Federal Peace Theory & the Importance of Recognizing Europe is Already a Federal State:
Federal Peace Theory & the Importance of Recognizing Europe is Already a Federal State:Rethinking Federalism in the 21st Century
Kevin A. Stoda
"I know that the term 'federation' irritates many Britons. But to date, I have been unable to come up with another word."--Joschka Fischer
2007:Introduction
Introduction Over the last two hundred fifty years, there have been several periods when federalism has soared and fallen as a framework solution to problems of heterogenous representation and governance. Certainly in the 20th century, there was a great rush to federalism as a solution for state building and interstate system building .
This rush to federalism occurred immediately after both world wars as federalism was seen as a framework strategy for intergovernmental peace making. Both Wilson 's League of Nations and Roosevelt 's support for a United Nations were examples of American interest in building federations.
Finally, for a third time in the wake of renewed pressures from globalization and in the wake of the collapse of the federal Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many former soviet states, satellites, and peoples have continued to remain undaunted to embracing the many hurdles posed by their intended entrance into the ever more federalized European Union.
These former Cold War soviet states, in large numbers, have been seeking to join that very successful federalist[1] body of peoples and nation states of the European Union in this new millennium. Meanwhile, in other diverse regions the same move towards federalism has been occurring.
In North America NAFTA has been formed, In South America Mercosur has encompassed even more nations. In Central America a regional parliament has been voted in representing those six nations with a centralized representative body established in Guatemala City . In South Africa the post-Apartheid government has created an increasingly federalized new regime.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, the federal United Arab Emirates have been showing an amazing flexibility in development and governance with great intergovernmental competition--leading to well distributed prosperity and representation unseen in most other Middle Eastern states.
the same time, historically speaking, federalism has already been proven at times to be on very shaky ground in other less democratically oriented Eastern European states. First, Tito's federal Yugoslavia began to splinter in the late 1980s just ahead of the Soviet Union ' self-dissolution.
Then after the Soviet Union disappeared, the Czech and Slovak peoples quickly proceeded to peacefully dissolve the Czechoslavak federation a year later as well. Meanwhile in Asia, India , the world's largest federal state in terms of population, too, has at various times been on shaky ground over the years.
However, it should be noted that India has not had nearly as troubling a history with federalism as its neighbor, Pakistan , which lost Bangledash through civil war in the early 1970s. (One must also note that the militarist Pakistani leadership had already centralized a once federal entity by the early 1960s.)
A resurgence in interests in both federalist and intra-regional governance comes at a time when neo-liberalist approaches to capitalism dominate the political-economic markets on the world stage under the umbrella of a somewhat vague concept known as globalization.
Alternative dependency theories of state-building, whereby states had sought to break away from the chains of global or imperial capitalism and had led to a well-acknowledged North-South divide by the 1950s and 1960s, are still around but are no longer as dominant in most corners of the globe. (They are making a recovery in regions near Venezuela where Hugo Chavez has been promoting a break-the-chains of capitalist global networks in recent years. However, even Venezuela remains formally a federal state itself.)
The idea of federalism is a relatively slippery and subjective term which at the same time has become a key to the new globalized identities of peoples and institutions in many lands–starting with the so-called American experiment in constitutionalism in 1787.
This continued with the Swiss confederation in 1848, the Canadian one in 1867, the Australian one in 1901 and--on through our present day. Federalism is loaded with terminology and notions which have promoted nation building--while at the same time when misapplied, misunderstood, or just plain weak in practice have led to collapses as in the former Soviet Union .
A collapse in federal Weimar even led to the rise of more radical alternatives--such as occurred with the centralizing power grab of the NAZIs in Germany in the early 1930s. (The Nazis eliminated the federal state system one year prior to starting war with the rest of the continent.)
By the mid-20th century Europe had found itself placed at a proverbial crossroads as best described by Klaus Mann in his Nobel Prize winning Die Wendepunkt. Mann had noted that struggles over hegemony and new constellations of balance in power had marked the decades and centuries in Europe up through WWII.
This is why Mann then specifically challenged his continent's citizens to rethink their future, saying: "No doubt, the continent will, in the long run, be completely doomed when it allows one of its component parts to oppress the others. The permanent hegemony of one constituent would be tantamount to the disintegration of the organism. The harmony of Europe is based upon dissonances: uniformity means death, according to the intrinsic logic of Europe 's structure and mission (Mann, 1987: 162)."
Mann continued, saying that there exists a "double postulate Europe must fulfill or else perish": Europe would have
(1) to maintain and develop the consciousness of its unity, i.e. Europe is indivisible, while
(2) at the same time not violating or denying its diversity as conditioned by its history and nature (Mann, 1987: 162).
With the subsequent Cold-War and Wirtshaftswundern across Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s and with the subsequent demise of many political-scientific trends--exemplified by functionalist and systems theories, which had been calling for the political science discipline to move beyond institutions and the nation states--, most political scientists (especially in the fields of international relations and public policy) had quickly refocused on the nation state and political institutions rather than on more federalist solutions to development in the post-WW II period.
Starting in the post–WWII era, both governments and political-scientists generally used traditional statist, liberal, and rationale choice methodologies to portray relations between peoples around the globe.
Finally, starting in the late 1970s (as the world economic monetary crises in developed nations was slowly being followed by major international debt problems in developing ones in the 1980s), Western European leadership once again seriously began to take steps towards creating more robust federative relations beyond that anticipated by traditional treaties.
The results of these changes in the last 2 1/2 decades within Europe have helped change Europeans' own self-image and are one focus of the rest of this paper. Another focus of this paper is the need for leaders and their political science and history teachers to understand and recognize that this present and future Europe is an important interdependent federal manifestation.
Despite struggles in getting a common constitution passed, Europe is busy rewriting the book on federalism-while most of America accepts a somewhat antiquated version without some very fundamental checks and balances coming into being in a way that promotes peace.
Europeans are now once again considering the two main points outlined by Mann above with a federalist option in one hand and the possible return to older statist traditions in the other.
(1) How is Europe and how are Europeans to maintain and develop "consciousness of its unity"?
(2) How will Europeans be able to maintain a sense of unity while at the same time maintaining diversity of history and culture?
Answering these questions is a further goal of this paper. These developments in the Old World are very important at the national and individual identity levels as the Eurobarometer (2000) had already shown that 70% of the Europeans questioned were already interested in seeing a European Union constitution put in place--even while some European leaders and some voters strive to maintain very separate social and economic development policies.
Where Europe Stands Currently
It is posited in this paper that a go-slow approach is important for controlling the evolution of these somewhat dichotomous goals stated above.
Currently, following such an approach, European leadership seems to be taking a page out of Muller & Seligson (1994:635) whose research on "civic culture" found that such civic culture, "controlling for other macro-social variables", seems to have little or no affect on changes in democracy as long as the societal preference for slow change versus revolutionary change is taken into account.
, a two-step forward, one-step back approach is most logical and is what is being practiced in the integration of post-Modern Europe . This is why every few years great strides are made in the federalization of the European Union, as occurred immediately first just after WWII, again in the 1980s, and once again in the early 1990s.
On the other hand, every few years disappointments in federalist development and progress occur as could be seen in the wake of the Nice and Amsterdam Treaties where not nearly as much progress had been made in expanding the umbrella Europe and integrating further the peoples and nation states already affected by the European Union Regime directly.
