The last 18 months have been extremely painful for supporters of European political integration.
We have to admit that the Eurosceptics were right in at least one respect. As currently configured, the euro is indeed (in William Hague’s words) a ‘burning building with no exits’, in which the peripheral nations are locked into a debt serfdom which they cannot sustain, while the ‘core’ countries – especially Germany – face the unpleasant choice of either allowing the existing Union to implode or flinging their hard-earned taxes into a potentially bottomless pit. (1)
This is why the governments of France and Germany are now trying to establish an ‘economic government’ for Europe, with a common treasury and other instruments of a more or less undisguised Franco-German economic tutelage. Berlin, in particular, is fast becoming the new Brussels. (2)
What Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy fail to understand, however, is that this solution will never work without the direct democratic participation of the citizens of Europe – both those who will be lending the money and those who will be receiving it in return for the necessary far-reaching ‘structural’ changes to their economies and societies. (3) Moreover, without a viable ‘internal settlement’ in Europe, the continent will never be able to meet the new global challenges in partnership with the United States and the other great democracies.
We have before us a grim prospect: the collapse of the eurozone, and a sudden uncoordinated debt default, followed by huge economic dislocation across the Union. (4) This will lead to a surge in popular xenophobia and national tensions, signs of which we can already see in the revival of anti-German feeling on the western and southern periphery. In the east, territorial disputes may erupt once again. Given the resulting acrimony and finger-pointing, it cannot be assumed that Europe will be able to reform as a simple free-trading confederation. The whole political rationale of the Union will be in doubt, and the ordering principle of the last decades will be called into question; all bets will be off. This will leave Europe rudderless at a time of reduced American commitment to the continent and massive challenges from outside, including Russian territorial revisionism, Chinese economic growth and the Iranian nuclear bomb programme, to name but the most serious.
In short, while Europe is not confronting a single external enemy comparable to that which drove England and Scotland together, it does confront a multitude of perils very like those which persuaded Americans to unite in the late eighteenth century: an escalating sovereign debt problem, deep internal divisions between the member states, and a range of external competitors ready to move into the power vacuum.
It is time, therefore, to return to first principles and to establish a closer and more perfect union in the way that the Americans did after the War of Independence. Europe needs to elect delegates to send to a new constitutional convention, which would supersede all existing arrangements, including the German Basic Law. The dire state of the eurozone and the tasks facing Europe in the coming decades require the immediate creation of a complete fiscal and military union of the continent.
This will involve the creation of a Union parliament with legislative powers; the federalizing of all state debt, after a suitable ‘haircut’ through the issue of Union bonds to be backed by the entire tax revenue of the common currency zone; the supervised dissolution of insolvent private sector financial institutions; and the creation of a single European army, with the monopoly of external force projection. (5) This is the only structure that will enable Europeans to mobilize in pursuit of their collective destiny rather than against each other, and that will integrate Germany economically and militarily, without disenfranchising either the Germans or any other population of the Union.
The constitutional arrangements should broadly follow the American model. The president of the Union should be elected every six years at fixed dates, and would nominate a cabinet to be approved by the Union parliament. This should have two chambers, a House of Representatives elected by the population, and a Senate made up of four delegates from each of the constituent states (some of the larger existing nation-states, such as Germany and France, may wish to dissolve themselves into more manageable units for that purpose).
In other words, Ireland, Germany and France would each have four senators; or Ireland, Castile, Lorraine and Bavaria could each have four senators. All members of the new Union would automatically apply for NATO membership. All Union military units would attain full interoperability with NATO. The official language of the Union would be English, which would be exclusively used for Union business and would be the sole language of command.
This mighty Union should cooperate closely with the other great federal democracies, such as Canada, the United States and Australia. It should enter into reciprocal trade relations with all liberal democracies that desire them. In the event of Great Britain declining to join the new Union as a full member, the closest possible economic, political and military links should be maintained with London. After all, the UK already makes a sufficiently large contribution to democracy promotion and international security. It is more important for Europe to acquire the strengths which Britain has developed over the past centuries, through union and constitutional government, than to insist on the UK joining Europe in this endeavour, unless it wills this of its own accord. What we urgently need now is not a European Britain, but a British Europe.
None of the national governments will initiate this process, because it would turn them into state administrations below the sovereign Union parliament. The same goes for the existing political groupings in the national parliaments, which are replicated in the current European Parliament. Indeed, the leadership of the largest party in the largest state of the Union, the German Christian Democratic Union, has recently restated its belief that Europe should be a confederation of states, rather than a federal state with a strong central executive responsible to a pan-European electorate. (6)
Nor should one look to the rent-seeking local elites on the European periphery in Ireland, Spain and Greece who have feathered their nests through the exercise of their ‘intermediate powers’ between Brussels and the member states; they stand to lose most by any federal solution which bypasses them and their clientelist systems. Finally, there are no serving political leaders either capable of or interested in tackling this project. It is likely, in any case, that the established elites will be so discredited by approaching catastrophe that they would be a liability.
The task of achieving this new Union must therefore fall to a new pan- European party which aims to gain a majority in the European Parliament in the 2014 election or, in the event of that institution ceasing to function, to win majorities in the respective national legislatures (or both). Once a majority in Brussels has been secured, and in the event of the national governments refusing to accept the democratically expressed will of the electorate for a new federal Union, the party would use its power to reject the new commission put forward by the member states until its objectives were met.
The party would work with any existing grouping in the Parliament willing to support the transformation of Europe into a democratic federal union. It should welcome the establishment of other democratic pan-European parties as the first step towards the creation of a pan-European party landscape. The new party should be called the ‘Party of Democratic Union’ to accentuate the key twin themes of democracy and union, and should avoid the appellation ‘European’, now sadly toxic. The party language at Union level should be English. It would be a constitutional party in that it would abide by the democratically expressed will of the citizens of Europe, but it would be revolutionary in that it would aim at the overthrow of existing forms of national sovereignty.
References:
(1) See John Forsyth, ‘Hague: the euro is a burning building with no exit’, The Spectator, 29 Sept. 2011.
(2) See Ulrike Guerot and Olaf Boehnke, ‘Germany in Europe: the euro matters in foreign policy’, European Council on Foreign Relations, 28 Oct. 2011.
(3) For a critique, see Jürgen Habermas, ‘Rettet die Würde der Demokratie’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 Nov. 2011.
(4) See Niall Ferguson, ‘It’s 2021 and we’ve bid Europe farewell’, Sunday Times, 27 Nov. 2011.
(5) For a proposal on these lines, see Declan Ganley, ‘Europe must form a fully federal union or it will fall apart completely’, Sunday Independent, 13 Nov. 2011.
(6) See ‘Antrag des Bundesvorstandes an den 24. Parteitag der CDU Deutschlands am 14./15. November 2011 in Leipzig’.
