I've rarely seen anti-federalist arguments put forward so solidly and eloquently (and the pro-federalist rationale debunked so soundly), as here in this article and the comments which follow it. Highly recommended reading.
ft.com/brusselsblog
Brussels blog: Tony Barber
I have been the FT's Brussels bureau chief since September 
2007 and was previously the bureau chief in Frankfurt and Rome. In this blog you'll find my thoughts on everything from the European Union's foreign and economic policies to the fortunes of its political leaders - as well as the more light-hearted aspects of life in Europe. Recent posts
I have been the FT's Brussels bureau chief since September 2007 and was previously the bureau chief in Frankfurt and Rome. In this blog you'll find my thoughts on everything from the European Union's foreign and economic policies to the fortunes of its political leaders - as well as the more light-hearted aspects of life in Europe.
2007 and was previously the bureau chief in Frankfurt and Rome. In this blog you'll find my thoughts on everything from the European Union's foreign and economic policies to the fortunes of its political leaders - as well as the more light-hearted aspects of life in Europe.Recent posts
http://blogs.ft.com:80/brusselsblog/2009/04/the-eu-the-us-founding-fathers-and-the-last-word/
The EU, the US founding fathers and the “last word”
April 20, 2009 12:05pm
There can be few more terrifying sentences in contemporary English than: “The Treaty of Lisbon is not the last word.”
The sentence appears in “Saving the European Union”, a new book by Andrew Duff, a British Liberal Democrat who sits in the European Parliament. It’s certain to raise the hackles of anti-Lisbon campaigners, who have said all along that the EU can never resist the temptation to keep tinkering with its institutional arrangements, no matter how strong the evidence that European voters are thoroughly turned off by the whole process.
Before I develop this point, let me note that Duff’s short book is an excellent introduction to the Lisbon treaty and to the challenges facing today’s EU. Friends and foes alike of the EU will benefit from reading it. Duff is one of the European Parliament’s top constitutional affairs experts, and he writes clean, crisp prose.
The Lisbon treaty’s fate hangs mainly on the outcome of a referendum, expected to take place in October, in Ireland, whose electorate rejected the document in June 2008 by a 53.4 to 46.6 per cent margin. If the Irish reverse their verdict and Lisbon comes into effect, EU leaders have solemnly promised us that there will be no more institutional tinkering, no more inter-governmental conferences, no more constitutional conventions - in short, no more attempts to ape Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the other US founding fathers - for a long time to come. “We’re in tune with the voters,” is the message. “We know they wouldn’t forgive us.”
The institutional reform efforts that are encapsulated in Lisbon began as long ago as 2001 and have been plagued with embarrassing setbacks, so it is understandable that most EU leaders have little appetite at the moment for yet more self-punishment. Still, I have always had a sneaking suspicion that the adoption of Lisbon would in fact serve as a prelude to another bite at the institutional cherry.
Duff’s book strengthens this suspicion. “The founding fathers of the United States admitted from the outset that the Constitution as drafted was not the final word. Far from over-selling the text as the ultimate settlement, as some Europeans have done with Lisbon, the Americans were bold enough to admit that further amendment would be both desirable and necessary…”
Duff continues: “So the Treaty of Lisbon is not the last word… Europe can decide whether it wants to be more united or more divided: it neither can nor will stay as it is. The challenge is to manage this federalisation process with similar skill and boldness to that evinced in their time by Messrs Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson.”
Well, there you have it. Lisbon isn’t the last word. Europe must move on with its “federalisation process”. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.
You need to be logged in to comment.
RSS feedComments
- 2. Federalist Ultras like Andrew Duff, Richard Corbett, etc. will be the last to buckle, but in the final analysis European federalism must and will be broken because it is a myopic self-absorbed movement that leads inevitably to the progressive elimination of democracy.