This was then followed by trouble in writing and passing an EU constitution We observed this sort of dance by European leadership in the months leading up to the 2000 Nice Treaty as three European statesmen led the continent's first major public debate on the future of federal Europe .
First, at Humboldt University Berlin in May of that year Germany's Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, gave his speech, "From Confederation to Federation: Thoughts on the Finality of European Integration", in which he indicated that the European Union was already a federation-albeit without "the abolition of the nation state (Fischer, 2000:19)."
Fischer continued ". . . even for the finalized Federation the nation-state, with its cultural and democratic traditions, will be irreplaceable in ensuring the legitimation of a union of citizens and states that is wholly accepted by the people. I say this not least with an eye to our friends in the United Kingdom , because I know that the term 'federation' irritates many Britons. But to date I have been unable to come up with another word (Fischer, 2000:19-20)."
The key point is that Fischer was claiming that an integrated Europe will continue to maintain that without a doubt within a federal Europe British, French or Polish identities. Nonetheless, Fischer also clearly saw that such a union requires a constitutional future as eventually legitimizing the federation at some point in the future.
Waiting just over a month later (on June 27 of the same year) before coming to Berlin , French President Jacque Chirac spoke at the German Bundestag of his hesitancy, as a Frenchman, to fully embrace the federation as the ideal type of union at that point in history--but certainly would continue to hold out hope for such an evolution of identity in the future. He also joined Fischer in agreeing with the call to make the European Union more democratic.
Chirac also implied that a constitution needed to be developed to solve the issues concerning the "division of responsibilities between the different levels of the European system (Chirac, 2000:14)."
Chirac added that he certainly hoped that this Europe would soon be recognized as a kind of superpower-one "that we so want to see-this Europe , one which is a strong player on the international stage, [and one that] has to have strong institutions and an effective and legitimate decision making mechanism (Chirac:14)."
Finally, in autumn that same year, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, went to neighboring Poland to confirm in another important Speech on Europe's future identity that he, like Jacque Chirac before him, certainly had a vision of the European Union as a superpower but it was not, nor would Europe become, a "superstate". This resonates with the historical condition of Britain being the one nation state historically most out of tune with the integrated picture of Europe often envisioned by those on the continent.
On the other hand, Blair explained that Britain 's vision of Europe was indeed drastically changing. "The blunt truth is that British policy towards the rest of Europe over half a century has been marked by gross misjudgements, mistaking what we wanted to be the case; hesitation, alienation, incomprehension, with occasional burst of enlightened brilliance which only served to underline the frustration of our partners with what was the norm. The origins of this are not complex but simple. Post-war Britain saw the issue-entirely naturally-as how France and Germany were kept from going back to war with each other (Blair 2000:12)."
He added, "Then with gathering speed, and commensurate British alarm, Europe started not just to work together but to begin the institutional co-operation that is today the European Union. At each stage it did happen and we were faced with the choice: catching up or staying out (Blair:12)."
Sovereignty and Federal vs. Unitary State Actors
The debate among European statesmen now needs to become one among political scientists. The European Union's current stage of integration has created what some political scientists amusingly call the unidentified European Object. This is most particularly the case where sovereignty has historically been an important concept for identifying political actors in the area of international state relations.
As early as the 1960s, Harvey Walker (1964), explained that there are two types of sovereignty that political scientist have traditionally been concerned with-"internal" and external".
External sovereignty comes from international law. "It is the quality of independence from the control or interference of any other state in the conduct of international relations. Each sovereign state theoretically is equal to every other in international law, regardless of population, area or economic wealth. . . . This aspect of state is known as external sovereignty ( Walker : 491)."
On the other hand, Walker notes that internal sovereignty "relates to the power and authority of the state over individuals and groups." Walker adds that "John Austin considered it indivisible and although it originated with the people it was exercised in their name by the government which they established. This monastic view is denied by the pluralists, such as Leon Duguit, who consider the power exerted by organized groups in the state over their members as an exercise in sovereignty. Few would deny that sovereignty is divided in a federal State, such as the United States or Canada ( Walker : 491)."
The European Union already appeared to function as a federation ( Watts , 1999) by the 1990s. Most importantly for most political scientists, Walker concludes, "Prudent observation and reflection clearly show that neither internal nor external sovereignty is or can be absolute. They are continuously changing. The question is not whether a nation shall surrender sovereignty to some international community or to its people, but only how much. This process already has proceeded far through the practice of treaty making (ibid.)."
This last point by Walker2 reinforces my understanding that both
(1) federal constitutions and
(2) treaties-both of which have their roots in the Latin word foedus--can change the degree of sovereignty for a state actor.
These changes can occur both externally and internally. The list of important treaties that built first the European Community and then its follower the European Union include:
(1)Treaty of Paris 1951--which established the European Coal and Steel Community,
(2) Treaty of Rome 1957--which established the CAP or Common Agricultural Policy advocated by France , the EUROATOM program, and started a common market advocated by Germany
(3) Single European Act of 1986--which led to the completed common market for the community in 1992, gave the European Commission leadership in reforming the market and appropriate legislation, led to the passing of the European Monetary Union or EMU and created a whole new set of governmental relations and cooperative practices
(4)Treaty of Maastricht 1992-which institutionalized the EMU, strengthened the EU social policy while providing for new health, education, transportation, and consumer policies, added EU citizenship, and created two new pillars beyond economics for the EU in the areas of justice and home affairs
(5)Amsterdam Treaty of 1997-which transferred provisions concerning the free movement of peoples to the EU level and delegated further powers to the Commission from the two newest pillars: Justice and Home Affairs (Hix 1999: 26-28)
This procedure of using a treaty rather than a constitution to shift state sovereignty has been recognized for some time and should have therefore already been more fully incorporated into our internal and external comparisons and studies of states and nations. Also, it has not been applied more regularly to the fields of international relations, international law, IPE, etc.
Social scientists--as have political leaders in many capitals around the globe--have been slow to grasp what this almost institutionalized shifting sovereignties by treaties means for nations in a global age. Just as there are currently unmeasured degrees of sovereignty being shifted among European actors within the EU umbrellas, there are also degrees of or levels of autonomy that political scientists have also been wary of measuring to date.
Statist approaches to political analysis have often used an Ivo Duchacek-type of analysis of federations to avoid having to answer the tough questions that federalist theory has always posed to the nation state system. From a traditional Westphalian statist perspective, Duchacek described federal states and their constituent government actors as follows: "[T]heir refusal to merge with the rest into one uniform whole" leaves the federal nation "as it were, an unfinished nation (1970:192) ."
In short, the Westphalian approach to describing nation states has been inherently strict and often unrealistic when handling federations and confederations-declaring them non-complete states or simply assuming full sovereignty exists at the national level regardless of the fact that sovereignty is an external as well as an internal form of state, constituent unit/state, and international organization.
The fact is that constituent state actors in a federal system can and have at times certainly had strong foreign policy roles. For example, it was certainly true of the individual U.S. states in the 1980s, like Texas which prohibited in its own constitution the investment of state saving funds in apartheid South Africa .
Such actions by states and municipalities helped lead to the transformation of the political and economic isolation of that particular independent apartheid nation.
Further, all constituent states, particularly borderstates, can and often do create international relationships with partner regions in other countries through educational, developmental, sister city, and various twinning process. This practice has been particularly very noticeable since WWII. In short, sovereignty has always by degrees within and among constituent states and national states.
