Is Europe Going Federal?

Third Quarter 2000

The most significant Christian thinking about federalism today is being done at the policy research institute of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), the largest of several Christian political parties in The Netherlands. The reason for such serious reflection on this issue is, of course, the movement among European states toward ever closer ties in the European Union (EU). The EU grew from the European Coal and Steel Community, founded right after World War II, which expanded to a European Common Market and then became the EU. It will soon have a single currency and already has other characteristics of a federal state. Late last year, the CDA institute published an impressive 200-page volume entitled, "Public Justice and the European Union, a Christian Democratic View of the Nature and Tasks of the European Union" (http://www.cda.nl). The following excerpts have been drawn from that English-language publication, which represents a major contribution to the work of shaping the political future of the EU. —Ed.

What Is a State?

The state took shape during the course of the historical developments from medieval times to the present. The state's domain developed along-side other domains such as the church, the university, business life, the family and other social spheres. Religious communities were confronted with grave dilemmas as a result of this differentiation, since it reduced the church's role—which in the Middle Ages had an overarching position—to one domain among many others. Does this differentiation not play into the hands of secularization? Or does the disentanglement of social domains offer the institutional framework within which the social significance of religion can finally come into its own? Christian Democracy holds the latter view. In principle, faith is at work in all areas of life; it does not only manifest itself in the workings of the church. The differentiation of society may also be considered to be a positive phenomenon, seeing it as an unfolding of the cultural diversity which was given with the creation.

Political responsibility concerns that aspect of existence that concentrates on the exercise of power, based on a monopoly of physical coercion, with the aim of establishing and maintaining the law, or the universally valid rules of that society. The state that unfolds within a differentiated society should have as its goal the promotion of the public interest by means of the execution of the law. This definition of the state implies certain criteria which public international law refers to as the "three elements theory" (trias politica), namely the existence of an effective and stable government, the existence of a citizenry, and the existence of a national territory. Depending on the kind of state that is formed, the distribution of responsibilities between higher and lower levels of government should be deter-mined by the principle of "vertical subsidiarity" to achieve the most just and efficient execution of those responsibilities.

Society

The legacy of Christian Democracy and the study of reality in the light of the gospel teaches us that society is composed of qualitatively diverse relations. This diversity has a lot to do with the specific normativity that prevails in each of the separate social spheres. The various different social organizations cannot be reduced to one another. The state is not a prolongation or a manager of the church, the unions or business. Nor is it the representative of a single national community with the characteristics of a family.

The relationship between the state and various social spheres should be characterized by the principle of "horizontal subsidiarity." This means that the government—with its legislative, fiscal and other policies for creating conditions—provides social organizations with the opportunity to give shape to the unique quality of the various sectors of social life. There is quite a varied assortment of nongovernmental organizations that lend color to European society. They function as a shield against too much state influence and check the dominance of the market. A purely economically oriented state structure in which, from a legal point of view, only individual citizens and companies are considered to be legal subjects, will not have any social depth.

The Environment

Our responsibility for nature is not merely a responsibility towards our fellow men, but also towards the created world and, thereby, towards the Creator. For this reason, the creation can be seen as having "its own rights," even though it has no legal personality itself. Nature possesses a value that must be protected by society. The value of nature can be concretized in norms through the formulation of limit values and target values. Limit values indicate an elementary level of protection, where transgression causes irrevocable damage to the productive capacity of nature. Target values indicate a level of protection where virtually no more damage is caused. Between the limit and the target values lies a field in which damage can still be repaired or reversed by natural processes. The value of the environment, then, should be made a part of the economic order to assure a sustainable society.

Sovereignty

If sovereignty is defined not just as the possibility and competence for establishing internally binding rules, but also as the ability to successfully defend oneself externally, the sovereignty of many states is obviously very weak. In a world threatened by the presence of nuclear weapons, there are few states that can adequately defend themselves. This is one reason why sovereignty is often shared within cooperation agreements such as NATO. This phenomenon sheds further light on the concept of sovereignty: it is a means rather than an end, a means of promoting the interests of the citizens. One could say that states which cede part of their sovereignty to more comprehensive links are in fact acting in the interests of sovereignty rather than compromising it. Particularly the smaller states lose no authority by ceding powers to the European government; often they regain control in this way. Shared sovereignty fits in well with a federal concept of the state: it makes possible a substantive response to the citizens' claims to peace and security.

Federalism

States can come in many different forms. We distinguish unified states, federations, and confederations. In a federal system, a state is established where there is a balanced distribution of competencies between two strong levels of government: on the one hand, a central federal authority and, on the other hand, diverse regional governments. A federal state is a form of political cooperation among these regional governments, which choose to unite in an overarching body for certain tasks. The identity and original structures of the federating states remain, for the most part, intact.

No federal system is identical to any other one. They are also constantly developing. It would be a mistake to think that power in a federation is always concentrated by definition in the federal authority: power can be centrifugal as well as centripetal. The federal state's fundamental principle is a clear distribution of legislative, executive and judicial competencies among the federation's various levels of government. In general, this distribution of powers is brought about by a two-chamber legislative system where the member states are represented in one of the chambers. The federal model would be useful in Europe, with its diversity of cultures.

The European Union is an entity established by public law which shows greater similarity to a federal state than to an international organization. The EU is on the way to becoming a federal state: there is a state territory and there is state authority in many areas, with at least indirect powers of enforcement. Moreover, for the development of European citizenship it is not necessary that there be a European nation in the nationalistic sense. All that is needed is a citizenry in the legal sense, and this already exists.

Conclusion

The state in a differentiated society is the community of government and citizens, organized under public law and founded on the legitimate monopoly of coercion over a delimited territory, whose aim is to promote the public interest by an application of the law. The collected facts indicate that the European Union is an entity under public law with closer affinities to a federal state than to an international organization. The European Union should go further along the path which has been laid out, just as other countries have done, such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Germany and India. No federal system is the same as any other. Europe, too, will surely develop as a federal state with its own unique character.

A European constitution is necessary in order to provide answers to the questions dealt with in this study. The constitution pro-posed by the European Parliament is based on the values of freedom, equality, solidarity, human dignity, democracy, respect for human rights and the primacy of the constitutional state. If subsidiarity, particularly "horizontal subsidiarity" and sustainability were added to this list and the mentioned values were elaborated into a more consistent framework, they would offer the moral foundation which the state—including the European state—requires.