The founders of the American nation-state were real liberal democrats that put Andrew Duff and his party to shame. Jefferson and Madison believed that only basic issues of liberty (e.g. human rights) should be put beyond the reach of democratic politics, as set out in a separate body of constitutional law (e.g. the Bill of Rights) or international law that the short-term majority in the legislature could not touch. Andrew Duff and the so-called Liberal Democrats believe that this undemocratic political zone should be far larger, encompassing all the general matters of politics that we used to decide in general elections. Increasingly these matters are being put beyond the reach of our votes in the form of a superior body of European law which only ever grows in size, all the time pre-empting national law and our very ability to elect a parliament capable of enacting legislation that does not overlap with that of Brussels. The inevitable long-term consequence of European integration is to shrink the arena within which democratic politics operates towards nothing, negating the very concept of liberal democracy itself.
Supra-nationalism (a.k.a. international federalism) makes use of qualified majority voting and the supremacy of EU law to force nations to follow policies that they do not agree with. It is inherently undemocratic and only suited to deciding minor technical matters of single market regulation that will not generate political tensions between nations. As soon as supra-nationalism is applied to politically sensitive policy areas it leads to EU law which does not enjoy the consent of the governed in the outvoted minority of European nations, and which therefore has sacrificed that which is most essential to it being accepted as a law in those countries. The treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice (and possibly Lisbon) have done just this, leading directly to the spreading de-legitimatisation of the European project beyond the UK, France, the Netherlands and Ireland and increasingly throughout the Continent. If these treaties are allowed to remain in force they will inevitably lead to ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ perishing throughout Europe. That must not and will not be allowed to happen. European federalists must therefore be sought out wherever they are to be found, confronted at every opportunity, and permanently destroyed as a political movement. - 3. Really the most scary sentence? Really? More scary than "I'm now going to cut your toes off with a rusty hacksaw?"
I'd be happy for more institutional reform if it left us with something as concise, democratically rooted and flexible as the US Constitution. This half-bureaucracy, half-alliance, half-democracy (yes, I know) is outgrowing its old ways of working. The world is moving on. Federalism can be democratic, can promote local government, can be liberal. Take a look at India, the US, Germany etc. - 4. Anthony Zacharzewski: Federalism within a nation-state can be democratic but not at international level. Democracy requires that the principle that the majority decides be acceptable to the governed, and this principle is only accepted within the nation-state because ultimately a nation is a community that aspires to self-governance. In the US political lexicon there is no difference between the terms ‘national government’ and ‘federal government’, but the legitimacy of the political institutions in Washington DC is entirely dependent on them being national institutions and the same is true of the national governments of Germany, India etc. The opposite is true of Brussels. You could apply the exact political institutions of the USA to all of North America, or to Europe or the whole world and the result would not be democratic at all because no nation would agree to be bound by policies that their majority is against simply because of a majority in some international assembly.
The only way that international organizations can preserve democratic legitimacy when making serious political decisions that are binding on their membership is through the principle of unanimity. The EU began to sacrifice democratic legitimacy with the abandonment of unanimity in political areas under the treaty of Maastricht. That de-legitimization has only accelerated under Amsterdam and Nice and would be made worse by Lisbon. - 5. Derek Tunnicliff: have you ever read any french constitution to say that the treaty trying to cover all the detail is typically french? wanna know what? i think what you're saying is typically british :)
- 6. Oh, what a surprise .
In their Declaration 23 attached to the Final Act of the Nice Treaty, on page 80/85 here:
http://www.lexnet.dk/law/download/treaties/Nic-2001.pdf
EU leaders stated:
"... with ratification of the Treaty of Nice, the European Union will have completed the institutional changes necessary for the accession of new Member States".
and yet less than four years later they were signing the next treaty - the Constitutional Treaty, now re-packaged as the Lisbon Treaty - and claiming that a new treaty was essential to "streamline" the working of an enlarged EU.
In fact during the Irish referendum campaign, some on the "yes" side even tried to justify Lisbon on the basis that the EU’s systems were designed for only 6 member states, and could no longer cope now that it had 27 members ... neglecting to mention the four previous "amending" treaties since 1957.
Of course Lisbon wouldn't be the last word, and saying that is to state the bleedin' obvious.
Still, it's good to see that Andrew Duff has openly admitted what the likes of Gordon Brown emphatically denied. - 7. Well that was worth the wait from the blog-break I guess. Yet more anti-EU bile from the FT's Brussels bureau chief.
