it the Big Bang. It's finally something that sounded a bit more interesting and all these acronyms coming out of Brussels. It was 10 countries joining. And yeah, I mean, you're right. It, it, it, it ended up also with Hungary and Poland, right? And having constitutional crises and, and ending up with Orban basically having very weak rule of law.

So we've already learned from that and we've built in already new mechanisms that if a country joins, they have to abide by much, much stricter rule of law criteria. And I would say we have to go further. We have to say, okay, for example when it comes to the new companies joining, why not have it so that for some of these sectors you would have a bit longer derogations. So for agriculture, for transport, especially in Ukraine. Just give it a little bit extra years of adjustment before they become fully part of the single market.

They become formally member states, but you know, leave that aside while at the same time actually accelerating some things. We call this gradual accession. We've had this program called the Ukraine facility where one of my colleagues actually negotiated on last, last mandate. It's 50 billion euro. It's basically saying if you make reforms, we give you some money in return. So it's not like an all or nothing thing where after 30 years you finally become an EU member state and get everything. By this time you've lost the entire population's, you know, support. No, no.

You do it gradually. So step by step, you make some reforms, you get some money, you get some access to some programs, and you keep people happy and excited and there's momentum. you know. That's the way to do it more, I think. And that's the way I think forward for EU accession.

And finally. I mean, there's even discussions like, I mean, as part of this this enlargement run, why not reform the European Union so that actually yu don't just make a, what we currently have is, is it for the budget of the EU, it's conditional on the rule of law. So, that's why that 10 billion euro was frozen for Orban before. It's a new instrument that the Netherlands actually pushed for, is that if there's a government that's corrupt, it's clearly in breach of the EU laws, you can freeze the EU budget. And that's often a lot of money, right?

It's like mini-Marshall plan level of money and let's extend it to everything. So let's extend the conditional to, for example, if Hungary or another membership is really in breach of EU law, then we don't have to wait, like you said, for 26 countries to say, okay, we, we take their vote away. Why don't we have the European Court of Justice ruling about that?

Or you have an automatic triggering of sanctions, basically if they're in breach of certain rule. So it's an opportunity to make the system better through them joining. And again, there's many creative things we can do, like derogations, transition periods, so it should be fine.

Just a close off, there was studies about this. If you think just about the cost of enlargement, also it's been calculated at around 5% of the current you budget. So we would have to spend 5% more, that's like 50 billion Euros approximately to accommodate Ukraine and everyone else currently coming in, not Turkey, but Ukraine and the Western Balkans and Moldova, that's not that much money, right?

So we should talk about a bit more as an opportunity, as a positive chance and something that's actually doable than just talking about how much of a problem's gonna be, burden us.

Benjamin Wittes: I assume, I mean, Turkish EU accession was a big controversy a number of years ago. I assume at this point it is effectively off the table just because of the degree of of Erdogan's authoritarianism.

Teun Janssen: You get into a very interesting question actually, which is, is EU accession technical or political? And everyone always says, oh, it's merit based. We use this term merit based. So if a country is ready to join, then it should join based on its own merits, having made the reforms. But of course, it's super political in practice, right?

So, you've seen this many times. I'll, I'll get to Turkey, but for example, we've had that in North Macedonia where Greece vetoed the next step in its accession because it was first called the former Republic of, former Republic of Macedonia, which Greece said, oh, that implies that you have a territorial claim to parts of Greece. Because we had, you know, Alexander the Great and he was Macedonian, right? So there's always these kind of problems, make it political.

And the question is also, what is it to be a European country? So in the treaties it says any European country can join. But is Armenia a European country? They are going to adopt a law recent, soon saying we should become an EU member state. Is the U.K. a European country? I think so. What about Greenland? What about Canada? Cause recently you saw a poll where 45% of Canadians would like to join the European Union.

Is Tunisia or Morocco European country? Morocco applied for EU membership in the 1990s. But then the European Council said, no, no, no, you're not a European country. It was super political, right? It had nothing to do with actually the, the technical reason. With Turkey, it's similar because a lot of countries, and I totally disagree with this idea, think that Turkey is incompatible because they're somehow Islamic and religiously incompatible with the.

