The Eastern Question

The world after the war was very different from the world before it. All the continental empires had disappeared, either overthrown in a revolution or simply disintegrated under the pressures of various nationalist movements. The demise of the Ottoman empire had been anticipated for a long time. Ever since Alexander I's foreign minister Adam Czartoryski first speculated about it at the turn of the nineteenth century, European politics had faced the challenge of managing this decline in an orderly way. The outbreak of war in 1914 made its implosion a foregone conclusion.

The Austrian empire's dissolution was treated as equally inevitable. After all, even the Empire's own legal scholars had been unable to prove it even constituted a state in the first place. Or rather: that it constituted one state. The settlement of 1867 between Hungary and Cisleithania had created a kind of personal union that was more familiar from early modern times. The conflict centred on the question which element of it, if any, was the bearer of sovereignty. The Austrian side argued that the union was represented through the person of the emperor. The Hungarians denied that the emperor had any say in Hungarian matters. All the two countries had in common was “the physical person of the ruler, in whom two different governing persons were united” (Rumpler 411). In other words: where the Austrians saw a political union, the Hungarians saw only a personal one.

Federal union in the Third Peace Movement

In his address to the Banquet of the 1904 World Peace Congress in Boston, the American philosopher William James warned his audience to be under no illusion about the challenge they faced. Peace may have seemed the reasonable option, but “[r]eason is one of the feeblest of nature's forces,” especially in confrontation with “[o]ur noted enemy (…) the bellicosity of human nature” (James, 845 “The plain truth,” he observed despondently, “is that people want war. (…) War, they feel, is human nature at its uttermost. It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical blood payment” (846) Warning that “[w]e do ill (…) to talk much of a universal peace or of a general disarmament,” he called on the delegates instead to “organise in every conceivable way the practical machinery for making each successive chance of war abortive. Seize every pretext, no matter how small, for arbitration methods, and multiply the precedents” (847)

For a movement that had spent much of the nineteenth century formulating seemingly impossible aspirations, the switch to a pragmatic approach was clearly a challenge. Still, of its three overarching goals, arbitration was the area where most progress was likely to be achieved.

The Napoleonic era and end of the balance of power

And then came Napoleon. “World spirit on horseback,” according to Hegel. “A fool (…) aiming for world domination,” according to the Prussian diplomat Karl August von Hardenberg (Dwyer 300).

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It was probably inevitable that one of the many wars fought within the European framework of the balance of power would end up fundamentally disturbing the balance. Though it is difficult to say with accuracy which battle was the decisive one, one obvious candidate was that of January 1797 in Rivoli, in Northern Italy. The recently appointed commander of the French Army of Italy, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), defeated an Austrian army sent to reverse his conquest of the Piedmont region. Following this victory, Napoleon marched over the Alps and into the Habsburg heartland with the aim of conquering the capital Vienna. Though he didn't achieve that particular goal, the final result of his efforts was still an astounding victory in territorial and political terms. The peace treaty of Campo Formio at the end of the Italian Campaign gave France control of most of northern Italy, as well as of the Austrian Netherlands. The Austrians received compensation in the form of the Veneto, and of Venice itself – marking the end of a thousand years of independence for the Serenissima.

These first victories gave Napoleon the springboard he needed. He would go on to become the most prominent general in the French republican army, then the first consul in the republic, and eventually the supreme ruler of a newly founded empire.

Europe Divided: the Council of Europe

The debates at the 1948 The Hague conference showed how difficult it would be to find a formula that could unite the different strands of European unionism. It was in the Political Committee, which convened the day after the plenary at which Churchill gave his keynote speech, that the motions that would define the legacy of the conference would be discussed. The debate revealed how deeply divided the participating countries were on the key issues of sovereignty and representation.

On sovereignty the main division was that between the French and the British delegations. The French aim was for the conference to propose a directly elected deliberative assembly, with its own mandate separate from that of the member states. The main thing was to act fast, so as not to lose momentum. As the Dutch president of the Union of European Federalists Henri Brugmans observed, acting fast and decisively also had a tactical use. It served as a “psychological choc,” and created a “fait accompli” (Council of Europe 103).

