In the new global commercial playing field of increasing complexity and interdependence, opportunities are increasingly modeled around shared vulnerabilities and pooled risks rather than around exclusive self-interest and individual entrepreneurial gambles. In a global risk economy, trust, reciprocity, and cooperation become more important survival values than go-it-alone rugged individualism and adversarial behavior.
THE SAME GLOBAL CONDITIONS that are forcing a new cooperative economic model to the fore, based on network architecture, are affecting the political arena as well. Nation-states can no longer go it alone in a dense, interdependent world. Like transnational companies, they are slowly coming together in cooperative networks to better accommodate the realities of a high-risk globalized society. The European Union is the most advanced example of the new transnational governing model, and for that reason, its successes and failures are being closely watched in every region of the world as nation-state leaders rethink the art of governance in a global era.
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The “United States” of Europe
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HE EUROPEAN UNION is the third-largest governing institution in the world. Its 455 million citizens are spread out over a landmass that is half the size of the continental United States. In the course of the next two years, its people will ratify a constitution, pledging their lives and fortunes, and tying their personal and collective destiny to its political success.
What Is Europe?
All in all, the EU is a remarkable feat, especially when one stops to reflect on the fact that even its architects are unsure of exactly what the EU represents. The problem is that there has never been any governing institution like the EU. It is not a state, even though it acts like one. Its laws supercede the laws of the twenty-five nations that make it up and are binding. It has a single currency—the euro—that is used by many of its members. It regulates commerce and trade and coordinates energy, transportation, communications, and, increasingly, education across the many national borders that make it up. Its citizens all enjoy a common EU passport. It has a European Parliament, which makes laws, and a European Court, whose judicial decisions are binding on member countries and the citizens of the EU. And, it has a president and a military force. In many of the most important particulars that make up a state, the EU qualifies. Yet, it cannot tax its citizens, and its member states still enjoy a veto on any decision that might commit their troops to be employed.
Most important of all, the EU is not a territory-bound entity. Although it coordinates and regulates activity that takes place within the territorial boundaries of its nation-state members, it has no claim to territory and is, in fact, an extra-territorial governing institution. This is what makes the EU unique.
Nation-states are geographically defined governing institutions that control specific territory. Even dynasties and empires claimed ultimate control over the territory of their subject kingdoms. The only faint historical parallel to the EU is the Holy Roman Empire of the eighth to the early nineteenth centuries. In that period, the Vatican claimed ultimate sovereignty over the principalities, city-states, and kingdoms of much of Western and Northern Europe. In reality, the Holy See’s actual influence over territory-related matters was more moral and ethereal than enforceable.
The member states of the European Union still control the territory they represent, but their once absolute power over geography has been steadily eroded by EU legislative encroachments. For example, the Schengen Agreement, an EU agreement forged in 1985, gives the European Union the power to create a Europe-wide set of rules governing immigration into the EU, and even includes a European police force to protect the EU’s members’ borders. The individual states, however, still retain the right to decide how many immigrants to allow into their country and to designate which countries outside the EU they can emigrate from. Once an émigré becomes a citizen in a member country, he or she is allowed full reign to take up residence anywhere else in the Union and be granted the full protection of whichever host country he or she settles in. Citizens of EU member countries not only have the right to establish residence in another member country but can even vote and run for office in local elections and European parliamentary elections, only not in the national elections of any second country they may be living in.
Because the EU itself is not bound by territorial constraints, it can continue to bring new states under its umbrella. Indeed, the EU’s criteria for membership is value-based rather than geographically conditioned. In theory, any country can apply for membership and, if it fulfills the qualifications, be admitted into the Union. The open-ended and inclusive nature of this new kind of governing institution has caused concern among existing members and tensions among prospective candidate nations. Some argue that even though membership is value-based, it ought to be limited only to those countries that make up “historical Europe.” The problem is, historians disagree as to exactly what constitutes historical Europe. Geographers say there is no such thing as the European continent. Yet others argue that Europe begins at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and extends across Europe into Russia and even to Turkey to the southeast. Is Russia part of Europe or Asia? Is Turkey part of Europe or the Middle East? Recall, the Ottoman Empire controlled parts of Europe at various times. So is Europe part of the Middle East?
Many claim that Europe is tied by a common cultural thread and point to its Greco-Roman roots, Christendom, and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as proof that Europe exists. Europe, they say, is a state of mind that results from a shared past and common destiny. Again, the problem is that history has not unfolded in the tidy fashion that Euroenthusiasts project. For example, in the ancient Greco-Roman world, the idea of Europe never extended north of Gaul and the British Isles. Certainly the Nordic countries were not considered part of what the ancients regarded as “Europa.”
The Catholic Church argues that Christianity is the cultural glue that constitutes Europe. But how do we explain the fact that Islam ruled over parts of Europe from the eighth century to the early twentieth century?
Nor are these simply academic questions. There is a heated debate, both inside the Union and out, on whether to admit Turkey and eventually even Russia to membership. And there is the related question of broadening the Union’s associational ties to include North Africa and the Middle East.
