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1Introduction
The modern nation state, with its two defining spheres, the sphere of popular sovereignty and the sphere of freedom from it, emerged in the turbulent epoch of the French Revolution after a long period of struggle in the realm of world history. The revolution’s most glorious achievement was that it eventually transferred the idea of freedom, the idea that it is in man’s nature to be born free, from theoretical into practical existence. For thinkers and political practitioners of that era, it became a common place that ‘the revolution received its first impulse from philosophy’ (Hegel 1900: 446). The ‘Declaration of the rights of man and citizen’, passed by the French National Constituent Assembly in August 1789 is usually seen as a decisive step towards the realisation of the philosophical principles of natural law (Habermas 1974: 82–120). As a direct consequence of the overthrowing of a monarch by an absolutely sovereign French nation, all political and legal advantages previously accorded to some privileged estates of society vanished. Uniform legal norms defining the rights and liberties of men became the basic premise of modern statehood. This ‘liberty of moderns’ presupposes the right of everyone to be subjected only to laws, to express their opinion, to choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, to associate with other individuals and to directly or indirectly influence administration of government (Constant 1819). It was recognised even by the modern state’s most brilliant critic, Karl Marx, that this development was undeniably a step forward with respect to the feudal epoch, in which classes of civil society were the same as political classes, given that civil state was at the same time a political state (Marx 1994: 293).
This remarkable historical emancipation from the feudal system did not come merely as a technical application of the theories of such political thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, whose social contract theory, aimed at universal applicability, was based purely on reason and reflection. Realisation of modern principles of natural law came as the result of a concrete historical struggle between the French people and their absolutistic monarch, a struggle during which the French people eventually became conscious of their capacity to create general norms. Ever since the French Revolution, the legitimacy of the modern state has emanated neither from the state itself nor from some transcendent divine source, but from the nation, which is the aggregate of those individuals who stand under the same law and are represented by the same legislative assembly (Sieyes 1989). It was the very idea that the source and origin of all political power rests in the people that gave revolutionary strength to the emergence of nation states in Europe since the end of the eighteenth century.
Even so, the claim that the modern liberal state represents the last station on the historic road of actualising the idea of freedom was thoroughly criticised at the same moment when this new political form was being enthusiastically accepted by European peoples. Among many other influential critics of modern statehood, the philosophical thought of French anarcho-federalist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, seems especially revealing (Proudhon 1959, 1967). According to Proudhon, it is flawed to claim that the nation state represents the ultimate result of the secularisation of the idea that man is in his very nature born to be free (see Hegel 1900: 335), given that state actually deprives citizens of at least three quarters of their sovereignty and freedom. As a substitute for the hierarchical nature of modern statehood, being essentially characterised by possession of one unalterable centre of sovereign authority, the French philosopher proposes the concept of a dynamic federalism. Proudhon, though, was not talking about finished federal states as we know them today. For him, authentic federalism is founded on the idea of contract as a foundation stone for the voluntary association of different communities on the basis of mutuality, with the aim of finding efficient governance solutions for some common problems. He rejects as deceiving the very notion of social contract that is concluded once and for all times with the major aim of dividing the sphere of state from the sphere of society. From Proudhon’s radical libertarian stand point, it is impossible to justify the existence of a political community whose members irrevocably transfer their sovereignty to an abstract nation. Individuals belonging simultaneously to numerous diverse organisations of interest should be able to transfer authority only voluntarily and only to those institutions with precisely defined competencies. If these extremely high standards for measuring freedom are accepted, it follows that citizens can sacrifice their right to self-governance only in a measure that will compensate them with efficient implementation of common governing tasks.
Modern principles of natural law were transformed into basic principles of national constitutions in the period that followed the French Revolution, thus proving for Hegel to be ‘truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world’ (Hegel 1900: 446). In contrast, Proudhon’s anarcho-federal political vision, aimed at revealing corruption of the Europe composed of nation states, was far from being convincing enough. In the European era of wars, conflicts and constant existential threats, the idea of replacing sovereign states with federal systems characterised by constant deliberation, negotiation and a search for a consensus among territorially and functionally organised associations, was indeed rather far from gaining the necessary amount of revolutionary force. This noble federal concept remained nothing but wishful thinking, although it continued to inspire many libertarian spirits of generations to come.
Instead of utopian federal proposals, such as Proudhon’s, it was actually the constant instability in Europe determined by the hostile and expansionist character of modern sovereign states that eventually led to the fundamental transformation of the state’s meaning and role. Besides its indisputably emancipative character, the modern nation state has historically proven to be a type of community whose essential feature is a will for expansion at the expense of other communities of the same kind. Very soon after the strength of Voltaire’s lucid genius awakened, inspired and bifurcated the democratic spirit of the French people, another genius, Napoleon Bonaparte, transformed this spirit of freedom into a will for conquering the rest of the world. It was not until the end of the horror of the world’s two most devastating wars which took place in the first blood-drenched half of the twentieth century that Western European nation states ceased to produce existential conflicts aiming at political, economic or military expansion.