The man who had assembled the French delegation for the conference, the economist René Courtin, explained how a European Assembly could become a sovereign institution in its own right. Once established, the Assembly would “gain authority bit by bit, acquiring at first a little, subsequently a larger amount of sovereignty” (Council of Europe 49).

After fleeing to Brussels in the aftermath of his failed attempt to stop the coup that saw Louis Napoleon tighten his grip on power, Victor Hugo spent the next twenty years in exile – initially because he had to, eventually because he chose to (in the late 1850s he rejected an offer of amnesty by the French court with the message “When liberty returns, I will return.”) He left Brussels and settled in the Channel Islands, which gave him a feeling of physical proximity to France while also allowing him to maintain a critical distance from proceedings there. For a while his home was on the larger island of Jersey, until he decided to leave before being pushed out when he sided with the editors of a local French refugee newspaper who had criticised Queen Victoria for fraternising with Napoleon III. He moved to the nearby island of Guernsey, which would remain his home for the next fifteen years (Stephens 256–257).

Hugo would turn his exile phase into a period of incredible productivity. He published a successful collection of poems in the shape of his 1856 Contemplations. The receipts from this book allowed him to buy a townhouse in Guernsey's little capital city St Peter Port (Stephens 275). He spent years redesigning the property's interior, making the house a reflection of his artistic and philosophical inclinations. In it, he would also complete arguably his most famous work, Les Miserables (1862).

If exile could not stop him from increasing his fame as an artist and a writer, it also did nothing to diminish his faith in his ideals of liberty, equality, and European unity. He peppered newspaper editors with letters of support for a range of causes, from the Polish uprising of 1863–1864 to the Irish Fenians, and sponsored Garibaldi's revolutionary brigade (Stephens 317–318). He became involved with the second peace movement, acting as honorary chair of the 1869 conference in Lausanne. It was this movement that, even more than the first, devoted itself to the cause of a united Europe.

With the rumours of war again growing – this time between Napoleon III's French Empire and the North German Bund led by Bismarck – Hugo felt that the movement needed an act of inspiration to rally its spirits. To that end, he used 14 July 1870 to organise a ceremony in the garden of his house in Guernsey.

This book started with a hypothesis: the people who negotiated the earliest version of the European Union, the European Coal and Steel Community, would have worked with concepts that contained numerous historical layers of meaning. Irrespective of whether they were aware of their existence, these hidden layers would have impacted the outcome of the negotiations, by influencing what the negotiators would reasonably have expected to be able to achieve through them. And so I set out to uncover the various layers of meaning contained in what Koselleck called the “sediments of time.”

This voyage of dis-covery started with the first early modern analysis of a regime type at least somewhat similar to the European Union: the league as described in Machiavelli's Discourses. In his analysis of the historical examples of the league (including his personal favourite, the pre-Roman Etruscan League), and of the ones existing while he wrote his treatise (chiefly the Swiss Confederation) he identified a number of core qualities that would later become associated with federal union: its being based on the equal status of the participating states, its link with a political culture of freedom, and its functioning as a collective defence arrangement.

It did not serve a defensive purpose only though. In spite of the fact that he claimed a league had an optimal size in terms of territory and number of members beyond which it was difficult to sustain organisationally, he also included it in his overview of methods for territorial expansion. Here the league, or “Tuscan method,” competed with two others: “violent union,” which he linked to the Athenians and the Spartans, and what he called “the method of Rome,” of forming an alliance where the other members effectively served the dominant power. This then was what the oldest layer contributed to the concept of federal union: equality, freedom, security and expansion.

The second oldest layer of meaning was formed by reflections on the practical experiences of various regional leagues that existed around the time of writing of the Discourses or were founded in the century after Machiavelli's death: the Swiss Confederation, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569), the Dutch United Provinces (1579–1581), and the Holy Roman Empire in the format that was constituted through the Peace Treaty of Westphalia (1648).