Where, then, does the European Union end? No one knows. EU observers use the term “variable geometry” to encompass all of the possible combinations that might make up this new governing experiment. If it’s hard to grasp exactly what the EU is, it is because it is continuously metamorphosing into new forms as it adjusts to fast-moving new realities. The EU is, in actuality, the first really post-modern governing institution. If it seems amorphous and less fixed, that’s because it is navigating in a world of perpetual novelty. In the global era, duration has shortened to near simultaneity, and history has given way to an ever changing now. Geography, in turn, is no longer experienced contiguously and in terms of distances but rather as a patchwork of patterns that brings disparate places together in shared activities. For example, regions like Baden-Württemberg, Rhônes-Alpes, Lombardy, and Catalonia are now united in close commercial, social, and political networks that leapfrog across their existing nation-state borders.
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Many regions of Europe now have more intimate activity with consort regions far removed from their own geography.
Unlike past states and empires, whose origins are embedded in the myth of heroic victories on the battlefield, the EU is novel in being the very first mega-governing institution in all of history to be born out of the ashes of defeat. Rather than commemorate a noble past, it sought to ensure that the past would never be repeated. After a thousand years of unremitting conflict, war, and bloodshed, the nations of Europe emerged from the shadows of two world wars, in the span of less than half a century, decimated: their population maimed and killed, their ancient monuments and infrastructure lying in ruins, their worldly treasures depleted, and their way of life destroyed. Determined that they would never again take up arms against one another, the nations of Europe searched for a political mechanism that could bring them together and move them beyond their ancient rivalries.
In 1948, at the Congress of Europe, Winston Churchill pondered the future of a continent wracked by centuries of war and offered his own vision of a European Dream. He said, “We hope to see a Europe where men of every country will think of being a European as of belonging to their native land, and . . . wherever they go in this wide domain . . . will truly feel, ‘Here I am at home.’ ”
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Jean Monnet, who more than any other single individual was responsible for creating the idea of a common European community among formerly divided peoples and countries, understood how difficult it would be to fulfill Churchill’s dream. The problem, noted Monnet, is that “Europe has never existed; one has genuinely to create Europe.”
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This meant making people aware of their Europeanness.
The preamble to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which established the European Community, states unequivocally that the aim is “to lay the foundations for an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.”
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The grand hope was “to substitute for age-old rivalries the merging of their essential interests; to create, by establishing an economic community, the bases of broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts; and to lay the foundations for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforward shared.”
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Here was the first political entity in history whose very reason for existence was “to build peace.”
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Today, two-thirds of the people living across the European Union say they feel “European.” Six out of ten EU citizens say they feel very attached or fairly attached to Europe, while one-third of European youth between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five say they “now regard themselves as more European than as nationals of their home country.”
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The World Economic Forum’s own survey of European leaders found that 92 percent of them see their “future identification as mainly or partly European, not national.”
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Although difficult to fathom, this extraordinary change in how people perceive themselves has occurred in less than half a century.
From the very beginning, the process of forging a common European community ran up against the other side of a paradox: that the architects of the new, more interdependent, and expansive governing model were nation-states, whose very reason for existence was based on exclusive control of territory, the contestation and seizure of other countries’ lands, and the sequestration of people within their borders who owed their allegiance and loyalty to the state. Breaking open the nation-state container to allow “a closer union among the peoples of Europe” threatened the longstanding sovereignty of nation-states, undermining their hegemony and rule. The question has always been, Would there be more to be gained than lost in sacrificing a degree of national sovereignty in return for a greater measure of security and opportunity? At each turning point in the fifty-year development of the Union, the nations and peoples of Europe have narrowly voted yes to a rewriting of the political contract, conferring more authority to the Union, while giving up an increasing share of their national sovereignty in the process.
The journey to union began with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951.
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Many European intellectuals and political leaders argued that the long-standing economic rivalry between Germany and France was at the heart of the lingering conflict in Europe, and a major cause of war that periodically engulfed the continent. Jean Monnet proposed the idea of merging the coal and steel production of Germany and France, especially along the long-contested industrial corridor that bordered the Ruhr and Saar rivers. The ECSC Treaty of Paris, signed by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, provided for the creation of a supernational high authority with broad regulatory powers, a council with legislative powers, a political assembly, and even a European Court of Justice.
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The new entity would have the power to bind the member states under the umbrella of a higher authority for the very first time. The intent was to set the stage for a broader union.
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In 1957, the six member states of the ECSC signed the Treaty of Rome, broadening their mission to include the creation of a European Economic Community. The EEC’s mandate called for the establishment of a common market and included the harmonization of taxation, the elimination of internal customs barriers, and the enactment of rules governing capitalism and the free deployment of labor. A legislative body was set up comprised of representatives of each member state, a commission was created and given executive power, a European Parliament was established with limited advisory and legislative oversight, and the European Court of Justice was given broad judicial review power. The new European Economic Community enjoyed an international legal identity. It could enter into diplomatic relations and negotiate treaties on behalf of its member countries just like nation-states. The Treaty of Rome and the establishment of the European Economic Community meant that member states no longer had the right to act alone in economic matters.
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The six states also entered into a separate agreement to create a cooperative venture to develop nuclear power across their territories. The European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) came about because the six countries realized that only by pooling their investments and sharing the technology could they afford to compete with the U.S. and the USSR in the nuclear power field.
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In 1965, the ECSC, EURATOM, and the EEC merged.