For a Federal Pact Among Europe’s Founder Member States
PROBLEMS OF FEDERALISM AND OF THE FIGHT FOR EUROPE
In case any forget what the fight is all about, here is what was expected of the Constitutional treaty, now reformed as Lisbon. =12 pages I send it round once more in case anyone missed it. Anne
1
The impotence of Europe and the need for a European foreign
and defence policy
The European Union today finds itself in a situation of impasse on
many fronts - political and economic. But the occupation of Iraq, by
British and American troops, coming in the wake of events in the Balkans,
has made it patently and dramatically clear that the unity of the continent
is much more than just a question of safeguarding the wellbeing
of the Europeans, and closing the technological gap that separates Europe
from the United States. It is, as former German chancellor Kohl
never tired of repeating in the final years of his mandate, a question of
peace or war. Europe has shown itself to be quite incapable of assuming
any role on the international stage. Its peoples wanted peace, but its
governments have proved incapable of making their wishes count.
Some governments, to avoid incurring the displeasure of the imperial
power, were even willing to challenge the wave of public opinion at
home. Others opposed the American position, but as a result of their impotence,
were able to achieve nothing more than ensure that the preventive
attack mounted by the United States and Great Britain went
ahead without the approval of the Security Council.
Dating back at least to the end of the Second World War, America’s
hegemony over Europe is by no means a recent reality. During the Cold
War, this American domination was, to an extent, masked by the common
endeavour to contain the Soviet power and by the considerable
convergence of European with American interests. With the end of the
ColdWar, however, this convergence of interests ceased to exist and the
United States found itself faced with a new task: that of guaranteeing
For a Federal Pact Among Europe’s
Founder Member States
PAVIA, November 2004, N.1
2
some form of world order, however precarious, by bringing the entire
world under its hegemonic influence. In this setting, the European
states‘ vassal-like dependence has become dramatically evident; at the
same time, within the most sensitive section of public opinion, an acute
awareness has developed that Europe’s incapacity to act is a consequence
of its division. As a result demand has grown for a Europe that
speaks with a single voice.
The Convention
Many felt that this demand might be met by the European Convention,
whose work has recently drawn to a close, but they were wrong.
The Convention has, as expected, only delivered what the Laeken European
Council asked it to deliver: a very modest dressing up of the previous
treaties. Of the institutional innovations it has proposed all, moreover,
of very limited scope the ones that appear to have something to
do with foreign policy (although not defence, an area covered by the entirely
anodyne measures contained in article I-40) are the regulations relating
to the President of the European Council of Ministers (who cannot
be a head of government in office, must devote himself entirely to
his role, and will remain in office for a maximum of two two-and-a-halfyear
terms), and to the creation of the so-called Union Foreign Minister,
who, elected by the governments, will also fulfil the role of vice-president
of the Commission and incorporate the prerogatives of the High
Representative for CFSP and of the EU commissioner responsible for
external relations).
Clearly, in the presence of twenty-five member states whose sovereignty
remains intact and who thus have both an independent foreign
policy and the instruments needed to implement such a policy, these
personages can have little more than a symbolic role. Obliged to interpret
and represent the divergent orientations of twenty-five sovereign
states, they will be bound to find themselves impotent and quite unable
to act. One need only ask oneself what an EU president or foreign minister
might have been able to do in the face of the contrasting positions
on the war in Iraq assumed by the UK and France.
The majority rule
Many feel that the work of the Convention might have been viewed
in an entirely different light had it proposed (and had the Intergovernmental
Conference accepted) the application of majority voting in the
areas of foreign policy and defence (as well as in that of fiscal policy).
3
This view, too, is clearly flawed. In truth, Europe’s capacity to act on foreign
policy and defence matters is not a question of rules, but of power.
