In February this year, Hungary simultaneously blocked the twentieth package of restrictive measures against Russia and the €90bn loan to Ukraine — €30bn in budget support, €60bn for military needs — that heads of state and government had agreed politically two months earlier. The reason given had nothing to do with the substance of either decision. It concerned the interruption, since late January, of Russian oil shipments through the Druzhba pipeline, damaged in circumstances Ukrainian authorities attributed to Russian strikes, and the claim that Kyiv was slow to repair it. The impasse lasted until late April.
The object of the blockage and the object of the demand were entirely unrelated. That is the signature of a system in which preventing is worth more than deciding.
One detail of the episode deserves more attention than it received. Of the three legislative acts required for the loan, two proceeded under the ordinary procedures applicable to enhanced cooperation and were adopted in February; the amendment to the multiannual financial framework still required unanimity, and it was that one which remained blocked until April. Three member states did not take on the financial obligations of the instrument. Faced with the veto, the Union separated those who decide from those who pay. It did so under pressure, outside its own institutional design and as an exception — but it did so.
This is worth holding on to, because it shifts the debate. The question is not whether Europe should allow that not every member state takes part in everything. It already does, whenever the alternative is not acting at all. The question is whether it does so by rule and with rules, or by expedient and without them.
It will be said that the episode ended with the government that staged it: Viktor Orbán lost April's election and the incoming Hungarian diplomacy has promised to abandon the veto as an instrument of political theatre. That would be a relief, and it would be a misreading. Since mid-2011, forty-eight vetoes have been documented, exercised by fifteen different member states — Hungary in twenty-one cases, Poland in seven, and others by states that rarely feature in this conversation. And the count records only reported vetoes: as the person who compiles it acknowledges, matters already blocked tend not to return to the Council's agenda, so the most effective blockage is precisely the one never exercised, and therefore never counted. The problem is not a government. It is an architecture that rewards those who obstruct.
The prevailing diagnosis is therefore mistaken. Unanimity is not the disease. It is the symptom of a principle no treaty states and everyone presumes: that a European policy requires the same states to decide, execute, finance, benefit and answer, always together. It is that compulsory coincidence which makes the veto necessary. When deciding means binding everyone, whoever does not wish to be bound has a single instrument available: preventing the decision.
The principle has a legitimate origin. In a customs union, coincidence is a technical necessity rather than a political choice: a common tariff applied by twenty-five states and not by two ceases to be common and becomes an internal border. But geopolitics does not work like a customs tariff. A naval mission carried out by twelve member states is no less a naval mission. A capability programme financed by fifteen produces capabilities. A stabilisation operation conducted by nine stabilises. External action, unlike the internal market, is divisible in execution without losing its identity — and Europe treated it, even so, as though it were not.
From this follows the distinction that captures the whole of the necessary reform. The Union today treats external action as a common policy, in the ordinary sense that everyone does exactly the same thing. It should treat it as a collective policy: everyone belongs to the same system and deliberates within the same institutions, but not everyone executes, finances or answers for the same mission. The difference is not semantic. A common policy requires unanimity because it obliges everyone to act; a collective policy dispenses with it in operational matters, because it obliges no state to carry out a mission against its will.
Call it the Union's Differentiated Policy.
Its design consists in separating five planes that compulsory coincidence kept conflated. The decision remains European and is taken by qualified majority. Execution belongs to the member states that declare participation, in the act of voting itself. Financing follows execution, through a ring-fenced account. Liability towards third parties follows whoever acts, rather than the common budget. The benefit follows whoever contributes. Each plane obeys its own logic, and none needs to coincide with the others.
Differentiation does not, however, apply to everything. It holds for operational execution — missions, capabilities, assistance, defence programmes — not for sanctions or the Union's legal positions, whose partial application would destroy the object itself: an internal market with one member state serving as an open commercial door is not a sanctions regime. In those matters, a majority decision binds all. In exchange — and this is the trade — a member state suffering disproportionate and verified economic exposure acquires a right to compensation. It loses the power to refuse; it gains the right to be compensated. The energy grievance that served as leverage in February would thus have a route of its own: a procedure, not a negotiation.
What results is not a Europe à la carte, and it matters to say why. Not participating has a price, and a known one. The member state that does not finance a policy also does not capture what it generates: the contracts, the access to acquired capabilities, the technology transfer, the placement of personnel in its structures. It loses something less visible and more valuable still — the governance of the policy, that is, influence over how it is conducted and what it yields strategically. And that cost is calculated and published before the vote, so that each government chooses knowing exactly what its non-participation will cost. The choice exists. It is not free.
Nor is this fragmentation. The objection assumes the alternative is a uniform Union, and it is not: whenever unanimity blocks the Council, member states act through informal coalitions, bilateral agreements and off-budget vehicles. Europe goes on acting. It does so outside the institutions that ought to secure parliamentary scrutiny, judicial control and strategic continuity. Institutionalising differentiation is the opposite of fragmenting. It is bringing inside what already happens outside, and subjecting it to the rules everything else obeys.
The most counter-intuitive effect is in defence. Constitutional neutralities would be better protected than they are today, not worse. No member state could be compelled to deploy armed forces to an operation it had not endorsed, and that guarantee would become express and non-derogable. In exchange, it would no longer be able to prevent the others from doing so under a European mandate. What is taken from neutral states is not what their constitutions protect — the faculty of not taking part. It is what no constitution grounds: the power to prevent others.
The geopolitical gain is measured in the difference between two sequences. Today: crisis, Council, veto, nothing. Under the new architecture: crisis, European decision, execution by the participants. It is not a difference of speed. It is the difference between being an actor and being a communiqué.
Enlargement makes the discussion unavoidable. An accession process today runs through dozens of veto points, and it is worth noting that unanimity at many of them is settled practice rather than a treaty requirement — which only makes it harder to defend. Brussels is already discussing admitting new members without full veto rights for a transitional period: a solution that recognises the problem and resolves it by the frailest route, creating two categories of member state instead of correcting the architecture that applies to all.
Contrary to what is often claimed, unanimity in foreign policy is not an institutional residue inherited from a Community of six. It was chosen at Maastricht, with twelve member states, and reaffirmed at Lisbon, with twenty-seven, on a premise nobody stated because it seemed self-evident: that Europe could afford to decide slowly. That premise has expired. A choice made three times can be revised a fourth — and revising a choice is a good deal easier than correcting an inheritance.
The real reform, then, does not consist in replacing unanimity with qualified majority. It consists in abandoning the idea that the Union acts only when everyone does exactly the same thing. And what would result is not a Europe with less sovereignty, but with sovereignty of another kind: one in which it ceases to consist in the power to prevent and comes to consist in the freedom to choose, each bearing the consequences of the choice made.