Making the Case for a United States of Europe

Even as the continental union falters, a Harvard professor says its architects haven't been ambitious enough

Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Glyn Morgan, an associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University, about the prospects for a politically and economically unified Europe now that France and the Netherlands have rejected a proposed constitution for the European Union. Map: Status of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in the countries of the EU Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By DAVID GLENN

When voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union this spring, the EU's architects initially put on a brave face. The referendum defeats were a painful setback, they said, but with another round of negotiations and some redrafting, a constitution could still be approved within a few years. And in any case, many of the draft constitution's less-controversial provisions could be enacted by the European Union Council -- the gathering of the member nations' ministers. The ship was battered but still seaworthy.

Two weeks later, however, it sprang more leaks.

At a summit in Brussels, the EU's leaders failed to agree on a new budget. Britain and France squabbled about agricultural policy. Poland and nine other eastern countries attempted to broker a face-saving deal -- even offering to sacrifice some of the subsidies they receive from the EU -- but they failed. The prime minister of Luxembourg told the news media that, no matter what the EU's bureaucrats might say to the contrary, "Europe is in deep crisis."

So this might seem like an awkward time to release a book that makes the case for a United States of Europe. But that is precisely what Glyn Morgan, an associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University, is about to do.

In The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration (Princeton University Press, September), Mr. Morgan argues that the European Union's designers have not been ambitious enough -- that they should go whole hog and create a union that usurps most elements of its member countries' sovereignty.

Mr. Morgan grounds his argument on questions of security and foreign policy, using a classical balance-of-power framework. A unipolar world system overwhelmingly dominated by the United States is bound to be unstable, he says. If Europe is truly serious about balancing U.S. power, he continues, it must evolve into a sovereign entity with a single military command and a single foreign policy. The complex, multilayered, "post-sovereign" model promoted by many of the EU's architects simply won't do.

Mr. Morgan invites his reader to imagine that foreign-based terrorists someday launch large-scale attacks in Europe, and that the United States cannot offer much help, because its own military is bogged down in China or Iraq or elsewhere. Without a unitary state and a unified military, he writes, "there would be little that European leaders could -- other than fulminate about U.S. isolationism -- do about it."

That model is unlikely to find many admirers on either side of the usual Europhile-versus-Euroskeptic divide. The project of unification is generally defended (or attacked) these days on grounds of trade and economics, not war and peace.

"Europeans need to confront this brutal choice," the British-born Mr. Morgan says. "Are they going to remain weak and dependent and maintain their decentralized government units, or are they going to try to become players in the world? And if they're going to become players in the world, they need to centralize. I think presenting that brutal choice is profoundly annoying to both sides of the debate."

The unpopularity of Mr. Morgan's scheme, however, is largely beside the point. The true purpose of his book is not to inspire a movement for a superstate, but to provide a model of how to argue about European integration. Both the EU's architects and the EU's foes, he says, have evaded certain fundamental questions, and they have failed to justify their projects in terms that the broad European public could conceivably accept.

It is no wonder, he says, that the EU's popularity has been slipping. Mr. Morgan hopes that his book will provoke Europhiles and Euroskeptics -- even if they reject his own prescriptions -- to adopt clearer modes of argument. The two sides have generally failed to squarely answer each other's longstanding claims, he says -- and that failure has generated the present impasse. "People are starting to demand answers to fundamental questions," he says. "Why are we doing this? What are the costs and benefits? They're raising basic questions about nationality and sovereignty, and not looking at the EU as a narrow set of economic arrangements."

It's Not Just the Economy, Stupid

Indeed, economic arrangements are the questions that Mr. Morgan wants to see less of in Europe's constitutional debates. The no votes in France and the Netherlands were driven, at least in part, by popular fears that the draft constitution would promote American-style laissez-faire economics and erode the French and Dutch social safety nets. Many of Britain's Euroskeptics, meanwhile, dislike the constitution for the opposite reason: They believe that it would drag Britain into a sclerotic social democratic economy.

Both of those camps, Mr. Morgan says, can point to various provisions in the 349-page draft document that seem to bear out their fears. The constitution is full of enormously detailed language about commercial policy. (Article III, Section 221, proclaims that the EU will pursue its economic objectives "by the action it takes through the Structural Funds (European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund, Guidance Section; European Social Fund; European Regional Development Fund), the European Investment Bank, and the other existing financial instruments.")

Mr. Morgan argues that there is no good reason why these economic questions should be so deeply embedded in the constitution. "The issue of social democracy versus economic free markets should be played out at the democratic level of the European Parliament," he says. "It shouldn't be locked in place at the level of the constitution."

"The problem with Europe at the moment," he further argues, "is that they've centralized the wrong things, and they've not centralized the things that they ought to have centralized."

Mr. Morgan would prefer to see a much simpler, more streamlined constitution that deals primarily with the question of how a confederation with 25 members (and more in the pipeline) can formulate a coherent foreign and military policy.

Other scholars of the European Union, however, insist that it would not be so simple to remove economic language from the constitution. Alex Warleigh, a professor of international politics and public policy at the University of Limerick, in Ireland, says that certain economic questions should be settled clearly now, at the constitutional level, precisely because the public already distrusts the EU bureaucracy.

To do otherwise, he says, "would be to repeat the tendency that the EU has always had, which is to obfuscate the real issues of power that are brought into play by European integration. And that would be a mistake because it lends credibility to those who say that Brussels is simply a power grabber."