Of all state forms, federations are generally more adept at sharing sovereignty among other territorial units of governance than more unitary types of regimes. The European Union's emphasis on "the Regions" in recent years in which autonomy is extended in a gradual fashion-even across national borders within the EU membership--is part of the federalist approach to maintaining peace and state development.
Meanwhile, the traditional, somewhat dichotomous distinction between federal and unitary nation states has typically portrayed the ideal unitary state's organization as that of the metaphoric pyramid while the federal state is certainly more decentralized.
Elazar (1994a) claimed that rather than visualizing a flattened or decentralized pyramid, a matrix is by far the most appropriate metaphor for federal governance and administration. Such a matrix metaphor implies that federations are not simply decentralized nations but actually non-centralized with each node or crisscross of lines on a matrix representing an autonomous unit of government with possibly its own degree of sovereignty or shared sovereignty branching out in woven, interlocking, or crisscrossing patterns in relationships with other semi-sovereign nodes.
In short, the federal state projects both a spread-out and shared image of overlapping powers within a territorial domain while the ideal centralized unitary state maintains its specific domain of autonomy quite evenly across the land over all local units.
Meanwhile, Europe and the rest of the world are evolving quickly away from the centralized pyramid model under globalization in the post-Cold War era. For example, the United Kingdom used to be typically referred to until recently as a unitary state in much of political science literature due to a tradition of increasingly centralizing the national government's power. This process continued up through the Thatcher era.
However, since the 1990s, although the UK is certainly more hierarchical than decentralized, it is nowhere near the ideal type of sovereign power and decision making as portrayed by the pyramidic paradigm1 of governance. Obviously, the recent reestablishment of both a full-parliament in Scotland and a new Assembly in Whales have changed Britain 's image in federalist literature.
It could certainly be that a Elazar's matrix or non-centralized metaphor may eventually play role in the self-image of UK governance projected towards most political scientists later in the 21st century.
In his writings on federations, Daniel Elazar (1994b:56 ) had already made it quite clear in the wake of the new Maastricht treaty that it was already becoming difficult on the European continent to find a centralized unitary state on the continent.
Writing in 1994, in the year prior to the entrance into the European Union of Austria, Finland, and Sweden, Elazar found only three unitary state members in the whole EU, namely Ireland, Luxembourg, and Greece. Meanwhile the other nine members could be divided into three types of federal governance and constitutional power sharing arrangements:
(1) federations- Belgium , Germany , and Spain ,
(2) decentralized unions- Denmark , the UK , and the Netherlands , and
(3) autonomy/federal arrangements- France , Italy , and Portugal .
Of the aforementioned newest entrants, Austria would clearly be a type 1 federation according to Elazar's criteria of identification; Sweden would be a type 2 union, and Finland would resemble France as a type 3 or autonomy/federal form of governance.
Althusian federalist theory and 21th-century federalism In the decades before the Treaty of Westphalia which first set in force the modern European state system, Johannes Althusius--a German theorist, Calvinist, and statesmen in the city of Emdon -published first in 1603 and in final draft in1614 the first complete theoretical work on republican federalism.
In Althus' Politica Methodice Digesta, federalism is described as being based on the biblical covenantal traditions which in turn had influenced other Northern European covenantal agreements and other intracommunal and intercommunal compacts, such as the Mayflower Compact, which led to the founding of a federal American constitution in 1787.
In contrast to the American constitution which found national governmental sovereignty solely bestowed upon it directly from the sovereign individual American peoples who make up the state, Althusian federalism founded a bigger tent for the basis of bestowing or sharing sovereignty within a territorial domain. That is, consociatios or communities, associations, families, and other groups all made up those who bestow sovereignty on the state and state actors in a union of sharing or living together.
For Althusius (1995:17): Politics is the art of associating (consociandi) men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating , and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called "symbiotics." in which the symbiotes pledge themselves each to the other, by explicit or tacit agreement, to mutual communication of whatever is useful and necessary for the harmonious exercise of social life. The end of political "symbiotic" man is holy, just, comfortable, and happy symbiosis, a life lacking nothing either necessary or useful. Truly no man is self-sufficient . . . (Althusius:17)
This sort of federalist tradition as a theoretical basis holds out much hope in our post-modern world:
(1) where limits to national sovereignty in solving issues of global trade, development, and peace have led to the creation of quasi-permanent covenants between nations as represented by NATO, the United Nations, and to global agreements on human rights, laws of the sea, and trade, such as the GATT/WTO;
(2) where the world has begun to move beyond demanding equal rights among all citizens by accepting claims of individual ethnic groups, such as in Spain which has developed new covenants with the Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Andalucian peoples in a series of steps during the post-Franco period that have left that once unitary state a very federal one today (Watts, 1999:30).
Althusius wrote and developed his theory while running the city of Emdon for over thirty years. He was part of the Reformed Protestant movement of his day which dominated the Netherlands , Friesland and the British Isles of his time. His work was in the transitional period from Middle Ages to the Modern State system and his work on constitutional covenant predated that of Locke and Hobbes by several decades.
Althus was concerned with the maintenance of good government where there would be checks and balances against tyranny by representative leadership. As a political scientist he was interested in theory and the practical dimensions of human behavior, i.e., how people shared and accommodated one another in society. In this way, a polity can be compound as well as each polity's own domain of sovereign control.
In the tradition of Calvin, Knox, Roger Williams, Zwingli, and John Winthrop, Danile Elazar (1994a:35-42) writes that Althusius claimed:
(1) Every individual follows the community's rules to holiness and to doing justice for the community.
(2) Every individual is morally autonomous and gives consent to the covenant-while actually observing the covenant or not.
(3) Humans act together through covenants, whereby God enters covenants of partnership with man for fulfillment and government.
Further, each individual is in the image of God but protected not as an individual but in covenant with God and group, including family, association. This is clearly in contrast to methodical individualism that lay behind even statist federalist theory of the 18th, 19th and much of the 20th centuries.
It is no accident that most constitutions around the globe continue to include wording of the document being made before God, similar to the western and biblical tradition from which Althusius came. Although a protestant, Althusius freely used many Catholic scholars as sources in his Politica Methodice Digesta, e.g. authors such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Carlo Signio–a historian on ancient Israel and Rome– and jurist Diego Covarruvias, are all to be found in Althusius' writings.
In short, although the Protestant-Catholic divide helped to form modern Europe , in the federalism of Althusius the tent is big enough for both traditions. In this tradition of accommodation and sharing, according to Frederick Carney (Althusius,1995), Daniel Elazar (1994a & b), and other earlier 20th century writers, such as Karl Friedrich, the modern European tradition of federalism can be forged.
Summary
The revival of conceptual Althusian federalism has brought the sovereign unitary nation state versus federation debate full circle in recent years to where it was when the Middle Ages were being replaced through Renaissance, Reformation, and the creation of the modern state system in Europe . In short, Europe has had a federal identity rooted in biblical concepts of covenants dating back centuries.
The pressures of globalism and the diminishing of distances have opened the way for new levels communication and sharing at an interstate and international level not perceived as possible before the Cold War ended. However, the search for federalist solutions for peace and harmony are not new and were particularly strong in the last years of WWII through the 1950s in Europe and the North Atlantic until the Superpower struggle of that age and the successful economic boon in post-war Europe unraveled the great strides made at mid-century. Charles Chatfield (1999), in "The Federalism Papers: Commentary on the History of Federalism", claims that the world is now in its fifth historical phase of federalism and federalist theory development.
