Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union, symbolically displayed on his desk a copy of
The Federalist, that classic of American political writing, produced in a successful campaign to secure the adoption of the Constitution just drafted at Philadelphia in 1787. It was not widely known at the time that — as historians now report — Monnet received funds from the CIA to promote the cause of European unification.
Conspiracy theorists should not be allowed to monopolise this fact. From a US perspective, two world wars pointed to just such an arrangement as the rational solution to Europe’s problems, and many Europeans were to agree. What better than a United States of Europe to ensure “never again”?
Europhobes and Europhiles equally deplore the quality of debate on the EU’s constitutional arrangements, but the literature on the EU’s founding and development shares an assumption: the real debate was conducted, and concluded, long ago. The real debate on the merits of federalism was in 1787-88, on whether to ratify the US Constitution. That debate rehearsed the key issues, say the political scientists, and the citizens of the new American republic gave the correct answer. The track record of the US shows that Americans invented federalism in its modern form, and that it works. There is now a vast body of writing on European politics that holds up federalism as a timeless magic answer.
The key text in securing the adoption of the Constitution and in placing an interpretation on its meaning was The Federalist. As a central component of the US “myth of origins”, it is still more revered than scrutinised. Read critically, however, it reveals that all was not as it seemed. Its authors, those Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, were brilliant spin-doctors. Yet even they sometimes failed to cover their tracks.
Their first coup was to steal a title. “Confederal” and “federal” initially meant the same thing: weak central government, divided sovereignty, strong states. The Federalist stole the label to describe a regime that its authors intended to be just the opposite. Their next coup was credibly to write as if they spoke for “the people”. Far from the US still being a diverse alliance of sovereign states, the authors created the impression that the republic was already the unified (if imperfect) creation of a single people. Indeed, on “the consent of the people” rested no less than “the fabric of the American Empire”: a manifest destiny beckoned.
The Federalist, read closely, had two contradictory ways of explaining why the existing constitution, the Articles of Confederation, had to go. One was to argue that the proposed amendments would make no real difference — the American people had agreed to their substance. All that was now proposed was “a partial union”. Hamilton said the distinction between “a confederacy and a consolidation of the states” was “more subtle than accurate”. The states would still be intact, becoming “constituent parts of the national sovereignty”. But he also argued the opposite: a unifying government would make a big difference. Without it, there would be “frequent and violent conflicts” among states.
A unified sovereignty might be an alarming prospect: what checks and balances, what divisions of powers, would restrain such a polity? Hamilton’s argument was that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary, since “the people” retained all their individual rights. He added that the states would still possess all the rights not given by “exclusive delegation” to the federal government.
But he explained states’ rights not as inherent in them but as only “a theoretical consequence” of his fictional division of sovereignty. If so, could sovereignty be divided at all if the ultimate sovereign was “we, the people”? So was the proposed constitution really “federal” (ie, decentralised) or “national” (ie, unified)? In The Federalist No 39, Madison gave a series of sophistical answers: federal, not national, in the source of its authority; national rather than federal in the operations of its powers.
Madison claimed that the Constitution would be ratified by people as members of “the distinct and independent states to which they respectively belong”, so that the states would really create the federal government; but Hamilton had already conceded that the federal government would deal with individual citizens directly, not via their states. That was what he claimed justified the Philadelphia Convention in drafting a new Constitution when that body had a mandate only to revise the Articles of Confederation.
Whatever orators said about the tyranny of George III, Hamilton’s preoccupation was the “propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights and absorb the powers of the other departments”. Madison urged “the danger from legislative usurpations”. So the Constitution provided effective barriers against legislatures, especially those of the states, and failed to provide against the rise of an overmighty Executive that has come to characterise the modern US.
Few lessons were drawn in Europe about how the Constitution worked in practice. Independence meant that the US often dropped off the map for British observers until the late 19th century. It is still overlooked that the 60 years that followed ratification of the Constitution saw not happy acceptance of it but a series of plausible, legal challenges to the authority of the federal Government as Americans tried to come to terms with what they had been sold.
Some Southerners claimed that the Constitution recognised the sovereignty of the independent states, as they had been assured in 1787-88. In that sense the Civil War of 1861-65 was only the last of a succession of crises. Slavery was not the unique cause of the war, upsetting a harmonious union; it was the final straw.
These comparisons are seldom made now. In all complex situations, people see what they wish to see. Europhobes claim that the US case was wholly different; Europhiles reply that America shows how federalism works. Each grasps only part of the picture.
Constitutions matter: they shape the long-term development of societies. Many settlers embarked on armed resistance against the English in 1776 in an idealistic attempt to create a more virtuous society: agrarian, libertarian, without strong government, corruption, urban vice, diplomatic entanglements or regular armies. The Articles of Confederation of 1777 attempted to provide for such a state and for a division of sovereignty within it. The Constitution drafted in 1787 shaped, over two centuries, a different society: urban, industrial, with the strongest central Government and the most massive Armed Forces in the world. The Anti-Federalists, as they came to be called, had a point; but failure guaranteed them oblivion.
In the shadow of the American state, friends of federalism tend to talk idealistically about its ability to reconcile a viable central government with the devolution of appropriate issues to local level, and this may sometimes be so. But it is worth weighing successes against failures. The German Empire, from its establishment by Bismarck round a Prussian core, was explicitly federal, but this did not prevent it from acting as a unified state in 1914.
It is as plausible that the major divide between central and local government that federalism produces can shield central executive power from effective democratic control. However much the US Constitution is misunderstood, British usage embodies one important perception. In continental Europe, “federal” is often used to mean “devolved”; in Britain it means the opposite.
The parallels between state formation in the US and Europe need no urging: Europhiles and Europhobes may draw encouragement or warning from the way in which a unified, centralised state was marketed in 1787-88 to a diverse collection of constituent states, only some of whose citizens wished to embark on such a different course. The US case shows how much can be achieved by creative misrepresentation when combined with widespread idealism.
History teaches awkward lessons: there is nothing inherently wicked about federal government, and yet, federalism contains no magic answer. Like all forms of government, federal ones have failures and successes. Especially, they tend to contain an inbuilt drive to become unified states; if they fail to do so, they often break up. There is much to be said for historical candour about the process of which the EU’s constitution marks only one more stage.
The author is a visiting professor at the University of Northumbria
