POL 5032 Week VII

Is there any merit in correlating the political arguments of Calhoun, Clay and Webster to the European Union?

 When I last wrote about the problems of the European Union, my mind was focused on the debate between economics and politics.  I was still deeply immersed and influenced by the arguments on neo-functionalism and the federalists within Europe.

I then read David Cameron’s ‘EU speech at Bloomberg’, delivered on Wednesday January 23, 2013.  Put simply, David Cameron argued that the first purpose of the European Union was to secure peace, and this he argued, had been achieved.  Today, he maintains, the main, overriding purpose of the European Union is different: not to win peace, but to secure prosperity.  

Given the continuous economic problems the EU is still experiencing, it would appear that the future of the European Union lies in fixing its economic problems and this influenced my original thoughts on whether to concentrate on economics as espoused by Haas and Balassa or to look for a political solution, which in essence would strengthen the institution of the EU itself by creating a federation with all the implications that this would entail.   Now I feel there are three options:

1).  Continue with more of the same, but as Cameron argues, “More of the same will just produce more of the same – less competitiveness, less growth, fewer jobs.”

2). Strengthen the ‘federalist’ component by creating a central bank, a single market, a single currency, a federal parliament, together with a new central government on the lines of either Germany, Switzerland or the United States of America.   This would immediately stop the economic rot, but is this the only solution?

3).  Create a confederation of states that devolves power back to the states within the European Union; a European Union that respects the rights and individualism of each state while strengthening the notion of a single market without necessarily adopting a single currency.

 Key here to the arguments is the idea of a Federalist United States of Europe as opposed to a confederation of states that would more resemble the Zollverein, established by treaty in Germany in 1834.

 In order to understand the concepts more fully, I returned to the arguments and debates that raged within the United States during the early part of the 19th century, and especially the many lessons to be learned from the pre-Civil War state-rights advocates, particularly those of John C. Calhoun.

 Calhoun’s understanding of federalism provides an alternative vision to the possibilities of federal organizations for emerging supra-national unions.  His arguments, and indeed his entire intellectual attack still resonates against the formation of large pluralistic super-unions that are based on the federal ideal as evidenced by the Maastricht Treaty and Lisbon Treaty preambles.

 Larry Backer’s excellent article titled “The extra-National State: American Confederation Federalism and the European Union,” Columbia Journal of European Law 7, (2001) provides the point of departure, but to understand where the European institutions are heading, we also need to understand how Chief Justice John Marshall revolutionized the relationship between Congress and the judiciary, first through his concept of judicial review, and second through his ruling on federal judicial power.  Indeed his actions irrevocably changed the nature of power between the American States and the federal authority. 

 Is the European Court of Justice following Marshall’s path, and will the ‘National’ Courts of the various member states push back?  Evidence would suggest that the national courts, especially the German Courts are adamant that the laws of the land supersede any notion of the supremacy of EU law for now. 

 To really understand where EU institutions are heading, we also need to revert to the historic understanding of agency as espoused by Hegel, or more recently Anthony Giddens, and the position of nationalism within the European Union.  Where for example would you position the ideas of Benedict Anderson and his ‘Imagined Communities’ for instance?