The original Machiavellian Moment

For the Florentine republic, the original Machiavellian moment was a moment of rupture, a tear in the historical fabric. Through it would pour the forces of disruption – literally, in the form of invading armies. The rise of the newly united Spanish kingdom had made conflict with France over the Italian peninsula all but inevitable. After all, the power that controlled Italy would control the major trade routes in the Mediterranean. Florence would experience the full disruptive force of this conflict in the 1490s and 1500s, when the Italian peninsula was repeatedly invaded by French, Spanish, and (German) Imperial armies. The first invasion, by the French king Charles VIII, had led to the collapse of the Medici regime. Subsequent offensives would bring the Medici back to power, see the French take control of the duchy of Milan, and the Spanish seize the kingdom of Naples; meanwhile, Venice would lose all its territory outside the Veneto. Pope Julius II, with his anti- French Holy League, was briefly successful in his effort to “free Italy from the barbarians,” but his successes would be overturned immediately after his death in 1513. This left the Florentines with an urgent question: how could a city state like theirs avoid getting swept away by the rising tide of monarchies striving for universal rule?

The republic's demise in 1512, and the Medici family's return to power, constituted a moment of maximum danger for the city. Not because the Medici might succeed in their aim of subjugating the city's population, but because they might not. While the republican experiment of 1494 to 1512 had clearly ended in failure, its mere existence had inculcated in the people of Florence a love of liberty that might have left the city unsuited to any other form of government. It made the task of forming a stable rule by one family much more difficult.

International law and the problem of sovereignty

The fact that Bernhardi's book had to be written at all was an indication that, on the eve of Armageddon, the idea of perpetual peace was very much an active force in European political thought and debate. This was in large part due to two nineteenth century developments: one academic, the other political.

Academically, the idea of European federation would play a role in the development of the new discipline of international law. Its rise was an answer to the demise of the natural law tradition, specifically of the law of nations. The latter was born in the seventeenth century out of the Scholastic tradition. Two events had led to its emergence. One was the discovery of the new world, which stimulated the development of new theories about relationships between peoples. To this tradition was attached, above all, the name of the School of Salamanca, with authors like Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez. The other was the end of the Respublica Christiana which created the need for a new set of rules to coordinate the relationship between Europe's various monarchies, republics, and federations.

For three hundred years, the concepts of the law of nations tradition developed by authors like Gentili and Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Vattel would form the basis of all Western thought about inter-state or international relations. By the middle of the nineteenth century however, this tradition was in terminal decline.

Before unification: the Zollverein and the dividing of the German Bund

Not all nineteenth century nationalist movements would channel their energies into the construction of European federalist schemes. In the German case, the focus was instead chiefly on developing federal solutions on a national scale, not because they were anti-European, but because the more immediate challenge was to create a German union that would offer the states involved a double security: against each other (chiefly against the largest states), and against the great powers that surrounded them. Important to note is that in the German case, the distinction between European and national was one of degree. If the entire Austrian empire was included, the boundaries of this vast territory enclosed nearly half of continental Europe, running from the North Sea and the Baltic to the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, and from the Dutch border to Western Ukraine. Any German federation, therefore, was a European federation of sorts.

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After his victory over the Russian-Austrian coalition at the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon had seized the opportunity to found the Confederation of the Rhine (1806). This move not only spelled the end of the Holy Roman Empire, but also of the formal connection within it between the two main German powers, Austria and Prussia, and of the connection of those two with what was called the “Third Germany,” the collection of smaller German states.

Two roads

Through his post–First World War novels, Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) had become known as a glorifier of military violence and an exponent of German nationalism. Though his ideological stance during the Interbellum was close to fascism, he was no Nazi party sympathiser. Like Schmitt, he rejected the Nazis for their vulgarity, and unlike Schmitt their coming to power did nothing to change his stance. Not that he was an outspoken critic of the regime – before the start of the Second World War, his distancing from the Hitler government was more of a social than a political nature. In 1941 however, he started work on a pamphlet that would be adopted as the unofficial platform for hoped-for negotiations with the Allied Powers by a group of his admirers: the men behind the so-called Stauffenberg plot (1944).