That's, that's nonsense, I think because Albania is going to join the EU and they're also predominantly Muslim country. Makes no sense. We have many Muslims living in the EU, very well integrated. So that, that's, that's, that's nonsense. But it's a, it's a political threat. 'cause if Turkey joins, you would've, this the biggest member state. Currently it's Germany.

If Turkey joins, they would get a lot of the voting weight by population size and by size of the economy. And it would soak up a lot of the budget of EU going to Turkish projects. So in Paris and Brussels and in Berlin, they're looking skeptical at that, and they're using arguments like cultural reasons or values, but actually it's more about that hard power stuff.

But of course, the reality is to, to close off, it's obviously since Erdogan got to power, especially the last 10 years or so, Turkey is not really right now you know, a very well-functioning, advanced democracy. And, and, and we can say many things, but I mean that it, there's no way that Turkey becomes a member state tomorrow, basically, right? With this government, with the, with these policies and cracking down on, on civil society and democratic movements. So that's just not the way it works.

So it's always this balance between values, the technical criteria. We call this actually the Copenhagen criteria and the political reasons. It's always that trifecta, basically, that if the stars are aligned, you can join the union, you know, and that's every country different basically.

Benjamin Wittes: So you, tell an extremely optimistic story about, about European enlargement and about European support for Ukraine. And I wanna throw a big wet blanket on the whole thing.

Teun Janssen: Nice, let's go.

Benjamin Wittes: Number one, every time I ask you a question about current governance. You say, oh yeah, we gotta reform that, we gotta get rid of that. And you know, if you assume away all the governance problems, Europe can do anything because you know it's 500 million people. It's a bunch of really advanced democratic countries and advanced economies. Oh, and by the way, it's got this incredible infrastructure network. And it's got a huge labor force, right?

I mean, you know, it's a, it's an economic superpower. But the governance problems have never gone away. And sometimes they have been managed by wars and sometimes they have been managed by bureaucracies. But they've never been managed by creating a semi unitary state. I mean, except for four years under Hitler, right? A, a sort of a unitary state.

Teun Janssen: Let's not go back to that, please.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, that’s not a great model.

Teun Janssen: No.

Benjamin Wittes: You know, they've never been managed by creating the kind of governance structure that you are describing as a prerequisite. And unlike the United States, which created that governance structure when there were 2 million of us and we all looked exactly the same and you know, we all spoke the same language and nobody thought the country was gonna survive for 10 years.

You're talking about a very complex government arrangement around currently 27, but you know, you're talking about several more states that are in radically different stages of, of development and that are, one of them is in an active shooting war. You've got major language differences. Why should I be confident that the kind of governance arrangements that you are saying, oh, we'll just do this and then it'll be fine, are not, you know, way too optimistic against what's possible?

Teun Janssen: So thank you for chatting me a bit, a little bit. There's actually I, I do like that, so pay me the chance. So basically there's a number of elements there and I think I'm gonna touch about like two or three of them.

First one is that you said, okay. Yeah. America has its shared language and that that's true. I mean, you started from a sort of more like culturally modular space, but, and let's be very real, right? The, the people who were in charge back then, they were, they were white men with a lot of money, right?

Benjamin Wittes: White male landowners, and a lot of them slave owners.

Teun Janssen: So that's, that's very different. But the thing is, I think, I mean, it took you 11 years to get from the Declaration of Independence, longer, like 14 years to get to this like, Hamiltonian moment, right? Like it was actually a, the, the, the moment when you were, okay, clearly you're now moving towards a federal state, wasn't a sort of cultural awakening or like a big moment of like, you know.

You know, it, it was, it was essentially, it was a, it was, it is a systemic change, right? It was a change to the way you bundle your taxes and your, and your fiscal.

Benjamin Wittes: And it was really a change in three phases, right? So one is at the constitutional convention, one is at the end of the Civil War, which is the first time the federal rights are applicable against the states.

Teun Janssen: Right.

Benjamin Wittes: And then one of them, which you guys have already solved, is the spending power issues, which really don't get fully resolved at the federal level until the 20th century?

Teun Janssen: Yeah, I mean, in a way I think I mean we haven't fully resolved it yet, I think because actually, I mean, there's a huge demand for, for European debt, for Eurobonds I talked about earlier.

