Federalism and the European Union

The Building of Europe, 1950-2000

Michael Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134736782
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A revisionist interpretation of the post-war evolution of European integration and the European Union (EU), this book reappraises and reassesses conventional explanations of European integration. It adopts a federalist approach which supplements state-based arguments with federal political ideas, influences and strategies. By exploring the philosophical and historical origins of federal ideas and tracing their influence throughout the whole of the EU's evolution, the book makes a significant contribution to the scholarly debate about the nature and development of the EU. The book looks at federal ideas stretching back to the sixteenth century and demonstrates their fundamental continuity to contemporary European integration. It situates these ideas in the broad context of post-war western Europe and underlines their practical relevance in the activities of Jean Monnet and Altiero Spinelli. Post-war empirical developments are explored from a federalist perspective, revealing an enduring persistence of federal ideas which have been either ignored or overlooked in conventional interpretations. The book challenges traditional conceptions of the post-war and contemporary evolution of the EU, to reassert and reinstate federalism in theory and practice at the very core of European integration.

1
Federalism, the state and the European idea

At the end of the twentieth century, we continue to live in a world of states whose historical origins stretch back to sixteenth-century Europe. Europe was both the harbinger and the birthplace of the modern state. Its early evolution can be explained by the gradual breakdown of the feudal system and the increasing incidence of war. Indeed, there is plenty of historical and philosophical evidence which construes the early modern state simply as a war machine driven by the fundamental imperatives of princely power and territorial aggrandizement. The rise of the modern state in Renaissance Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries went hand in hand with the emergence of sovereignty as a conceptual instrument for the organization of power in the state. The modern state, then, is an historical phenomenon but it is also, analytically, a distinct political institution developed by society; it is a particular means of organizing political power. In this chapter, I intend to explore the conceptual, philosophical and historical aspects to the relationship between federalism, the state and the European idea in order to furnish the basis for an initial understanding of what is implied by a ‘federal’ Europe. In the course of this exploration, we will establish two quite distinct traditions of federalism, namely, the ‘Continental European’ and the ‘Anglo-American’, and we will address the key distinction between intrastate and interstate federalism. But first, let us begin with a short survey of the modern state.

Through its evolution, the state came to be seen as ‘public’ power while society was equated with ‘private’ activities related to the ordinary day-to-day business of living. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the gradual development and consolidation of the modern territorial state as the sole legitimate source of public order and political authority. And the state was ‘sovereign’ in the sense that it admitted no rival or competing authority within its own territorially demarcated boundaries. The modern territorial sovereign national state was predicated upon the assumption that there was a final and absolute political authority in the political community. In Weber’s terms, it possessed the legitimate monopoly of the means of physical coercion in a given territory. And it had two faces. The internal face of sovereignty was understood to be the source of the legal sanctions governing the use of physical coercion while the external face of sovereignty – international relations – confronted a world of similarly sovereign states where elite actors recognised no authority higher than their own except for treaty commitments which they could always revoke. In the absence of any overarching international authority which might attempt to monitor the behaviour of states and arbitrate between them in incidences of conflict, there was, therefore, an implicit ‘anarchy’ of international relations.

It is in this sense that Francis H. Hinsley referred to the origins and history of the state and sovereignty as indissolubly connected. The origin and history of sovereignty are intimately linked to the origin, nature and history of the modern state.¹ In the turbulence of sixteenth-century Europe, in an era of sustained dynastic and civil wars, religious schisms and a Holy Roman Empire in decay, the case for ‘sovereignty’ was made most forcibly and cogently by the French scholar, Jean Bodin. His Les Six Livres de la Republique was first published in 1576 and became the classic rationalization of the unitary monarchical state.² Bodin constructed his major work principally as a prescription for the achievement of order, stability and security for France in a dangerously uncertain world, but his recommendations also served the established interests of the hereditary nobility and medieval constitutional authorities. La Republique distilled the need for an undisputed sovereign authority into a simple formula: first, the authority of the state should be absolute, centralized and indivisible; and, secondly, the supreme sovereign power should reside in a monarch answerable only to God and natural law. Unless royal authority was endowed with supreme and indivisible authority, anarchy and civil war would result. Particular interests were elevated to universal prescription. However, it is also true that Bodin was addressing something much more profound than mere political expediency. La Republique stood as a bridge between the medieval, feudal period and the early modern epoch in the extent to which it recognised the existence of a natural order of things together with the new requirement that authority must henceforth be based upon legitimacy and consent. This reflected the shift from the divine rule of God to the notion of human will – the idea that human beings ‘will’ authority into existence via consent.