The first phase was quite ancient and dated to the Mosaic covenantal tribes of biblical times. The second phase, for Chatfield (1999:374), started in1 787 with the American experiment, which had been built upon a long history of English metropolitanism serving multiple jurisdictions which had "fostered multiple urban centers along the Eastern seaboard, all tied to" a British empire .
This second phase soon became more universalized as theorists, such as John Fiske in America in the early 19th century, noted. Federalism lent itself to visions of European Empire reform and to the anticipation for a United States of Europe by writers such as John Seeley in Britain and Victor Hugo in France . In a third stage of federalism, which began with the end of WW I and continued through the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s, three concepts of federation emerged as dominant but related. There was earlier a pan-European movement, alia Aristide Briand.
Two other strands of world federalism–one suggested by Clarence Streit's Union Now Movement which aimed at a North Atlantic federation of democratic states and emphasized a federal nation constituting all world democracies while the other movement was supported by diverse leaders, such as Henry Stimson. Gen Douglas MacArthur, Edward Teller, Albert Einstein, and Cord Meyer (Wooley,1999).
Now, 17 years after the collapse of the Cold War balance of power system in Europe, the EU is slowly marching on to encompass almost all of the continent. This is certainly a federalist movement which needs to either be accepted or rejected by the citizens of Europe in formal and popular debate. The tendency to avoid the word federal union in Britain and in some other European nation's internal debates on the European Union does not make this federal form of association–often through acceptance of treaties --signed by separate sovereign nations, who knowingly have decided to give up certain sovereignties to the Union over the years.3
In conclusion, it is posited that the European Union seems to already be a federation, especially in that European Union law is being applied in constituent state courts.3
De la Vega (2000: 603)notes, "EC law makes more demands on national law than treaties traditionally have. EC law adopts a monist approach in which the member countries have agreed that EC regulations would be directly applicable in the Member States' respective legal systems without requiring that they be adopted by the legislative body of the Member States'."
As a matter of fact, according to Connie de la Vega (2000:603) and Rossa Phelan, this court already oversees EC law, which is "more like the constitution of a federal state than a traditional international organization as is contemplated under public international law."
Further, the EU is certainly composed of at least two levels of governance, the EU and national state levels of governance, i.e. similar to the way the Bundesrat represents the Lander or states in the Federal Republic of Germany, the EU Council directly represents the sovereign nation states.
The other directly elected body is the European Parliament whose influence, according to Tsebelis and Kalandrakis (1999: 144), "is not confined to insignificant amendments or to amendments introduced in the second round." The European Parliament is also directly elected by the people as the Bundestag in Germany and Austria are. Meanwhile, the EU Commission acts as a quasi-executive branch and is certainly indirectly elected by the people and nominated and approved by their elected representatives.
Operationally, regional, state, and federal EU institutions and governments back each other and cooperate in many overlapping areas of shared powers. Finally, as de la Vega mentions, the European Union has its own Supreme Court of Justice with its strong powers on the continent to uphold EU rule.
The only major step that the Union4 has to yet undertake would be to at some point create a federal constitutional document that could be taken to the sovereign peoples and states for passage because currently, as Pippa Norris (1997: 275) in an article, "Representation and the Democratic Deficit", notes "[M]uch of the EU is federal, meaning that certain powers are transferred to European bodies above national governments. The European Commission, a rule-making institution, is essentially a supranational body, as is the independent Court of Justice; organised interest groups are consulted through the Economic and Social Committee, and European Parliament is chosen through direct election."
Specifically concerning the supranational role of the courts and EU law, it should be understood that the Court has already forced states to restrict subsidization of their native auto industries and banks, airlines have been deregulated across all countries, and EU health policies--in the wake of mad-cow and foot and mouth diseases–are being enforced.
It is the acknowledgment of the EU as federal state founded originally on federalist foreign policy that this conceptual article seeks to address. The data are in but neither the national leaders in many European are not ready to stomach these facts while the individual national school text books and EU citizens have yet to fully recognize what is already taking place.
This is why political science and historians must take a role in this debate and recognize the EU as its federal nature suggests. Further, theory and measures of sovereignty and federalism must be reworked.
Althusian federalism opens the door for a fully European approach to comprehending and building models of the federal solution to peace posed by the creation of the EU in Europe after WWII. It is especially important to see that a United States of Europe was not imposed from without–by globalism, etc.--but is rooted in European federal traditions outlined four centuries ago.
These same European federal traditions in thought certainly laid the groundwork for Swiss, German, and Austrian federalism and certainly and likely affected Comte's view of a Europe of democracies and regions in the 18th century. European covenantal tradition can and should be the identity behind the image of a more harmonious federal Europe in the 21st Century.
Epilogue
This paper was first presented in 2000 at the Society of Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. Over seven years later the importance of the federalist option in resolving international cooperation issues and reducing divisions from Israel and Palestine , to Iraq , to the Caribbean, to China , to South America are still evident. Meanwhile, the former federal state of Pakistan continues to struggle under centralized military dictatorship Even Turkey would be able to obtain peace with Kurdish and other peoples if a federalist, rather than statist, approach to problem would be used more often.
On the other hand, federalism appears to not be a simple panacea. Likewise, all representative democratic problem solving models have problems. They are messy and take time. It is important for cultures, countries, tribes, peoples, and individuals involved in building peace through federalism to be committed to the outcome of not only peaceful coexistence but to the idea that all problems cannot only be overcome but can certainly create a prosperous world in which to enjoy peace in.
Notes
1 The pyramid paradigm was first established in pharoanic Egypt and from which the pyramidic metaphor derives.
2 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1996:1362), in its adjectival definition of sovereignty, states that sovereignty is "having supreme rank, power, or authority". This Webster-dictionary concept of ranking sovereignty is what introductory textbooks on government still often use to delineate sovereignty, esp. as concerns the roles of sovereign constituent states' vs. sovereign national (federal) governments. This latter definition of Webster's, however, is misleading as it tends to make one believe that we can do a "pregnancy type test" for sovereignty: i.e., one is either pregnant or not; one is either a sovereign government or not. However, such a concept of sovereignty is misleading. As Harvey Walker indicates sovereignty is actually to be measured by degree. On the other hand, it is the concept or word autonomous, according to Webster's (1996:101)which most clearly implies this either "you are" or "you aren't" dichotomy in governance. Autonomy is defined as "self-governing; independent ; subject to its own set of laws only." In short, "autonomy" can both be used in a dichotomous manner, like with an integer in mathematics, and it can be measured in degrees as is sovereignty.
3Some European nations, like Germany , have specifically proclaimed that the European Union law is the prevailing law of the land in that sovereign land by changing their constitution to recognize this shift in sovereignty.
4 Because of its dual federal and confederal manifestations in structure. It is often said that it fairly federal in operation. This distinction is made well in John Kincaid's article Confederal Federalism and Citizen Representation in the European Union.
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Duchacek, Ivo D. Comparative Federalism: The Territorial Dimension of Politics. New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Hix, Stephen. The Political System of the European Union. New York : St. Martins, 1999. Joschka Fischer, "From Confederation to Federation: Thoughts on the finality of European Integration", European Essay No. 8, London : Federal Trust, 2000.