And right now, the only way clearly we can really make Europe, like we talk about is competitiveness. It's jargon now in Brussels, competitiveness, competitiveness. The only way to do that is actually have more joint debt, and there's a lot of demands and markets for it, and I hope you get there. So that's, yeah, but you're right. I mean, that was exactly how, one of the reasons why it went in that direction.

And the other thing is, I mean, there's two more elements to this. One is a cynical and one's a hopeful one, but we've had this moment since basically the Eurozone crisis, which was around 13 years ago, 14 years ago, of permanent crisis in Europe.

We call this the poly crisis, you know, sometimes, and it's been a banking crisis in Greece, Eurozone crisis. There was a migration crisis. We had Brexit, we had the ru, the Russian invasion of Ukraine 2014 already, Crimea annexation. We had COVID, right? We had this war. And now the, the war is also in the Middle East, so it's just constant crisis mode.

And in the way Europe is quite good at, you know, when things get really tough, this sort of like, my boss calls this a bike with square wheels, that sometimes this bike finally flips over with its square wheels and suddenly does a lot. You can also call this something called failing forward. It's like a sudden movement where suddenly a lot can happen.

And you've seen this, and Europe is a lot better than a lot of Anglo-Saxon commentators sometimes say, oh, now Europe will collapse. You're almost like salivating about it. Like, oh, now it's gonna happen, but it never happens. 'cause at the end of the day, we get together and we decide that whatever this is, as imperfect as this union is, it's better than breaking it up.

And there's always a moment of initial failure to respond, everyone scrambles on their own. You've had this with the COVID crisis. Everyone's getting their own masks, their own medical equipment. Everyone's scrambling. But eventually, sooner than later, you make a joint effort and you do things together and every time that happens, you go forward a little bit more, you integrate a bit more.

And honestly, compared to 10 years ago, where most people didn't care about Europe necessarily as much as they do now. They didn't know what was happening. They didn't know anyone who was there. Now it's from the lane. At least most people know her. Europe has integrated so much deeper in financing and in defense in industry and climate than we had 10 years ago.

It's something that happens sort of slowly. That's hard to see it, but it's a basically a silent revolution that's happened. We're already getting closer to being a state in a way because of that dynamic alone, but it's not enough, right? Because at the end of the day you can get closer with the functions of the state, but if people don't feel like they belong to it, they don't have the sense of identity to it, then it's basically very hard to do.

And it's like a strange thing maybe to be happy about. I'm not happy about it. But you've seen that Europe is gone a more far right. Recently. Right. That's very clear.

Benjamin Wittes: We know something about that too.

Teun Janssen: Yeah. Well, I'll give you, I'll give you a glimpse of it, is that, I mean before, before Brexit, most of them were saying, let's just exit the European Union.

Right? That's the way to go. Let's just exit it. Let's destroy it from the inside, and we don't need this stuff anymore. Let's go back to this nation state. It never existed. There's ultimately sovereign nation nations that never existed because Europe provides nation states with meaningful self, self sovereignty, self autonomy.

Anyway, the point is that after Brexit, everyone's scared the hell out of themselves that okay, it's really bad for your economy. It's clearly really bad for your sense of safety and purpose in the world. So most of these far-right movements have actually changed their minds, and now they're saying, let's create this Europe, this confederation of nation states that we wanna change Europe from within.

Right? A perfect example is Meloni, prime minister of Italy. You know what our favorite book is actually of Meloni. It's it's Lord of the Rings, because I think she subscribed this herself. She sees sort of Europe as this sort of collection of like, nation states, right? It's together fighting against this, this ultimate evil from the East, which is a ridiculous obviously analogy. And I do not support that.

But that's the way that some of these far-right politicians that they, they, they see themselves and they see Europe as this tool to transform their own power base. So by purely by that fact, I think we can be optimistic in a that Europe as a political space is there to stay because the left and the right and the center, everyone is slowly articulating the, the way that they, they, they, they, they act in a European way, right, on a European scale.

So even the far right. So that tells you enough that at the, at the end of the day, I think it's, the union is stronger than we sometimes give it credit for, and I can't, even if it's not about a single event or a single decision, right.

Benjamin Wittes: We are going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Teun Janssen: Thank you for giving me the chance and to talk about all these different subjects intertwined. It was really a lot of fun for me as well.

Benjamin Wittes: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

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