Indeed, the modern nation state that was born in the course of the French Revolution should be taken as a community in which the idea of freedom has to some extent been actualised by some European nations. At the same time, though, historical experience convincingly testifies that the state should also be seen as a perpetual threat to that same freedom hardly conquered or being desperately fought for by other peoples living within different territorial frontiers. According to the German philosopher who defined the state as a ‘temple of human freedom’, war as such, should be taken as a necessary, and sometimes positive, consequence of the progression of world history (Hegel 2001: 258–60). It is this second peril coming particularly from the eminently imperialistic nature of the politically, economically and militarily strongest European states that has so far been considerably diminished over the course of post-Second World War European integration. The fact that today one could hardly anticipate some new military conflict among Western European nation states is usually associated with the project of European unification, and is taken to be its most obvious and most precious result.
The major concern of this book, however, is related to the question of freedom within a peculiar multilevel political order emerging in Europe as a result of the European integration process. The post- Second World War voluntary integration of nation states in Europe resulted in the creation of a supranational level of government empowered to issue political decisions that profoundly influence the lives of ordinary citizens. The dilemma of freedom within this historically unprecedented political order is twofold. On the one hand, it is related to the absence of democratic legitimacy of the autonomous supranational political power holder, whose decisions directly or indirectly ever more shape European societies. On the other hand, the question of freedom is associated with the gradual loss of political autonomy of democratically legitimate national authorities to determine the most important social, economic and political goals. Within modern nation states, the issue of legitimacy was resolved based on the prevalent philosophy at the moment of their first constitution, and after that, tacitly put aside, given that in normal circumstances, a people silently performs its role of pouvoir constituent (see Schmitt 2008: 125–46). In contrast, the question of whether decisions made by the EU are in fact made in the name of its citizens has been attracting ever more attention with the deepening of the integration process. This is mainly because the ultimate answer to the legitimacy dilemma, which was, in the case of the modern state, deduced from philosophy on the eve of the French Revolution, is desperately lacking within the EU’s political structure. Despite the declarative resoluteness of European integrationist elites to fight against the EU’s famous democratic deficit, member states’ citizens have not become self-governing Europeans. Simultaneously, as a result of the clandestine process by which governing tasks are centralised at the supranational level, member states, whose legitimacy rests on the shared values and beliefs of their societies, have lost the ability to respond to their citizens’ democratic demands.
Inspired by functionalist theories, major architects of today’s EU have proven to be rather successful in their attempt to build Europe without Europeans. Member states’ citizens have been gradually transformed into pure consumers of negative rights of liberty conferred to them by the democratically unaccountable, although maybe paternalistic, European authorities. With each new sacrifice of national constitutional democracy for the sake of deepening of the integration process, political liberty, as a necessary guardian of Constant’s ‘liberty of moderns’, has been more and more jeopardised (see Bellamy 2012). So, the great conviction that emerged in the course of the French Revolution, that the source and origin of political power must rest in people, has been tacitly fading in an ever more depoliticised and neutralised Europe. Durable European peace has so far been achieved by the technocratic process of European integration at the direct expense of the republican principle. Kant would have most likely said that today’s European peace corresponds to the picture of a peaceful and quiet graveyard where liberty is buried (see Kant 2006: 67–109).
When following this argument in the context of the EU’s unfinished political community bearing many important federal features, the following question emerges: Is it possible to theoretically imagine and practically realise a European federal concept that would go beyond the logics of a modern political community, while being capable of efficiently dealing with fundamental problems of freedom, democracy and legitimacy that have, so far, been philosophically and historically resolved only within the boundaries of modern statehood? In this respect, the main hypothesis that is to be examined in this book reads as follows.
On the one hand, the process of European integration has produced high levels of economic, institutional and political integration among European states. What makes this process historically unprecedented, though, is the fact that it has not produced a clear hierarchical relationship between the European and national level of government. This fact essentially differentiates the EU from all modern federal states; despite some rather striking similarities between the EU and those modern federations regarding their institutional and constitutional functioning. In contrast to all classical federations, centralisation of competencies at the expense of member states’ autonomy has taken place in the absence of a constitutional answer to the question of the EU’s democratic legitimacy. The process of compound polity building in the shadow of the unresolved dilemma of the community’s finalité politique, under the mask of market integration, can be described as hidden federalism. From a functionalist point of view, this peculiar method of integration has proven to be rather successful: by skilfully avoiding a response to the question of ultimate sources of the EU’s legitimacy, Europe’s hidden federalisation has remarkably diminished potentials for some possible future war conflicts in Europe. This process has also led to the establishment of a common European market and monetary union as an innovative response to governance challenges in an era of ever-accelerating globalisation.