Certainly, decisions relating to foreign policy and defence do indeed
have to be taken (albeit in most cases by a government and not, except
in exceptional cases, by a legislative body). But having been taken, they
then have to be implemented. The taking and the implementing of decisions
are two stages that, in the government of a state, go hand in hand,
as the political majority in a state naturally has at its disposal the instruments
of power needed to enact the decisions that are reached. The
same cannot be said of a confederation of sovereign states, like the current
European Union, where the power to implement decisions is wielded
not by the Union institutions that actually take the decisions, but by
the governments of the Union’s member states, which reserve the right
to act on them or not to act on them, in accordance with the line that
their pursuit of their own interests prompts them to follow. Certainly,
when the majority rule was, from 1781 to 1787, effectively applied in the
thirteen ex-English colonies in North America under the Articles of
Confederation, whose total failure highlighted the need to unite the thirteen
ex-colonies in a more perfect union the states that, in each instance,
found themselves in the minority, above all over decisions relating
to the furnishing of military contingents for the Confederate army
and the payment of their financial contributions, refused systematically
to act on the decisions passed by the Congress.
It must be appreciated that the refusal of one or more states to act
on a decision is, in a confederation, a disintegrating force that undermines
the very existence of the union. It follows that the cohesion of the
union, however weak, depends exclusively on the consensus of the
member states, and thus on the observance, legal or effective, of the
unanimity rule. Neither should it be forgotten that the governments of a
confederation’s member states are answerable to their own electorate
and that, should the organs of the confederation make highly unwelcome
decisions, it would be the governments of the member states that
would feel the full force of popular discontent and of the protests that
would be mounted by the citizens and by the different factions into
which the latter are organised. In extreme cases, such a development
could even jeopardise the public order that the governments themselves,
and certainly not the confederation, are required to guarantee.
Today’s European Union is far more solid and well organised than
the union of the thirteen ex-English colonies of 1781-1787. But this simply
means that that, within the EU, majority voting is not even adopted
in the most important areas. And on the occasions when, in relation to
4
non crucial matters, it is adopted, it is hardly ever applied in practice.
What takes place instead is a general bartering and reaching of compromises
that ensures that any sacrifice a government might make in
one area is balanced out by its procurement of an advantage in some another
area. Thus it is that practically all decisions reached are unanimous
ones.
The need for a European state
It is clear therefore that the whole decision-making process conditions
both the way in which decisions are taken and their very content.
Decisions reached by a union of sovereign states are compromises based
on the interests of all the governments. And the greater in number and
the more diverse the states taking part in the decision-making process
are, the lower the profile and the smaller the impact their ultimate compromise
will have. No confederation can have an effective foreign policy,
and clearly a confederation embracing as many as twenty-five states,
with, in some cases, diametrically opposed geopolitical positions, cannot
hope to have even the semblance of one. It must therefore be realised
that if Europe is to make its voice heard in the world and to give
expression to its people’s will for peace, what is needed is not a President
of the Council with an extended mandate, a European “Foreign
Minister”, or the introduction of the majority rule in the areas of foreign
policy and defence (or even in the more technical sphere of fiscal policy).
It is, rather, a question of sovereignty, that is to say the creation of
an out-and-out federal state decentralised certainly, being federal, but
within which the capacity to make decisions is not divorced from the
power to implement them. And the term state implies a monopoly on
physical force, in other words, the disarmament of the member states
and the exclusive control, by a European government, of a single European
army. Certainly, it implies much more than the creation of a socalled
“rapid reaction force” made up of 60,000 men, with a commander
answerable to, and required to act upon the instructions of twenty-five
heads of state and of government. It can be remarked, in passing, that
were an out-and-out federal state to be formed, the question of whether
or not it would be opportune to preserve institutional ties between Europe
and the United States of America would be irrelevant. A European
federal state would be able, independently, to provide for its own defence.
It would certainly draw up agreements and enter into alliances,
but the policies it would follow would be determined, in each instance,
by the nature of the interests at stake, and would not necessarily always
coincide with those of the United States.
5
The federal core
A European state cannot be founded within the framework of the
current institutions, which is not to say that this framework might not be
re-introduced after its foundation. Indeed, even to think of founding a
European state on the basis of the consensus of the governments of
twenty-five different countries, in most of which public opinion is openly
hostile to any move towards political union of any kind, and which differ
from one another vastly in terms of their level of integration and their
foreign policy and defence traditions, would be pure folly. The founding
of a European federal state can come about only upon the initiative of a
group of countries that are highly homogeneous, closely interdependent
economically and socially, and in which the European ideal is strongly
rooted in public opinion. These requisites can be met only by Europe’s
founder nations the six countries that formed the first European Community.