Mr. Warleigh, who is the author of Democracy in the European Union: Theory, Practice, and Reform (Sage, 2003), agrees with Mr. Morgan that the EU's architects should speak much more plainly about the fundamental purposes of European integration. "To present it all as a dry technical operation -- I just don't think that would be believed anymore," he says. "You could get away with that back in the 50s." Nonetheless, Mr. Warleigh says, the detailed commercial language in the constitution is probably inescapable.

The Will to Power

Mr. Morgan's primary policy idea -- that Europe should become a single sovereign state for foreign-policy purposes -- is not likely to be embraced any time soon. ("That's the great thing about being a political theorist," he says. "If an actual politician stood up and said we should abolish Britain or France in its present form, it would just be political suicide.")

Nonetheless, he firmly believes that many of the EU's advocates, with their celebrations of post-sovereignty, multilayered arenas of governance, and "soft power," are deluding themselves. Old-fashioned Hobbesian sovereignty is still what makes the world operate, Mr. Morgan says, and the United States is in fact powerful because it is sovereign in the traditional sense.

"Imagine if the United States had to get approval from all 50 governors for a procurement bill for the military," he says. "Under those circumstances the United States would never have been able to fight the Second World War."

And yet that is approximately the cumbersome sort of arrangement that the EU's architects have created, Mr. Morgan believes.

"Typically, Europeans will then say to me, Well, we don't want to become like America," he continues. "To which I will then say, Fine. But then you should shut up with whining and complaining that America does all these things you don't like. As I said earlier, that's the brutal choice that Europeans face."

Richard J. Sweeney, a professor of finance at Georgetown University who recently completed a comparative study of the U.S. and draft European constitutions, says that Mr. Morgan's proposal is "nonsense, and it's a huge threat toward killing off the European Union."

In Mr. Sweeney's view, the nascent United States required a coherent foreign and military policy because it was isolated and vulnerable. Modern Europe, he says, faces no comparable vulnerabilities. Shoehorning all 25 EU members into a single foreign policy would be a recipe for divorce. "You can just imagine if a war were declared someday," he says, "and some member countries said, Well, this is intolerable."

It would be much better, Mr. Sweeney says, to continue with the present ad hoc arrangement in which, for example, Britain and Poland choose to send troops to Iraq, while France and Germany demur. "Forcing these questions to be asked and answered when they don't have to be," he says, "is just asking for trouble."

Desmond Dinan, a professor of international commerce at George Mason University and the author of Europe Recast: A History of European Union (Lynne Rienner, 2004), agrees with Mr. Morgan that there is a tension -- verging on hypocrisy -- when Europhiles celebrate post-sovereignty and at the same time talk about the need to balance American power. But he also says that there is no prospect of the unitary state that Mr. Morgan proposes. "National interests and national identities are just too strong," he says.

A Broader Conversation

So what will happen next? Mr. Morgan expects that there will be a cooling-off period, and that another constitution will be drafted in a few years, as long as the core institutions stay in place. "The nightmare scenario is that the euro fails," he says. (A few Italian politicians have recently murmured about a return to the lira.)

Mr. Morgan is not particularly optimistic about his proposal for a unitary sovereign state, but he is hopeful that this summer's crisis will lead to a broader popular conversation about the European Union's purposes. "All of these fundamental justificatory questions are going to have to be played out in public now," he says. "I think the old elite Europe where the demos was locked out is over now, it's finished."

Mr. Dinan, meanwhile, believes that the talk of crisis is overblown. "I saw a headline the other day that said something like 'Europe in Crisis: Schroeder Flies to Luxembourg for Consultation,'" he says. "And I thought, well, compared to Munich in 1938 or Europe in August 1914, this is really not too bad as crises go." It is a measure of the European Union's success, he says, that peace on the continent is taken so much for granted.

Not everyone is so comfortable. Mr. Sweeney, of Georgetown, believes that the entire project of integration could quickly unravel, and that that in turn could lead to a serious risk of war. "Could the EU survive if Britain left?" he asks. "I don't think we know the answer to that. The union may have gotten so big that they can't now shrink without starting a process that sort of accidentally ends in disaster."

Mr. Warleigh, of Limerick, is more sanguine, and has an elaborate plan for breathing new life into the union. He would like to see a new constitutional convention whose mission would be to draft two potential European constitutions.

One would be an intergovernmental model, in which the member nations would have a good deal of power to shape and veto European legislation. The other would be a more unitary model, in which EU leaders would be chosen directly by the European electorate writ large. The two draft constitutions would then be voted on in referenda across Europe. If, say, the intergovernmental model won in most countries, but the Polish public preferred the unitary model, Poland would then hold a second vote about whether or not to remain in the EU.

This is just the sort of fundamental debate -- a stark and clear conversation about the EU's structure -- that Mr. Morgan hopes to see. But he realizes that the most difficult arguments are probably yet to come. "The questions of political and military policy touch on questions of national identity," he says. "That's why this debate has now blown up."

"The Euroskeptics have always said that sovereignty matters, and I agree with them," Mr. Morgan continues. "I just disagree about how it matters. Sovereignty ought to be located at the European and not at the national level. But to get into that issue, we really have to have a debate about nationalism."

THE ROCKY ROAD TO RATIFICATION The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was drafted in 2004. The original timetable required all 25 members of the European Union to ratify it by October 2006. That schedule has been put on ice, however, now that voters in France and the Netherlands have rejected the treaty.