Mann, Klaus. The Turning Point: The Autobiography of Klause Mann. New York : L.B.Fischer Publishing Corporation, 1987. Muller & Seligson"Civic Culture and Democracy: The Question of Causal Relationships", (1994)
Norris, Pippa "Representation and the Democratic Deficit," European Journal of Political Research, 32:2, (1997), 273-282.
Walker, Harvey . "Sovereignty" in Dictionary of Political Science. Joseph Dunner ed., 1964.
Watts, Ronald L. Comparing Federal Systems. Ontario , Canada : Queen's University Press, 1999.
Webster's Encyclopedia Unabridged Dictionary, New York : Portland House/Gramercy Books, 1996
Kevin A. Stoda
"I know that the term 'federation' irritates many Britons. But to date, I have been unable to come up with another word."--Joschka Fischer
2007:Introduction
Introduction Over the last two hundred fifty years, there have been several periods when federalism has soared and fallen as a framework solution to problems of heterogenous representation and governance. Certainly in the 20th century, there was a great rush to federalism as a solution for state building and interstate system building .
This rush to federalism occurred immediately after both world wars as federalism was seen as a framework strategy for intergovernmental peace making. Both Wilson 's League of Nations and Roosevelt 's support for a United Nations were examples of American interest in building federations.
Finally, for a third time in the wake of renewed pressures from globalization and in the wake of the collapse of the federal Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many former soviet states, satellites, and peoples have continued to remain undaunted to embracing the many hurdles posed by their intended entrance into the ever more federalized European Union.
These former Cold War soviet states, in large numbers, have been seeking to join that very successful federalist[1] body of peoples and nation states of the European Union in this new millennium. Meanwhile, in other diverse regions the same move towards federalism has been occurring.
In North America NAFTA has been formed, In South America Mercosur has encompassed even more nations. In Central America a regional parliament has been voted in representing those six nations with a centralized representative body established in Guatemala City . In South Africa the post-Apartheid government has created an increasingly federalized new regime.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, the federal United Arab Emirates have been showing an amazing flexibility in development and governance with great intergovernmental competition--leading to well distributed prosperity and representation unseen in most other Middle Eastern states.
the same time, historically speaking, federalism has already been proven at times to be on very shaky ground in other less democratically oriented Eastern European states. First, Tito's federal Yugoslavia began to splinter in the late 1980s just ahead of the Soviet Union ' self-dissolution.
Then after the Soviet Union disappeared, the Czech and Slovak peoples quickly proceeded to peacefully dissolve the Czechoslavak federation a year later as well. Meanwhile in Asia, India , the world's largest federal state in terms of population, too, has at various times been on shaky ground over the years.
However, it should be noted that India has not had nearly as troubling a history with federalism as its neighbor, Pakistan , which lost Bangledash through civil war in the early 1970s. (One must also note that the militarist Pakistani leadership had already centralized a once federal entity by the early 1960s.)
A resurgence in interests in both federalist and intra-regional governance comes at a time when neo-liberalist approaches to capitalism dominate the political-economic markets on the world stage under the umbrella of a somewhat vague concept known as globalization.
Alternative dependency theories of state-building, whereby states had sought to break away from the chains of global or imperial capitalism and had led to a well-acknowledged North-South divide by the 1950s and 1960s, are still around but are no longer as dominant in most corners of the globe. (They are making a recovery in regions near Venezuela where Hugo Chavez has been promoting a break-the-chains of capitalist global networks in recent years. However, even Venezuela remains formally a federal state itself.)
The idea of federalism is a relatively slippery and subjective term which at the same time has become a key to the new globalized identities of peoples and institutions in many lands–starting with the so-called American experiment in constitutionalism in 1787.
This continued with the Swiss confederation in 1848, the Canadian one in 1867, the Australian one in 1901 and--on through our present day. Federalism is loaded with terminology and notions which have promoted nation building--while at the same time when misapplied, misunderstood, or just plain weak in practice have led to collapses as in the former Soviet Union .
A collapse in federal Weimar even led to the rise of more radical alternatives--such as occurred with the centralizing power grab of the NAZIs in Germany in the early 1930s. (The Nazis eliminated the federal state system one year prior to starting war with the rest of the continent.)
By the mid-20th century Europe had found itself placed at a proverbial crossroads as best described by Klaus Mann in his Nobel Prize winning Die Wendepunkt. Mann had noted that struggles over hegemony and new constellations of balance in power had marked the decades and centuries in Europe up through WWII.
This is why Mann then specifically challenged his continent's citizens to rethink their future, saying: "No doubt, the continent will, in the long run, be completely doomed when it allows one of its component parts to oppress the others. The permanent hegemony of one constituent would be tantamount to the disintegration of the organism. The harmony of Europe is based upon dissonances: uniformity means death, according to the intrinsic logic of Europe 's structure and mission (Mann, 1987: 162)."
Mann continued, saying that there exists a "double postulate Europe must fulfill or else perish": Europe would have
(1) to maintain and develop the consciousness of its unity, i.e. Europe is indivisible, while
(2) at the same time not violating or denying its diversity as conditioned by its history and nature (Mann, 1987: 162).
With the subsequent Cold-War and Wirtshaftswundern across Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s and with the subsequent demise of many political-scientific trends--exemplified by functionalist and systems theories, which had been calling for the political science discipline to move beyond institutions and the nation states--, most political scientists (especially in the fields of international relations and public policy) had quickly refocused on the nation state and political institutions rather than on more federalist solutions to development in the post-WW II period.
Starting in the post–WWII era, both governments and political-scientists generally used traditional statist, liberal, and rationale choice methodologies to portray relations between peoples around the globe.
Finally, starting in the late 1970s (as the world economic monetary crises in developed nations was slowly being followed by major international debt problems in developing ones in the 1980s), Western European leadership once again seriously began to take steps towards creating more robust federative relations beyond that anticipated by traditional treaties.
The results of these changes in the last 2 1/2 decades within Europe have helped change Europeans' own self-image and are one focus of the rest of this paper. Another focus of this paper is the need for leaders and their political science and history teachers to understand and recognize that this present and future Europe is an important interdependent federal manifestation.
Despite struggles in getting a common constitution passed, Europe is busy rewriting the book on federalism-while most of America accepts a somewhat antiquated version without some very fundamental checks and balances coming into being in a way that promotes peace.
Europeans are now once again considering the two main points outlined by Mann above with a federalist option in one hand and the possible return to older statist traditions in the other.
(1) How is Europe and how are Europeans to maintain and develop "consciousness of its unity"?
(2) How will Europeans be able to maintain a sense of unity while at the same time maintaining diversity of history and culture?
Answering these questions is a further goal of this paper. These developments in the Old World are very important at the national and individual identity levels as the Eurobarometer (2000) had already shown that 70% of the Europeans questioned were already interested in seeing a European Union constitution put in place--even while some European leaders and some voters strive to maintain very separate social and economic development policies.
Where Europe Stands Currently
It is posited in this paper that a go-slow approach is important for controlling the evolution of these somewhat dichotomous goals stated above.
Currently, following such an approach, European leadership seems to be taking a page out of Muller & Seligson (1994:635) whose research on "civic culture" found that such civic culture, "controlling for other macro-social variables", seems to have little or no affect on changes in democracy as long as the societal preference for slow change versus revolutionary change is taken into account.
, a two-step forward, one-step back approach is most logical and is what is being practiced in the integration of post-Modern Europe . This is why every few years great strides are made in the federalization of the European Union, as occurred immediately first just after WWII, again in the 1980s, and once again in the early 1990s.