The real question is this: do we really want to persist with those so-called nation-states, which have brought Europe nothing but war, poverty, and genocide ?
History does not exactly favour anti-EU activists, now, does it ?
As for those referring to the Founding Fathers, could they remind us of what happened the last time some states tried to leave the US federation ? - 8. Eurofederalist (7): You appear to be proposing that the way to end wars is to create a federation which would use military force to prevent any state seceding?
It was not nation-states that caused the wars of the first half of the 20th century, but a lack of democratic states in the Europe of that era. The world-wide experience is that democratic states rarely (if ever) go to war with one another with almost all conflicts being started by non-democracies. Democracy (from demos=people, kratos=rule by) has never existed anywhere on Earth outside the context of the nation-state, because the solidarity of the national ‘demos’ is essential to the acceptability of majority rule. When democracy was introduced in the Indian sub-continent Lord Mountbatten announced the need to create separate states for India and Pakistan by saying “there can be no question of coercing any large areas in which one community has a majority to live against their will under a government in which another community has a majority. And the only alternative to coercion is partition”. Partition was also necessary when introducing democracy into Eastern Europe with democratic nation states emerging to replace the undemocratic multi-national federations Yugoslavia, the USSR and Czechoslovakia. Nor is it any accident that the process of European federation is accompanied by the only examples we see anywhere in the world of the results of referendums not being respected.
The world-wide experience since the American revolution is that peaceful relations between nations depend on democracy, and that there is an undeniable link between democracy and the nation-state. European federalists are playing with fire in trying to severe this link. - 9. So eurofederalist is spouting the same tired europhile propaganda, the most likely outcome of the current mass migration of foreigners around the eu is the most likely event to create mass civil unrest, since the ethnic cleansing in the balkans, only on a far greater scale. The eu seems to be hell bent on robbing the downtrodden masses so that the political class can enjoy a superior lifestyle mass poverty isn't far away. History shows that it is inevitable for multi national empires to disolve into failure and corruption, that doesn't favour the europhiles does it. It is now impossible for a previously independent nation to decide to throw of the ever more stifling yoke of the eu, and the ever diminishing level of democracy as the unelected commisars in strasbourg hand themselves greater powers by the day, despite having been political failures, and generally are unelectable in their own countries. Orwell saw what was happening, he only got the date wrong.
- 10. At least in this comparison of the Lisbon Treaty with the US Constitution, and overt discussion about the "federalisation process", we are for once getting from the British politician an honest admission of the EU's real direction and goal.
The perpetual denial by EU supporters of the glaring direction of the EU project, and ludicrous protestations that the process of steadily passing ever more powers to the undemocratic EU centre is merely about 'co-operation', is the most frustrating aspect of the whole issue. Refusal to recognise the obvious hampers proper debate, clearly by design.
However, fundamentally, I would have to take Mr Duff to task on what exactly is federal about the EU? So far it has been sucking up any powers to that centre that it can get. Have any come back, even to a lower level of government than the national level? Are any powers out of bounds? I've seen no evidence. The Lisbon Treaty provides for further EU advances into even the most sensitive national areas like tax and defence.
Nowadays the EU makes laws that affect everything from the financial viability of the local post office to how often our dustbins are collected. I respect those who seek genuine federal arrangements, but those among them who believe the EU is such an example are kidding themselves. On the contrary, so far it is an example of increasingly gross over-centralisation and there is no evidence it plans to be anything different.
Willing, as Mr Duff does, more powers to the EU despite this disjuncture with his claimed federal objectives, added to the EU's democratic failings, really doesn't reveal him as much of a Liberal.
And given he must be well aware that very few of his East of England constituents would in any case support even a truly 'federalist' EU State outlook, he's clearly not much of a Democrat either.
Posts
For me, the problem with the Lisbon Treaty is that it tries to cover all the detail (a typically French fault), whereas the US Constitution was more concise. Yes, the latter left much open for debate and litigation, but the principles were clear. In the Lisbon Treaty any principles are lost in a fog of words.
Also, it did not deal with the critical issue that I believe is central to most ordinary people's opposition, that of democratic representation. The EU law-making machine appears even more remote from the ordinary citizen than their own governmental machine.