In spite of the ambiguous signals being given out by the Italian
government, this grouping has already emerged, albeit in an embryonic
form, on a number of occasions. What must be patently clear, however,
is that the initiative required of these countries must be more than a general
mounting of pressure, or the proposing of a design to be negotiated
with the Union’s other member states. Instead, it must involve the creation
of a federal core that, without further negotiation and once its Constitution
has been definitively approved, will be open to any other members
of the Union that wish to sign up to it.
It must be reiterated that this step must be taken outside the sphere
of the EU institutions. To imagine that a federal core might be established
within it, through the instrument of enhanced (now “structured”)
cooperation, would be to attempt, hypocritically, to neutralise the initiative
to set it on a different, dead-end track. Structured cooperation is
nothing more than an updated version of the old Europe à la carte idea.
The mechanism behind it is the formation of different groups of states
according to the objectives being pursued; besides, this form of cooperation
has to be authorised by all the EU member states. Were this procedure
to be followed, the birth of the federal core would depend on the
consensus even of those countries opposed to the idea, and it would be
an entity compatible with the institutional structure and the laws of the
union. This is clearly impossible. The birth of a federal core must inevitably
be the expression of the strong and unanimous political will of
the countries wishing to be part of it, and must inevitably involve a
breakaway action the kind of split that led to Germany’s reunification.
In the latter instance, all that the other member states could do was wit6
ness the emergence of the new reality and, when the dust had settled,
adapt the Community rules to it.
The objections
The federal core design is usually met with two main objections. The
first is that it is divisive, as it excludes from the outset the majority of
the EU member states. Nothing could be further from the truth. The
idea of the federal core was born precisely of the realisation that political
union is, in the presence of a line-up of twenty-five states, an impossible
objective. The idea of asking the British or Spanish government,
or the governments of the eastern European states, to join Europe’s
founder nations in this groundbreaking initiative and to unite under
a binding federal agreement, is quite simply ludicrous. But many of
these countries, and in the mid-term all of them, would be unable to resist
the pull of a federal state that already existed. It must therefore be
appreciated that the federal core would serve as a driving force of unity
and that it is the only instrument with the capacity to give meaning
and a political outlet to European enlargement, and to prevent the EU
from becoming totally ungovernable, with rules that are impossible to
apply, and destined, following its transformation into a free trade area,
ultimately to disintegrate. The federal core would thus be a decisive factor
in the promotion of that unity of Europe as a whole that the current
EU is completely unable to guarantee.
The second objection is that the strong political will needed to establish
a federal core does not, as yet, exist in any of Europe’s six original
member states. This is true, and it is a truth rendered all the more
stark by the fact that the government of one of them is led by a person
like Berlusconi and has a cabinet comprising three Northern League
members. But while the will to form a federal core is yet to be formed,
it is certainly realistic to imagine that it can be formed, given the right
conditions. The creation of these conditions will, in turn, depend on the
framework within which the problem of reforming the Community institutions
is broached, because it is only in the framework of a small and
cohesive group of countries that the crises, increasingly frequent and increasingly
severe, that are besetting Europe might be allowed as to an
extent they already are doing to give rise to uniform and prompt reactions
on the part of public opinion. This is why the group of founder
member states is the only one within which it currently makes sense,
and indeed is possible, to battle for the founding of a European federal
state.
7
The difficulty of the choice and the alternative
The fact remains that it is an extremely difficult battle. The idea of
national sovereignty took root in Europe over many centuries. It conditions
the behaviour of governments, political parties, the media and
public opinion. But the problem is now a desperately urgent one. And it
is important to realise that failure to solve it will result in the transformation
of Europe into a group of states entirely subservient to the hegemonic
power, condemned to a future of impotence and impoverishment
and, in the final analysis, condemned to exit definitively the historical
stage. This is the fate that has unfailingly befallen those world regions
that have not been able, quickly enough, to adapt the dimensions of the
state to changing circumstances: we might cite, as examples, Greece at
the time of the Macedonian and subsequently Roman conquests, and
Renaissance Italy. Unless it proves able to change course drastically,
Europe is heading towards its own “South Americanisation”. It needs to
decide whether it intends to resign itself to its decline, opting for the
easy course, that of inertia and subordination, or to fight it, choosing the
more arduous course of political unification.