On the other hand, every few years disappointments in federalist development and progress occur as could be seen in the wake of the Nice and Amsterdam Treaties where not nearly as much progress had been made in expanding the umbrella Europe and integrating further the peoples and nation states already affected by the European Union Regime directly.
This was then followed by trouble in writing and passing an EU constitution We observed this sort of dance by European leadership in the months leading up to the 2000 Nice Treaty as three European statesmen led the continent's first major public debate on the future of federal Europe .
First, at Humboldt University Berlin in May of that year Germany's Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, gave his speech, "From Confederation to Federation: Thoughts on the Finality of European Integration", in which he indicated that the European Union was already a federation-albeit without "the abolition of the nation state (Fischer, 2000:19)."
Fischer continued ". . . even for the finalized Federation the nation-state, with its cultural and democratic traditions, will be irreplaceable in ensuring the legitimation of a union of citizens and states that is wholly accepted by the people. I say this not least with an eye to our friends in the United Kingdom , because I know that the term 'federation' irritates many Britons. But to date I have been unable to come up with another word (Fischer, 2000:19-20)."
The key point is that Fischer was claiming that an integrated Europe will continue to maintain that without a doubt within a federal Europe British, French or Polish identities. Nonetheless, Fischer also clearly saw that such a union requires a constitutional future as eventually legitimizing the federation at some point in the future.
Waiting just over a month later (on June 27 of the same year) before coming to Berlin , French President Jacque Chirac spoke at the German Bundestag of his hesitancy, as a Frenchman, to fully embrace the federation as the ideal type of union at that point in history--but certainly would continue to hold out hope for such an evolution of identity in the future. He also joined Fischer in agreeing with the call to make the European Union more democratic.
Chirac also implied that a constitution needed to be developed to solve the issues concerning the "division of responsibilities between the different levels of the European system (Chirac, 2000:14)."
Chirac added that he certainly hoped that this Europe would soon be recognized as a kind of superpower-one "that we so want to see-this Europe , one which is a strong player on the international stage, [and one that] has to have strong institutions and an effective and legitimate decision making mechanism (Chirac:14)."
Finally, in autumn that same year, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, went to neighboring Poland to confirm in another important Speech on Europe's future identity that he, like Jacque Chirac before him, certainly had a vision of the European Union as a superpower but it was not, nor would Europe become, a "superstate". This resonates with the historical condition of Britain being the one nation state historically most out of tune with the integrated picture of Europe often envisioned by those on the continent.
On the other hand, Blair explained that Britain 's vision of Europe was indeed drastically changing. "The blunt truth is that British policy towards the rest of Europe over half a century has been marked by gross misjudgements, mistaking what we wanted to be the case; hesitation, alienation, incomprehension, with occasional burst of enlightened brilliance which only served to underline the frustration of our partners with what was the norm. The origins of this are not complex but simple. Post-war Britain saw the issue-entirely naturally-as how France and Germany were kept from going back to war with each other (Blair 2000:12)."
He added, "Then with gathering speed, and commensurate British alarm, Europe started not just to work together but to begin the institutional co-operation that is today the European Union. At each stage it did happen and we were faced with the choice: catching up or staying out (Blair:12)."
Sovereignty and Federal vs. Unitary State Actors
The debate among European statesmen now needs to become one among political scientists. The European Union's current stage of integration has created what some political scientists amusingly call the unidentified European Object. This is most particularly the case where sovereignty has historically been an important concept for identifying political actors in the area of international state relations.
As early as the 1960s, Harvey Walker (1964), explained that there are two types of sovereignty that political scientist have traditionally been concerned with-"internal" and external".
External sovereignty comes from international law. "It is the quality of independence from the control or interference of any other state in the conduct of international relations. Each sovereign state theoretically is equal to every other in international law, regardless of population, area or economic wealth. . . . This aspect of state is known as external sovereignty ( Walker : 491)."
On the other hand, Walker notes that internal sovereignty "relates to the power and authority of the state over individuals and groups." Walker adds that "John Austin considered it indivisible and although it originated with the people it was exercised in their name by the government which they established. This monastic view is denied by the pluralists, such as Leon Duguit, who consider the power exerted by organized groups in the state over their members as an exercise in sovereignty. Few would deny that sovereignty is divided in a federal State, such as the United States or Canada ( Walker : 491)."
The European Union already appeared to function as a federation ( Watts , 1999) by the 1990s. Most importantly for most political scientists, Walker concludes, "Prudent observation and reflection clearly show that neither internal nor external sovereignty is or can be absolute. They are continuously changing. The question is not whether a nation shall surrender sovereignty to some international community or to its people, but only how much. This process already has proceeded far through the practice of treaty making (ibid.)."
This last point by Walker2 reinforces my understanding that both
(1) federal constitutions and
(2) treaties-both of which have their roots in the Latin word foedus--can change the degree of sovereignty for a state actor.
These changes can occur both externally and internally. The list of important treaties that built first the European Community and then its follower the European Union include:
(1)Treaty of Paris 1951--which established the European Coal and Steel Community,
(2) Treaty of Rome 1957--which established the CAP or Common Agricultural Policy advocated by France , the EUROATOM program, and started a common market advocated by Germany
(3) Single European Act of 1986--which led to the completed common market for the community in 1992, gave the European Commission leadership in reforming the market and appropriate legislation, led to the passing of the European Monetary Union or EMU and created a whole new set of governmental relations and cooperative practices
(4)Treaty of Maastricht 1992-which institutionalized the EMU, strengthened the EU social policy while providing for new health, education, transportation, and consumer policies, added EU citizenship, and created two new pillars beyond economics for the EU in the areas of justice and home affairs
(5)Amsterdam Treaty of 1997-which transferred provisions concerning the free movement of peoples to the EU level and delegated further powers to the Commission from the two newest pillars: Justice and Home Affairs (Hix 1999: 26-28)
This procedure of using a treaty rather than a constitution to shift state sovereignty has been recognized for some time and should have therefore already been more fully incorporated into our internal and external comparisons and studies of states and nations. Also, it has not been applied more regularly to the fields of international relations, international law, IPE, etc.
Social scientists--as have political leaders in many capitals around the globe--have been slow to grasp what this almost institutionalized shifting sovereignties by treaties means for nations in a global age. Just as there are currently unmeasured degrees of sovereignty being shifted among European actors within the EU umbrellas, there are also degrees of or levels of autonomy that political scientists have also been wary of measuring to date.
Statist approaches to political analysis have often used an Ivo Duchacek-type of analysis of federations to avoid having to answer the tough questions that federalist theory has always posed to the nation state system. From a traditional Westphalian statist perspective, Duchacek described federal states and their constituent government actors as follows: "[T]heir refusal to merge with the rest into one uniform whole" leaves the federal nation "as it were, an unfinished nation (1970:192) ."
In short, the Westphalian approach to describing nation states has been inherently strict and often unrealistic when handling federations and confederations-declaring them non-complete states or simply assuming full sovereignty exists at the national level regardless of the fact that sovereignty is an external as well as an internal form of state, constituent unit/state, and international organization.
The fact is that constituent state actors in a federal system can and have at times certainly had strong foreign policy roles. For example, it was certainly true of the individual U.S. states in the 1980s, like Texas which prohibited in its own constitution the investment of state saving funds in apartheid South Africa .
Such actions by states and municipalities helped lead to the transformation of the political and economic isolation of that particular independent apartheid nation.
