Hope not for federal redemption - Brussels is not Philadelphia

The start of the EU-convention has been accompanied by a monumental display of federalist rhetoric. According to this, the Brussels congress finds its historical equal in the Philadelphia Convention which gave birth to the US constitution more than 200 years ago. This is no light comparison. The US constitution was born out of a fundamental philosophical reflection on human freedom, it marked the closing stone of a successful revolution and set the path for the coming of the American empire. Apparently, none of this holds for today’s Europe.

Maybe the greatest invention of the Philadelphia convention was the convention itself. This is a device for “legalizing” revolution. Its mission was to make the revolutionary achievement of freedom a common and lasting good. If constitutions live up to this idea, they embody a new vision of individual and collective freedom. The drafting of a constitution is thus a critical and decisive moment in the history of human freedom as Hannah Arendt clearly saw.

Even if the Brussels convention were to debate about more than a reform of institutions already in existence, what would be Europe’s common vision of free government? Is there any? „Europe is weary“, Tocqueville concluded already in the 1830s. For Nietzsche at the dawn of the last century, „Europe is sick“. After two world wars (if you count the cold war, three), the malaise continues. Europe still lives under the specter of its last political invention – the absolutist nation state and its corollary, the Rechtsstaat. This paternalistic attitude has been continued on to the modern welfare state. All differences between Europe’s nation states notwithstanding, the state in Europe is a sacrosanct institution. And its logic is deeply ingrained in those who convene in Brussels to build a European state. The convention‘s president, Giscard, comes from a country, where an all-encompassing, doctrinaire state has been built around the ruins of a revolutionary legacy. His co-delegates, with a few exceptions, are rather elderly men who spent their political lives as social or christian democrats, administering the rise and fall of the continental welfare state. Their prime goal is not to build a new Union but to administer the unaffordable competences of the nation-state on a new, European level. In this sense, the Brussels bureaucracy is the advent of a new state machine and of a new mould that sacrifices diversity for conformity.

For an instructive historical comparison, consider instead the case of constitution-building in Germany. Here become apparent the burdens of the past and the eternal return of the same. In the wake of the 1848 revolution, the assembly of the German confederation gathered to draft a federal constitution, to constitute a German federal union. But the revolution had not been victorious. Their grandiose and visionary draft was rejected by German princes and, most notably, the king of Prussia. In 1871, German unity was achieved under the diktat of Bismarck, bolstered by Prussian military power. From its inception and despite federal pretenses, the Reich was set to become a unitary state. In 1919 and 1949, the task was not to reconfigure the German state but to adapt its ruins to the situation created by military defeat. This has meant an ever-increasing centralization of state-power. The sanctification of the existing structure has been so pervasive that even the peaceful revolution in East Germany did not leave the slightest trace in the German Grundgesetz.

Europe today is in a similar situation. The status-quo of existing EU-institutions and the (national) interests vested in this system weigh heavily. The process of European integration has been captured by nation-states who, under the cover of the future-of-Europe debate, rush to transform EU-institutions into a scaffolding for their struggle to cope with the challenge of globalization. Their thinly-veiled status-quo project goes by the name of federation of nation-states. In this situation, the prospects for the Brussels convention are bleak. Embedded in the logic of static etatism, it is legally in the grip of the Intergovernmental Conference of 2003. Results most probably an overhaul of state architecture in Europe that will increase centralization.

Is this all there is to say about the future of Europe? Far from it! The rallying cry of the federalist movement - no more wars in Europe! - is only the tip of a revolutionary political project. Peace in Europe, still a dream unfullfilled, demands a new organization of power and territory. To move beyond the fundamental antagonism of nation-states requires to move beyond state organization. Else, Europe will ultimately degenerate into a super-state that offers peace at the price of freedom. Freedom and peace, this is the promise of European integration. None without the other, nothing less do people in Europe expect from European integration. For nothing less will they support European union – at the polls and in their hearts.

What is this new organization of sovereignty that we approximate by the name of federalism? “Subsidiarity” as an idea is only the first glimpse of this project. Certainly, even this new Europe would have a constitution, but less certain is if it will come from the dismal EU convention. All this to say: put not your hopes in the Brussels congress. It is not the Philadelphia convention. And nothing good will come out of it if we don’t see to it.

Lutz Hager
lutz.hager@jef.de
Vice-President JEF-Germany