The federal pact
The story of European unification is a story of corruption of words.
In recent times particularly, the attempt to delude public opinion into
seeing a process that is running out of steam as a process that is, on the
contrary, advancing and moving towards progressive goals, has resulted
in a twisting and minimisation of the significance of terms such as
“federation” and “constitution”. It is thus important to stress that a federation
is a state, which enjoys the prerogative of sovereignty and thus
has a monopoly on physical strength, and that there is no such thing as
a constitution that is not the constitution of a state. But it is equally important
to guard against corruption of the very word “state,” which
would lose all its essential connotations were credence to be given to
the falsehood that “state” corresponds to the extension of the majority
principle to the areas of foreign policy and defence (as well as fiscal policy).
Similarly, it is important to clarify that the union of a number of nation-
states in a single European federal state, quite apart from the problems
relating to the size of the framework within which this is achieved,
can never come about as a result of decisions reached by an assembly.
The protagonists in the creation of a federal state can only be those
8
agents that are invested with the highest political responsibility, in other
words the governments. These are the subjects that exercise real
power, and that are thus in a position to transfer real power to another
entity, even though it must be granted that such an initiative could come
about only in exceptional circumstances, with the backing of a strong
wave of public feeling since constituent power rests ultimately with the
people and in a climate of openness and political debate involving the
entire political class. A quite different matter will be the drawing up of
its constitution, in other words the formulation of the rules that will
govern the life of this new entity, once it has been created: the pactum
unionis is not the same as the pactum constitutionis. And this is reflected
in the sequence of events that, in the wake of the Second World
War and in a non federal setting, characterised the rebuilding of the republican
states of France and Italy, where the republican government
was first formed, and subsequently given a constitution.
The initial core of a European state must therefore be born of a federal
pact that, entered into by the governments of the founding nations,
transfers their sovereignty to the new state. It will create a provisional
government, which will control the European army and subsequently
convene a Constituent Assembly.
The terms of the federal pact
Clearly it is neither appropriate nor possible, here, to give anything
more than a brief indication of the content of the federal pact, whose
completion, refinement and correction clearly falls to individuals who
possess the necessary technical expertise. An initial drafting is, however,
necessary in order to highlight the nature of the problems that will
be encountered; in other words, in order to clarify what the creation of
a federal state really means and to prevent the ambiguity of expressions
like “federation of nation-states” from being exploited. It also allows us
to see, in a harsh light, just how difficult an objective this is. The design
will in fact be judged, by many, as a dream or as a purely theoretical exercise.
The fact remains that, if the Europeans really do want to achieve
European political unity the objective that has guided the whole course
of European integration then these, and not others, are the problems
that they must tackle and solve, because there is no other way to relaunch
the process and prevent Europe from falling into a rapid and inexorable
decline. To argue, on the other hand, that the federal core design
is purely utopian, and that public opinion in Europe’s founder member
states, as well as the politicians that represent it, is not and is not in
9
the foreseeable future likely to be able to give expression to the energy
and the will needed to realise it, is tantamount to resigning oneself right
now to a sorry end to the adventure of European unification and consequently
to a crisis of the democratic institutions and to the degeneration
of civil cohabitation in the continent. Europe is drawing closer and
closer to a radical crisis, and radical crises demand radical answers.
History, to be sure, is one long alternation of periods of slow evolution
with periods of rapid and profound change. In the latter, it becomes possible
to achieve things that, in normal periods, seemed utopian. We are
thus faced with a difficult battle, but it is the only one that, today, it is
worth fighting.
Here, then, are the fundamental points that the federal pact should
contain:
1. The governments of the founder countries agree to unite their
states in a federal pact, thereby creating a federal state that will be
called “The United States of Europe”.
2. The United States of Europe will be ruled by a provisional government
made up of the heads of state and of government of the signatory
nations.
3. The provisional government of the United States of Europe will
comprise a president, a vice-president and four ministers who will be responsible,
respectively, for foreign affairs, defence, the economy and finance,
and relations with both the EU and the states that subscribed to
the pact.