On the other hand, though, the process of step-by-step functional integration has not even come close to realising an emancipative vision of Europe’s federalised democracy that goes beyond the logic of modern statehood. Europe’s hidden federalisation has called into question the very existence of essential prerequisites for realisation of the principles of self-government and freedom within national political communities. At the same time, this process has failed to produce prerequisites for self-governance at the European level. As a result, the very idea of freedom, which was once transferred from books to historical reality during the storms of the French Revolution, has been seriously put in question. While the European governance process has so far followed the path of permanent hidden revolution, citizens’ political participation has been left captured within static democratic nations hopelessly lacking the capacity to autonomously determine their collective political, social and economic goals. The successful avoiding of the constitutional finalité politique issue, Europe’s great hesitation, was key to all major functional successes of the European integration process. Paradoxically enough, by running away from the dilemma of the sources of the EU’s legitimate authority for so long, Europe’s hidden federalisation process has eventually resulted in an existential crisis, whose structural determination already became evident after the failure of the constitutional project in 2005.
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The major aim of this book is to search for the European Union’s hidden federal features in order to explain the profound challenges facing this unfinished political community in terms of legitimacy, democracy, freedom and functionality. Even at first glance this task reveals its highly complex nature. The main theoretical difficulty is largely due to the fact that the book should uncover the vague linkage between two highly ambiguous subjects that successfully escape every precise definition – federalism and the European Union. This vagueness has first and foremost to do with the fact that both federal theory and the history of European integration are marked by a peculiar mixture of reopened philosophical ideas and a rapidly changing reality (see, for example, Burgess 2000: 1–22). Accordingly, a scholar who tries to see deeper into the nature of the EU through federal lenses, is, already by his first analytical step, confronted with a critical choice: whether to deal with federal ideas or politico-historical reality, to investigate norms or to simply describe and classify facts? In other words, it may seem that a scholar must choose between political philosophy, which is mainly concerned with norms and values, and political science, which deals primarily with facts. But is it really analytically fruitful to start an investigation into the EU’s federal features by sharply dividing ideas from reality and politico-philosophic principles from existing political institutions?
Those who decide to analyse the relationship between federalism and the EU by using only instruments of empirically oriented political science are primarily concerned with some kind of measurement, quantification or description of facts. In other words, they are mainly caught in the rigid logics of prediction-oriented natural sciences, such as physics or mathematics. Accordingly, these scholars try to compare EU institutions with existing and well-functioning federal states without providing a comprehensible analysis of those institutions’ philosophical roots (see, for example, Harbo 2005; McKay 2001; Bowie and Friedrich 1960). The main problem with research projects that empirically evaluate EU institutions on the basis of existing federal states’ institutions lies in the very simple fact that the EU is not a sovereign state. Namely, while the predictable functioning of all modern federal states resides first and foremost on the existence of a single people who became capable of acting politically in one decisive moment of history, it is beyond doubt that the EU desperately lacks its own politically self-conscious people, Europeans. Accordingly, its political system’s sustainable running is, at heart, dependent on the possibility of reaching consensus and compromise among numerous representatives of member states. Another big analytical problem with a positivistic comparative approach is that the huge differences between federal states regarding the actual functioning of their political and constitutional systems has a lot to do with fundamentally different politico-philosophical ideas, which have played an important role since the founding of these states’ constitutions. This means that those political theories aimed at attaining scientific objectivity by concentrating only on the empirical facts, while fully neglecting ideas and values, are not likely to provide a comprehensive understanding of various federal institutions. Thus, they are even less likely to create an appropriate analytical tool for investigating the EU’s political system. To put it very simply, one should not expect great success at measuring something without really knowing what exactly is being measured. Therefore, scholars trying to empirically discern elements of federal states in an unfinished political community, such as the EU, often spend a lot of time and energy without eventually providing any coherent conclusions.
Conversely, some scholars intend to measure the intensity of external factors necessary for a federal state to come into being or to be viable; these external factors could be of military, economic, ideological or some other nature (see Riker 1964; Franck 1968). Accordingly, they try to predict whether the EU is likely or not to become a federal state one day (Riker 1996). They try to discern some external factors, such as military or economic threats, that according to them are crucial for a federal state to come into being and whose continual presence is necessary for this federal state’s sustainable functioning. Nonetheless, unlike the exact rules of natural sciences which enable precise predictions, social sciences are very limited in this respect, given first and foremost their subject matter that is fundamentally different from natural sciences. Thus, depending on the chosen empirical facts, political scientists dealing with federalism accentuate completely different external or internal factors as crucial for a federal state’s predictable functioning. Some scholars have proclaimed external military threats to be the main factor in the federation building process, basing their stance on historical examples such as the United States or Switzerland (Riker 1964: 11–48). Others, on the contrary, put the emphasis on people’s ideological commitment to the federal concept, referring to other historical examples of unsuccessful federations, such as the West Indian or East African federations, which fell apart even though there were strong military and economic reasons for preserving their unity (Franck 1969: 167–98). In a word, even though this kind of empirically oriented analysis of federal states may seem interesting and innovative at first glance, it can also be rather misleading. What is sure is that political science that intentionally and fully neglects a normative analysis of constitutive philosophical ideas o...