Further, all constituent states, particularly borderstates, can and often do create international relationships with partner regions in other countries through educational, developmental, sister city, and various twinning process. This practice has been particularly very noticeable since WWII. In short, sovereignty has always by degrees within and among constituent states and national states.
Of all state forms, federations are generally more adept at sharing sovereignty among other territorial units of governance than more unitary types of regimes. The European Union's emphasis on "the Regions" in recent years in which autonomy is extended in a gradual fashion-even across national borders within the EU membership--is part of the federalist approach to maintaining peace and state development.
Meanwhile, the traditional, somewhat dichotomous distinction between federal and unitary nation states has typically portrayed the ideal unitary state's organization as that of the metaphoric pyramid while the federal state is certainly more decentralized.
Elazar (1994a) claimed that rather than visualizing a flattened or decentralized pyramid, a matrix is by far the most appropriate metaphor for federal governance and administration. Such a matrix metaphor implies that federations are not simply decentralized nations but actually non-centralized with each node or crisscross of lines on a matrix representing an autonomous unit of government with possibly its own degree of sovereignty or shared sovereignty branching out in woven, interlocking, or crisscrossing patterns in relationships with other semi-sovereign nodes.
In short, the federal state projects both a spread-out and shared image of overlapping powers within a territorial domain while the ideal centralized unitary state maintains its specific domain of autonomy quite evenly across the land over all local units.
Meanwhile, Europe and the rest of the world are evolving quickly away from the centralized pyramid model under globalization in the post-Cold War era. For example, the United Kingdom used to be typically referred to until recently as a unitary state in much of political science literature due to a tradition of increasingly centralizing the national government's power. This process continued up through the Thatcher era.
However, since the 1990s, although the UK is certainly more hierarchical than decentralized, it is nowhere near the ideal type of sovereign power and decision making as portrayed by the pyramidic paradigm1 of governance. Obviously, the recent reestablishment of both a full-parliament in Scotland and a new Assembly in Whales have changed Britain 's image in federalist literature.
It could certainly be that a Elazar's matrix or non-centralized metaphor may eventually play role in the self-image of UK governance projected towards most political scientists later in the 21st century.
In his writings on federations, Daniel Elazar (1994b:56 ) had already made it quite clear in the wake of the new Maastricht treaty that it was already becoming difficult on the European continent to find a centralized unitary state on the continent.
Writing in 1994, in the year prior to the entrance into the European Union of Austria, Finland, and Sweden, Elazar found only three unitary state members in the whole EU, namely Ireland, Luxembourg, and Greece. Meanwhile the other nine members could be divided into three types of federal governance and constitutional power sharing arrangements:
(1) federations- Belgium , Germany , and Spain ,
(2) decentralized unions- Denmark , the UK , and the Netherlands , and
(3) autonomy/federal arrangements- France , Italy , and Portugal .
Of the aforementioned newest entrants, Austria would clearly be a type 1 federation according to Elazar's criteria of identification; Sweden would be a type 2 union, and Finland would resemble France as a type 3 or autonomy/federal form of governance.
Althusian federalist theory and 21th-century federalism In the decades before the Treaty of Westphalia which first set in force the modern European state system, Johannes Althusius--a German theorist, Calvinist, and statesmen in the city of Emdon -published first in 1603 and in final draft in1614 the first complete theoretical work on republican federalism.
In Althus' Politica Methodice Digesta, federalism is described as being based on the biblical covenantal traditions which in turn had influenced other Northern European covenantal agreements and other intracommunal and intercommunal compacts, such as the Mayflower Compact, which led to the founding of a federal American constitution in 1787.
In contrast to the American constitution which found national governmental sovereignty solely bestowed upon it directly from the sovereign individual American peoples who make up the state, Althusian federalism founded a bigger tent for the basis of bestowing or sharing sovereignty within a territorial domain. That is, consociatios or communities, associations, families, and other groups all made up those who bestow sovereignty on the state and state actors in a union of sharing or living together.
For Althusius (1995:17): Politics is the art of associating (consociandi) men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating , and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called "symbiotics." in which the symbiotes pledge themselves each to the other, by explicit or tacit agreement, to mutual communication of whatever is useful and necessary for the harmonious exercise of social life. The end of political "symbiotic" man is holy, just, comfortable, and happy symbiosis, a life lacking nothing either necessary or useful. Truly no man is self-sufficient . . . (Althusius:17)
This sort of federalist tradition as a theoretical basis holds out much hope in our post-modern world:
(1) where limits to national sovereignty in solving issues of global trade, development, and peace have led to the creation of quasi-permanent covenants between nations as represented by NATO, the United Nations, and to global agreements on human rights, laws of the sea, and trade, such as the GATT/WTO;
(2) where the world has begun to move beyond demanding equal rights among all citizens by accepting claims of individual ethnic groups, such as in Spain which has developed new covenants with the Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Andalucian peoples in a series of steps during the post-Franco period that have left that once unitary state a very federal one today (Watts, 1999:30).
Althusius wrote and developed his theory while running the city of Emdon for over thirty years. He was part of the Reformed Protestant movement of his day which dominated the Netherlands , Friesland and the British Isles of his time. His work was in the transitional period from Middle Ages to the Modern State system and his work on constitutional covenant predated that of Locke and Hobbes by several decades.
Althus was concerned with the maintenance of good government where there would be checks and balances against tyranny by representative leadership. As a political scientist he was interested in theory and the practical dimensions of human behavior, i.e., how people shared and accommodated one another in society. In this way, a polity can be compound as well as each polity's own domain of sovereign control.
In the tradition of Calvin, Knox, Roger Williams, Zwingli, and John Winthrop, Danile Elazar (1994a:35-42) writes that Althusius claimed:
(1) Every individual follows the community's rules to holiness and to doing justice for the community.
(2) Every individual is morally autonomous and gives consent to the covenant-while actually observing the covenant or not.
(3) Humans act together through covenants, whereby God enters covenants of partnership with man for fulfillment and government.
Further, each individual is in the image of God but protected not as an individual but in covenant with God and group, including family, association. This is clearly in contrast to methodical individualism that lay behind even statist federalist theory of the 18th, 19th and much of the 20th centuries.
It is no accident that most constitutions around the globe continue to include wording of the document being made before God, similar to the western and biblical tradition from which Althusius came. Although a protestant, Althusius freely used many Catholic scholars as sources in his Politica Methodice Digesta, e.g. authors such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Carlo Signio–a historian on ancient Israel and Rome– and jurist Diego Covarruvias, are all to be found in Althusius' writings.
In short, although the Protestant-Catholic divide helped to form modern Europe , in the federalism of Althusius the tent is big enough for both traditions. In this tradition of accommodation and sharing, according to Frederick Carney (Althusius,1995), Daniel Elazar (1994a & b), and other earlier 20th century writers, such as Karl Friedrich, the modern European tradition of federalism can be forged.
Summary
The revival of conceptual Althusian federalism has brought the sovereign unitary nation state versus federation debate full circle in recent years to where it was when the Middle Ages were being replaced through Renaissance, Reformation, and the creation of the modern state system in Europe . In short, Europe has had a federal identity rooted in biblical concepts of covenants dating back centuries.