The Bodinian conception of the state and sovereignty was extremely rigid. The equation of order and stability with centralized, indivisible and unlimited power yielded a strict hierarchical structure – a single, basic pyramid of command and obedience. But if the triumph of the secular monarchical sovereign nation state – the state in which there was only one master – became the dominant political reality of this historical epoch, it was not without its critics from the very beginning. Indeed, the fundamental principles of political authority and the true attributes of sovereignty established by Bodin gave rise to much philosophical argument and speculation. The challenge to the Bodinian state began almost immediately he had formulated and disseminated his ideas about political authority.

The significance of Bodin for the emergence of federal ideas about the organization of the state resided in the imperative to refute his rigid conception of the state and sovereignty. By defining the state in such an exclusivist manner, he compelled his critics to come to terms either with his formulation of the concept or its application to particular cases. As S. Rufus Davis observed, it might initially seem paradoxical to include Bodin in a study of federal ideas but to omit him would be ‘a grave error’ for:

whether by the force of repulsion or resistance, his catalytic influence on federal theory cannot be ignored … other jurists could no more evade Bodin than successive generations of political jurists could free themselves from the questions – who commands, and how many masters can there be in a stable state, one, two, three, or more?³

Bodin’s legacy was enduring. In the following two centuries after La Republique, the debate about the nature of the state and sovereignty continued to shape the philosophical climate. In the great pantheon of British political thinkers who helped to mould this new philosophical environment, the names of Thomas Hobbes, Algernon Sydney, John Locke and David Hume loom large. Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) stands in a direct line of descent to Bodin’s La Republique as a theory of sovereignty. But Hobbes, who in a sense continued the work that Bodin had begun, must also be set in the context of ‘social contract’ theory which ‘opened the door to a restatement of the classical notion of the popular basis of sovereignty’.⁴ Along with Locke’s Treatise on Civil Government (1690), the idea of the social contract epitomized the shift from absolutism and the divine right of kings to the subversive ideas of consent – the notion of a compact or contract (or even covenant) freely entered into – and limited government. Whereas Hobbes was agnostic about where the sovereign power should logically reside (though his own sneaking preference was for monarchy), Locke’s reasoning catapulted him in the direction of the rights of man and representative parliamentary government.

It is important to note that neither Hobbes nor Locke donated anything directly to the modern federal idea, but in helping to shape a climate of intense political speculation and debate in which the old encrusted ideas and assumptions about authority and obligation were gradually discredited, they contributed the fundamental philosophical basis to it. Political theorists trace a fairly consistent line of thought grounded in social contract, natural rights, popular consent, the justification of resistance to authority, and utilitarianism, which brings into question the very essence of sovereign power. And the same observation may be made regarding the particular contributions of Rousseau and Montesquieu which reflected secular liberal Enlightenment thinking. Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois (1748) and Rousseau’s Contrat Social (1762) both addressed philosophical questions which were germane to a political climate in which notions of popular sovereignty, individual liberty, limited government and the separation of powers could flourish. However, the main intellectual inspiration for the Continental European tradition of federalism did not derive from this broad philosophical source. Scholars of federalism are well-acquainted with the mainly political-theological, collectivist, corporatist identity of mainstream European federalism which derives from both Roman Catholic social theory and Protestant reformism, and begins with the German Calvinist intellectual, Johannes Althusius.⁵ They are also familiar with the much later and very different secular anarchist-socialist intellectual strand of European federalism which is most closely associated with the French philosopher, Pierre-joseph Proudhon.⁶ However, if we wish to be more specific about federalism, the state and the European idea, we must investigate a much less well-known philosophical dimension to our subject, which can be traced back to the age of Bodin.

Recent research on the Anglo-American tradition of federalism has revealed the existence of a strand of federal thought unknown to most scholars of federalism until now. It is a source of European federalism which is quite different from the modern secular liberal Enlightenment thinking derived from Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu, and it is located in what is called ‘covenant’ theory. As we shall see, this investigation brings the existence of two quite distinct political traditions of federalism into sharp focus. And, by bringing them closer together, it also furnishes the basis for some comparative reflections which serve to deepen and enrich our historical and philosophical understanding of a ‘federal’ Europe.

