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Federalisation of the European Union

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 86.25.238.241 (talk) at 23:30, 8 September 2009 (→‎'Multi-speed integration': Sentence assumes all countries will eventually integrate further - not necessarilly. "It should be noted" is a phrase to avoid). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Since the 1950s, European integration has seen the development of a supranational system of governance, as its institutions move further from the concept of intergovernmentalism. However, with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, new intergovernmental elements have been introduced alongside the more federal systems making the definition of the European Union much more complex. The European Union, which operates through a hybrid system of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, is not officially a federation – though various academic observers treat it as a federal system.[1]

History

One of the first to conceive of a union of European nations was Hungarian Prime Minister Pál Teleki. Hungary had lost over two-thirds of its territory at the end of World War I in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. In early 1941, during the Second World War, Teleki was striving to preserve his country's autonomy in the face of Germany's coercion to join in their invasion of Yugoslavia. The book, Transylvania. The Land Beyond the Forest, Louis C. Cornish[2][3] describes how Teleki, under constant surveillance by the German Gestapo during 1941, sent a secret communication to contacts in America.[4]

Journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1941 supported the statement of others. "I took from Count Teleki's office a monograph which he had written upon the structure of European nations. A distinguished geographer, he was developing a plan for regional federation, based upon geographical and economic realities."[4] Teleki received no response from the Americans to his ideas and upon Germany's military advance into Hungary on April 2–3, 1941, committed suicide.

At the end of World War II, the political climate favoured unity in Western Europe, seen by many as an escape from the extreme forms of nationalism which had devastated the continent.[5] One of the first successful proposals for European cooperation came in 1951 with the European Coal and Steel Community. Since then, the European Community has reformed itself from being an organisation creating and ensuring internal free trade through wielding certain supranational powers strictly related to economy and trade, to one in which a whole range of policy areas where its member states hope to benefit from working together.

The process of intergovernmentally pooling powers, harmonising national policies and creating and enforcing supranational institutions, is called European integration. Other than the vague aim of "ever closer union" in the Solemn Declaration on European Union, the Union (meaning its member governments) has no current policy to create either a federation or a confederation.

Debate on European unity is often vague as to the boundaries of 'Europe'. The word 'Europe' is widely used as a synonym for the European Union, although much of the European continent is still not in the EU.

'Multi-speed integration'

Main article: Multi-speed Europe

A thesis, sometimes referred to as a 'Multi-speed Europe', envisions an alternative type of European integration, where the EU countries who want a more powerful EU, can boost their own integration, while other countries may go at a slower pace or cease further integration altogether. Specific current examples include the euro, the single currency not used by all members, and the Schengen Agreement for common external border controls without inter-state frontiers, but which includes some states that are not in the EU and excludes some states that are in the EU. The only country which has an 'opt-out' on eventual adoption of the Euro is the United Kingdom, and the Schengen Agreement is not an EU treaty.

Present situation

The European Union (EU) is not de jure a federation but various academic observers conclude that it is one.

Here is the view of Professor R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers University) on how various brands of scholars approach the issue:

Unencumbered by the prejudice that the EU is sui generis and uncomparable, federalism scholars now regularly treat the EU as a case in their comparative studies (Friedman-Goldstein, 2001; Fillippov, Ordeshook, Shevtsova, 2004; Roden, 2005; Bednar, 2006). For the purposes of the present analysis, the EU has the necessary minimal attributes of a federal system and crucially the EU is riven with many of the same tensions that afflict federal systems.[1]

According to Joseph H. H. Weiler, "Europe has charted its own brand of constitutional federalism".[6] Jean-Michel Josselin and Alain Marciano see the European Court of Justice as being a primary force behind building a federal legal order in the Union[7] with Josselin stating that "A complete shift from a confederation to a federation would have required to straightforwardly replace the principalship of the member states vis-à-vis the Union by that of the European citizens. ... As a consequence, both confederate and federate features coexist in the judicial landscape."[8]

According to Thomas Risse and Tanja A. Börzel , "The EU only lacks two significant features of a federation. First, the Member States remain the `masters' of the treaties, i.e., they have the exclusive power to amend or change the constitutive treaties of the EU. Second, the EU lacks a real `tax and spend' capacity, in other words, there is no fiscal federalism."[9]

This view is not simply confined to academics, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing found opposition from the United Kingdom towards including the word "federal" in the European Constitution, and hence replaced the word with "Community".[10][11][12] It can be argued, however, that simply because one man calls something a federation does not mean it is actually so. The European Union does not have some key characteristics of a federation, some of which have been mentioned above. The European budget is very small and does not finance a lot of the economic activity of the European Union. Each member state of the European Union has its own foreign relations and has its own military if it so desires. It is often the case that European Union member states decide to opt out of agreements which they oppose. In certain areas the European Union has some control of its member states. In a lot of other cases, however, the member states have sovereignty which would never be given to members of a federation. One important fact is that treaties must be agreed by all member states even if a particular treaty has support among the vast majority of the population of the European Union. Member states may also want legally binding guarantees that a particular treaty will not affect a nation's position on certain issues.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Kelemen, R. Daniel. (2007). Template:PDFlink In Making History: State of the European Union, Vol. 8, edited by Sophie Meunier and Kate McNamara, Oxford University Press, p. 52.
  2. ^ Cornis, Louis C (1947). Transylvania. The Land Beyond the Forest. Dorrance & Company.
  3. ^ Teleki, Pal (1923). The Evolution of Hungary and its place in European history (Central and East European series).
  4. ^ a b Francis S. Wagner, ed. (1970). Toward a New Central Europe: A Symposium on the Problems of the Danubian Nations. Astor Park, Florida: Danubian Press, Inc. He foresaw clearly the complete defeat of Nazi Germany, and the European chaos that would result from the war. He believed that no future was conceivable for any of the minor nations in Eastern and Central Europe if they tried to continue to live their isolated national lives. He asked his friends in America to help them establish a federal system, to federate. This alone could secure for them the two major assets of national life: first, political and military security, and, second, economic prosperity. Hungary, he emphasized, stood ready to join in such collaboration, provided it was firmly based on the complete equality of all the members states. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)[page needed]
  5. ^ "The political consequences". European NAvigator. Retrieved 2007-09-05.
  6. ^ J.H.H. Weiler (2003). "Chapter 2, Federalism without Constitutionalism: Europe's Sonderweg". The federal vision: legitimacy and levels of governance in the United States and the European Union. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199245002. Europe has charted its own brand of constitutional federalism. It works. Why fix it?
  7. ^ How the [ECJ] court made a federation of the EU Josselin (U de Rennes-1/CREM) and Marciano (U de Reims CA/CNRS).
  8. ^ Josselin, Jean Michel; Marciano, Alain (2006), The political economy of European federalism (PDF), Series: Public Economics and Social Choice, Centre for Research in Economics and Management, University of Rennes 1, University of Caen, p. 12, WP 2006-07; UMR CNRS 6211
  9. ^ Thomas Risse and Tanja A. Börzel, The European Union as an Emerging Federal System, Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law
  10. ^ Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose (2003-07-08). "Giscard's 'federal' ruse to protect Blair". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2008-10-15.
  11. ^ Thomas, Sean (2003-06-22). "Gobbledegook". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2008-10-15.
  12. ^ V. G. d'Estaing (7 July 2003), The Wall Street Journal Europe: I knew the word 'federal' was ill-perceived by the British and a few others. I thought that it wasn't worth creating a negative commotion, which could prevent them supporting something that otherwise they would have supported. ... So I rewrote my text, replacing intentionally the word 'federal' with the word 'communautaire, which means exactly the same thing.
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