Working Towards the Patron: Chain-Ganging in Hierarchy and the Expiring American Head

Member states at the edge of the European Union sometimes seem to escalate on their own, cite a common rule as cover, and leave the centre to tidy up afterwards. Whether this really recurs is still open. This note offers a theory for it anyway, and a way to test it. Ian Kershaw's account of officials "working towards the Führer" supplies the micro-mechanism: nodes act on what they expect a head to want, and expect its acceptance later. Europe has no head of its own for war and peace; it is headless within and, in the last instance, heterocephalous by invitation. So its edges work towards Washington. That head is legally complete for war and peace, but its organisational design is personal, expires with each President, and is partly steered from below. Christensen and Snyder's chain-ganging is excluded beneath a dominant patron, for a reason that holds for the juniors too. The note keeps their pattern and replaces their binding force: initiative at the edge, the cost of standing apart among the followers, a common rule and a shared exposure across the bloc. The first case changed the theory. Checked, the 2022 Kaliningrad transit episode turns out to have been framed by the centre and reversed on the patron's signal — a chain running through the centre, and backwards. The note names six rivals, fixes its selection criteria in advance, and places itself in the literature as an integration with three predictions of its own. Allies who follow a head rather than a treaty inherit the head's impermanence.Keywords: chain-ganging; alliance hierarchy; anticipatory compliance; European Union; National Security Council