In 1991, two American academic specialists in theology, Charles McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, published their revisionist monograph entitled Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition⁷ This essay identified a hitherto unknown dimension of Anglo-American federalism best described as the Biblical-Reformed-Puritan-ethical religious strand of federal thought. The intellectual origins of this strand stretch back to Heinrich Bullinger, a Swiss theologian-philosopher of the sixteenth century. This revealing survey of Bullinger’s own intellectual contribution to federal theory underlines how far this theological-political strand of federal thought antedates that of the conventional western liberal individualism of Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu. But it is also of great significance for both the Continental European and the Anglo-American federal political traditions. We will take a closer look at the particular intellectual contribution of Bullinger to both of these traditions, but first let us address the idea of the covenantal tradition.

In modern times, covenantal theory is most closely associated with the American contributions to federal scholarship of Vincent Ostrom and Daniel Elazar. It is, above all, a biblical perspective of federalism. According to this perspective, the concept of covenantal federalism embodies a set of normative principles which bind partners together in a moral contract or agreement of trust. The act of coming together remains a ‘political bargain’ but it is much more than just this; it is also based upon mutual recognition, tolerance, respect, obligation and responsibility. Indeed, Elazar refers to the genesis of such an arrangement in the original relationship between God and man which derives from the Bible. In a recent research paper, Michael Stein has underlined this:

In the religious compact there is supposed to be a set of tacit moral obligations mutually accepted by the Deity and those who adopt his code of law and its moral precepts. The same covenant is supposed to commit the individual members of the covenanting group to appropriate moral behaviour in their relations with each other.⁸

Elazar’s own research on American federalism arrived at the conclusion that a major source of the covenantal idea was both the Federalist Papers of Hamilton, Jay and Madison and the American Constitution (1789) itself.⁹ The journey to this destination was assisted by Ostrom’s pioneering work on the interpretation of late-eighteenth-century American political debates and constitutional negotiations in terms of these normative and convenantal principles.¹⁰ This scholarship has, therefore, firmly established the link between federal theology and federal politics. Covenantal theory is clearly central to a particular perspective of and approach to the study of modern federalism and modern federal political systems.

If we now turn to examine the intellectual contribution of Heinrich Bullinger to two distinct federal political traditions, we can begin to understand why it is that McCoy and Baker are able to corroborate the evidence assembled earlier by Elazar and Ostrom. Indeed, McCoy and Baker are unequivocal in their belief that ‘the terms “federal” and “covenantal” are closely related and, when carefully examined, virtually interchangeable.’¹¹ This argument, of course, is not restricted solely to American intellectual debate. In 1978, the Australian scholar of federalism, S. Rufus Davis, acknowledged precisely the same point:

… somewhere near the beginning of it all is the idea of ‘foedus’ … And the lexicographic association of foedus with covenant, and of its cognate ‘fides’ with faith and trust, provide us with the first crucial clue. Because in the idea of covenant, and the synonymous ideas of promise, commitment, undertaking, or obligation, vowing, and plighting one’s word to a course of conduct in relation to others, we come upon a vital bonding device of civilization … the idea of covenant … involves the idea of cooperation, reciprocity, mutuality, and it implies the recognition of entities – whether it be persons, a people, or a divine being.¹²

To McCoy and Baker, then, ‘federal’ derives from the Latin ‘foedus’ which means covenant. A covenantal order is federal. A federal order is covenantal.¹³

But what role does Bullinger play in the unfolding revelation of both European and Anglo-American federalism? The key to understanding Bullinger’s contribution to these t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Federalism, the state and the European idea
• 2 Federalism and federation in Western Europe: the theoretical discourse
• 3 Federalism and the building of Europe, 1950-72
• 4 Federalism and the struggle for European Union, 1973-84
• 5 Federalism, European Union and the Single European Act, 1985-88
• 6 Maastricht: the last treaty of the Cold War, 1989-93
• 7 From Maastricht to Amsterdam, 1994-98
• 8 The European Union as an intellectual puzzle: federal and confederal elements in European integration
• 9 Federalism and European Union: fin de siècle
• Index