Europe—What’s Left? Towards a Progressive Pluralist Program for EU Reform
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Description
A transnational federation that precludes war and orders the relations between peoples through law and rights has been a liberal progressive dream since Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Kant’s evocative essay gave little institutional detail about how the federation would work, but implied that such a union was the logical outcome, on one hand, of the idea of cosmopolitan right, and, on the other, of the historical experience of violence. Some have purported to see such a project imprinted on governance constellations such as the United Nations or its predecessor, the League of Nations. In these cases, it soon became clear that the legal constructs did not depart from Westphalian sovereignty in their real operation (except perhaps the UN Security Council, but in an ineffective manner because implementation of its decisions still depended entirely on state sovereignty). For many, the European Union, which began with the European Steel and Coal Community, then morphed into the European Economic Community (EEC), then the European Community (EC), and finally the EU, is the first and original example of a transnational federation. From its founding, the project of European integration was intended as a response to the most brutal and destructive outbreak of violence among the European nations: World War II and the Holocaust. There is little question that the most compelling telos of union was to connect the peoples and states of Europe in such a way as to turn such violent hatreds into a thing of the past. The project began through legal guarantees of economic mobility-free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons. But even from the early years of interpretation by the European Court of Justice, it was clear that the European treaty of union created rights for citizens that were directly enforceable in the European Court, the judgments of which would be directly applicable in the Member States; the treaty thus had a kind of constitutional dimension embedding a form of transnational legality that departed from Westphalian interstate international law in creating a direct and meaningful relationship between the citizen and the transnational order. This seemed to go further than anything yet devised in the direction of what Kant had called cosmopolitan right. In addition, as became ever clearer as the union evolved, and the ambit of the treaty expanded, the EU project not only constitutionalized, in effect, certain rights but also entailed the division of sovereignty that for many federal theorists is the true essence of federalism. Thus, certain competences were assigned exclusively to the European institutions (such as external commercial trade policy and competition policy), and others were to be exercised jointly. On the other hand, even though the union had a Parliament, the exercise of the union-level competences was achieved through a pooling or joint exercise of national sovereignty, intergovernmental decision making in the European Council above all. Thus began an endless debate among scholars of federalism as to whether, in truth, the EU was a federation or a confederation. Such discussion has crosscut controversies about whether the EU is or should become a constitutional polity in the full sense—is this possible with- out Europe having or being a single “demos,” the will of which can find direct expression in European governance through the European Parliament? As the EU level competences have expanded into many fields of policy, including labor and social standards, environment, and food safety, the relative weakness of democratic legitimacy (that is, in comparison to national institutions involved in these kinds of policy making) has become apparent, creating a concern with the democratic deficit. National governments generally have an ideological orientation of some sort. But is it really possible to conceive of the EU as a governance space that is ideologically neutral, or blind? In the post–WWII generation that was involved in getting the European project going, and also rebuilding the European polities as liberal democracies, there was a rather solid consensus on the goal of preventing another outbreak of murderous hatred among European peoples, as well as facilitating the building of stable mixed economies and democratic political institutions within European states. The original blueprint of the four freedoms plus intergovernmental cooperation and coordination on a range of commercial and industrial policies was an authentic expression of this consensus. It was able to accommodate most of the ideological spectrum—leftists like Alexandre Kojève were able to imagine the European project as a form of socialist internationalism; liberals as a stage toward the Kantian ideal of transnational federalism; and moderate nationalist conservatives a la De Gaulle as “L’Europe des patries”—in which the European nations would, despite being caught between the two superpowers, nevertheless realize great things not in competition and rivalry with one another but through concerted action.
Source Publication
Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism
Source Editors/Authors
Andrew Arato, Jean L. Cohen, Astrid von Busekist
Publication Date
2018
Recommended Citation
Howse, Robert L., "Europe—What’s Left? Towards a Progressive Pluralist Program for EU Reform" (2018). Faculty Chapters. 835.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/835