4. Foreign affairs and defence will be the exclusive responsibility of
the provisional government of the United States of Europe, which will
have full powers in these spheres; the economy and finance will be managed
concurrently and in collaboration with the relevant national and
European institutions; relations with the European Union and with the
member states will be managed in ways dictated by the nature of the
problems to be solved.
5. The pact will name the president of the provisional government of
the United States of Europe and assign the vice-presidency and ministries
to the other government members.
6. The provisional government of the United States of Europe, by a
process of co-optation and in the shortest time possible, will increase its
number to twelve, appointing to each of the ministers, as well as to the
president and vice-president, an undersecretary, to be chosen in each of
the member countries, preferably from the ranks of the opposition.
Each of these must be assigned to a ministry other than that run by the
head of his/her respective national government.
10
7. The selection of the successors to the heads of state or of government
who have become members of the provisional government of the
United States of Europe will be subject to the procedures in force in
each individual country.
8. The national armies, navies and air forces, as well as the gendarmeries,
will form a single European army whose supreme commander
will be the President of the provisional government of the United
States of Europe. The European army will come under the command of
a European General Staff, which will be made up of the Chiefs of the
General Staff and of other high-ranking officials from each of the countries
that have entered into the pact. The Chief of the General Staff will
be answerable to the defence ministry of the provisional government of
the United States of Europe and will be appointed in the pact.
9. The foreign and defence ministries of the countries that have entered
into the pact will automatically be abolished and their budgets will
be pooled in the budget of the provisional government of the United
States of Europe.
10. The diplomatic and consular staff of the states that have entered
into the pact will, in the shortest time possible, be amalgamated. Until
this occurs, each embassy and consulate will cease to represent a single
member state, and instead represent the United States of Europe.
11. The economy and finance minister can issue public loans, in accordance
with procedures defined by the provisional government upon
the proposal of the same economy and finance minister.
12. Until the first general election is held and this will be held upon
completion of the work of the Constituent Assembly mentioned in the
next paragraph parliamentary control of the activities of the provisional
government of the United States of Europe will be exercised, in an
consultative capacity, by the MEPs belonging to the states that have entered
into the federal pact.
13. Within two months of the completion of the process of ratifying
the federal pact, the provisional government of the United States of Europe
will call the election, through a uniform electoral system, of a Constituent
Assembly, whose mandate will be to draw up the constitution
of the United States of Europe. The latter must take the form of a federal
state, founded on the principle of subsidiarity, in which the European
institutions will have responsibility, at least, for foreign policy and
defence, for the general guidelines of economic policy and the policy of
infrastructures, and for policies on scientific research and technological
development; the head of government or the government in its entirety
11
must be democratically answerable before the electorate or before the
parliament (or a branch of the parliament) and must, accordingly, be
elected by the citizens or by the parliament; legislative power will be entrusted
to a two-chamber parliament in which one chamber will represent,
proportionally, the citizens and the other will represent the states;
the highest expression of judicial power will be the Court of Justice,
which will be responsible for interpreting the constitution, declaring
void any legal provisions that are in conflict with it; the Constitution
must be open to amendment through a procedure that does not require
the unanimous consensus of the member states; the right of secession
will be excluded; the European institutions will be equipped with a power
to levy taxes that is exercised independently or in concert with that
of the member states, the regional and local authorities; the constitution
will contain a provisional regulation that will allow any EU member
state that has not entered into the federal pact to become a member
state of the United States of Europe, accepting the constitution and the
obligations it imposes. The constitution drawn up by the Constituent
Assembly will be put to a public referendum.
14. The United States of Europe will continue to be part of the European
Union and of the European Monetary Union, providing the relevant
EU institutions agree. The United States of Europe minister responsible
for relations with the EU will, without delay, begin negotiating
with the EU authorities the conditions that will allow this participation
to continue.
15. The pact will be submitted for ratification to the states whose
representatives have signed it, in accordance with the procedures provided
for by the constitutions of each of them, and it will come into
force in the countries that ratify it on condition that these countries represent
at least five-sixths of the states that signed the pact and threequarters
of the overall population of the latter.
Francesco Rossolillo
F O N D A Z I O N E
ALBERTINI
ACURADELLA FONDAZIONE
MARIO E VALERIAALBERTINI
VIA VOLTA, 5 - 27100 PAVIA
MARIO e VALERIA
Posts