The pressures of globalism and the diminishing of distances have opened the way for new levels communication and sharing at an interstate and international level not perceived as possible before the Cold War ended. However, the search for federalist solutions for peace and harmony are not new and were particularly strong in the last years of WWII through the 1950s in Europe and the North Atlantic until the Superpower struggle of that age and the successful economic boon in post-war Europe unraveled the great strides made at mid-century. Charles Chatfield (1999), in "The Federalism Papers: Commentary on the History of Federalism", claims that the world is now in its fifth historical phase of federalism and federalist theory development.
The first phase was quite ancient and dated to the Mosaic covenantal tribes of biblical times. The second phase, for Chatfield (1999:374), started in1 787 with the American experiment, which had been built upon a long history of English metropolitanism serving multiple jurisdictions which had "fostered multiple urban centers along the Eastern seaboard, all tied to" a British empire .
This second phase soon became more universalized as theorists, such as John Fiske in America in the early 19th century, noted. Federalism lent itself to visions of European Empire reform and to the anticipation for a United States of Europe by writers such as John Seeley in Britain and Victor Hugo in France . In a third stage of federalism, which began with the end of WW I and continued through the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s, three concepts of federation emerged as dominant but related. There was earlier a pan-European movement, alia Aristide Briand.
Two other strands of world federalism–one suggested by Clarence Streit's Union Now Movement which aimed at a North Atlantic federation of democratic states and emphasized a federal nation constituting all world democracies while the other movement was supported by diverse leaders, such as Henry Stimson. Gen Douglas MacArthur, Edward Teller, Albert Einstein, and Cord Meyer (Wooley,1999).
Now, 17 years after the collapse of the Cold War balance of power system in Europe, the EU is slowly marching on to encompass almost all of the continent. This is certainly a federalist movement which needs to either be accepted or rejected by the citizens of Europe in formal and popular debate. The tendency to avoid the word federal union in Britain and in some other European nation's internal debates on the European Union does not make this federal form of association–often through acceptance of treaties --signed by separate sovereign nations, who knowingly have decided to give up certain sovereignties to the Union over the years.3
In conclusion, it is posited that the European Union seems to already be a federation, especially in that European Union law is being applied in constituent state courts.3
De la Vega (2000: 603)notes, "EC law makes more demands on national law than treaties traditionally have. EC law adopts a monist approach in which the member countries have agreed that EC regulations would be directly applicable in the Member States' respective legal systems without requiring that they be adopted by the legislative body of the Member States'."
As a matter of fact, according to Connie de la Vega (2000:603) and Rossa Phelan, this court already oversees EC law, which is "more like the constitution of a federal state than a traditional international organization as is contemplated under public international law."
Further, the EU is certainly composed of at least two levels of governance, the EU and national state levels of governance, i.e. similar to the way the Bundesrat represents the Lander or states in the Federal Republic of Germany, the EU Council directly represents the sovereign nation states.
The other directly elected body is the European Parliament whose influence, according to Tsebelis and Kalandrakis (1999: 144), "is not confined to insignificant amendments or to amendments introduced in the second round." The European Parliament is also directly elected by the people as the Bundestag in Germany and Austria are. Meanwhile, the EU Commission acts as a quasi-executive branch and is certainly indirectly elected by the people and nominated and approved by their elected representatives.
Operationally, regional, state, and federal EU institutions and governments back each other and cooperate in many overlapping areas of shared powers. Finally, as de la Vega mentions, the European Union has its own Supreme Court of Justice with its strong powers on the continent to uphold EU rule.
The only major step that the Union4 has to yet undertake would be to at some point create a federal constitutional document that could be taken to the sovereign peoples and states for passage because currently, as Pippa Norris (1997: 275) in an article, "Representation and the Democratic Deficit", notes "[M]uch of the EU is federal, meaning that certain powers are transferred to European bodies above national governments. The European Commission, a rule-making institution, is essentially a supranational body, as is the independent Court of Justice; organised interest groups are consulted through the Economic and Social Committee, and European Parliament is chosen through direct election."
Specifically concerning the supranational role of the courts and EU law, it should be understood that the Court has already forced states to restrict subsidization of their native auto industries and banks, airlines have been deregulated across all countries, and EU health policies--in the wake of mad-cow and foot and mouth diseases–are being enforced.
It is the acknowledgment of the EU as federal state founded originally on federalist foreign policy that this conceptual article seeks to address. The data are in but neither the national leaders in many European are not ready to stomach these facts while the individual national school text books and EU citizens have yet to fully recognize what is already taking place.
This is why political science and historians must take a role in this debate and recognize the EU as its federal nature suggests. Further, theory and measures of sovereignty and federalism must be reworked.
Althusian federalism opens the door for a fully European approach to comprehending and building models of the federal solution to peace posed by the creation of the EU in Europe after WWII. It is especially important to see that a United States of Europe was not imposed from without–by globalism, etc.--but is rooted in European federal traditions outlined four centuries ago.
These same European federal traditions in thought certainly laid the groundwork for Swiss, German, and Austrian federalism and certainly and likely affected Comte's view of a Europe of democracies and regions in the 18th century. European covenantal tradition can and should be the identity behind the image of a more harmonious federal Europe in the 21st Century.
Epilogue
This paper was first presented in 2000 at the Society of Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. Over seven years later the importance of the federalist option in resolving international cooperation issues and reducing divisions from Israel and Palestine , to Iraq , to the Caribbean, to China , to South America are still evident. Meanwhile, the former federal state of Pakistan continues to struggle under centralized military dictatorship Even Turkey would be able to obtain peace with Kurdish and other peoples if a federalist, rather than statist, approach to problem would be used more often.
On the other hand, federalism appears to not be a simple panacea. Likewise, all representative democratic problem solving models have problems. They are messy and take time. It is important for cultures, countries, tribes, peoples, and individuals involved in building peace through federalism to be committed to the outcome of not only peaceful coexistence but to the idea that all problems cannot only be overcome but can certainly create a prosperous world in which to enjoy peace in.
Notes
1 The pyramid paradigm was first established in pharoanic Egypt and from which the pyramidic metaphor derives.
2 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1996:1362), in its adjectival definition of sovereignty, states that sovereignty is "having supreme rank, power, or authority". This Webster-dictionary concept of ranking sovereignty is what introductory textbooks on government still often use to delineate sovereignty, esp. as concerns the roles of sovereign constituent states' vs. sovereign national (federal) governments. This latter definition of Webster's, however, is misleading as it tends to make one believe that we can do a "pregnancy type test" for sovereignty: i.e., one is either pregnant or not; one is either a sovereign government or not. However, such a concept of sovereignty is misleading. As Harvey Walker indicates sovereignty is actually to be measured by degree. On the other hand, it is the concept or word autonomous, according to Webster's (1996:101)which most clearly implies this either "you are" or "you aren't" dichotomy in governance. Autonomy is defined as "self-governing; independent ; subject to its own set of laws only." In short, "autonomy" can both be used in a dichotomous manner, like with an integer in mathematics, and it can be measured in degrees as is sovereignty.
3Some European nations, like Germany , have specifically proclaimed that the European Union law is the prevailing law of the land in that sovereign land by changing their constitution to recognize this shift in sovereignty.
4 Because of its dual federal and confederal manifestations in structure. It is often said that it fairly federal in operation. This distinction is made well in John Kincaid's article Confederal Federalism and Citizen Representation in the European Union.
Works Cited
Althusius, Johannes. Politica (Methodice Digesta) Abridged, Frederick S. Carney ed., Indianapolis : Liberty Classics Edition, 1995.
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