Published in 1948 in an English translation under the title The Peace, it was an essay in two parts. In the first section, “The Seed,” he sketched the full scale of the horrors of the Nazi regime, “of unconcealed despotism and (…) naked bestiality” (Jünger 32). One aspect of it was the hollowing out of ordinary life under totalitarian rule: “Things lost their cheerful hue and with each new morning came the question: Would evening find the family united round the table or torn apart, its members dragged away? And when at night the light was extinguished, the ear strained to catch the whispering of the police agents without” (Jünger 32–33).

The Swiss Confederacy

Of one union we have an extensive description by Machiavelli himself. He wrote about the Swiss Confederacy in his main works as well as in diplomatic letters and memoranda to the Florentine Chancery. At times he referred to them as German (because they fell under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire), though this was mainly when he described certain traits that they had in common with the free German cities. When he discussed their individual traits and their constitutional regime, he referred to them clearly as Swiss.

Describing the Swiss as poor by Florentine standards but “completely independent” (Machiavelli, The Prince 44), in his “Second Letter about the Mission to Emperor Maximilian I” (17 January 1508) he sketched the Confederacy's organisation in the following terms: “[T]he main body of this country consists of twelve communities leagued together, and called Cantons. (…) These are united in such a manner that whatever is resolved upon in their Diet is always observed by all of them, and none of the Cantons will oppose it” (Machiavelli, Collected Works 5047). Apart from the twelve Cantons belonging to the Diet he mentioned two others who “are not so united to the other twelve” but were able to “take separate action in opposition to the others” (5052).

Machiavelli's assessment of the Diet's effectiveness was qualified somewhat by his observation that recently, French interference through bribery and propaganda had prevented “all action of the Diet in favour of the Emperor” (Machiavelli, Collected Works 5049). Perhaps as a result of that, “up to the time of my passing numerous meetings of the Diet have been held, but no resolutions passed” (5049).

How to keep a union

The new American constitution had managed to solve two of the three problematics of federation as defined by Machiavelli: the inefficiency of its decision-making process, and the limits of its potential expansion. The third challenge was the one of duration. They had succeeded in creating a more perfect federal union. The question was: could it survive?

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The Convention clearly hadn't been the kind of Socratic meeting of philosopher-kings that history has made it out to be. In reality, it was a clash between different factions of hard-nosed negotiators who fought each other over every clause and subclause – often to a standstill, and on one occasion to the point where it seemed like the Convention might actually end in failure. Negotiations could only be saved by a compromise over what even at the time was already seen as a patently immoral practice: slavery. The text they finally agreed showed the scars of these battles. Its institutional framework was so unusual, and the consensus underpinning it so fragile, that most delegates doubted it could be made to work. Whatever it was, it clearly wasn't “the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain of man,” as the late nineteenth-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone would later claim (Gladstone 185).

Still, the fact that delegates had managed to reach agreement at all was a political feat of the first order. And the new constitution did contain a number of wholly original political concepts and mechanisms. Now that they had a republic, however, they inevitably faced the challenge of securing its continued existence.

Expansion and raison d’état

From around 1550 onwards, a number of factors pushed European countries in the direction of raison d’état thinking. One of these was economic in nature. Technological breakthroughs made warfare increasingly expensive. Economic growth therefore became a political imperative. Since domestic economies could only generate so much additional produce and commerce, the focus almost naturally shifted towards expansion – which introduced inevitable new risks of conflict, as well as the practical challenges of managing international commerce amid conflicts with rival powers. Maintaining one's state in this vastly expanded game would consume a significant amount of the Western intellectual resources of the age (Hont 11–17).

Another factor was early modern philosophy. In The Passions and the Interests, Albert Hirschman described the stages of theoretical development in this period. First came the emancipation of the passions from classical ethics. According to the Aristotelian moral scheme which had dominated European political thought for the previous two thousand years, politics was an ethical activity, linking knowledge of man as he was (ontology) through knowledge of his duties (deontology) to the ultimate aim of a good life, man's highest calling (teleology). Inspired in part by Machiavelli, early modern philosophy would move beyond this scheme by giving up the idea that ethics could serve as a link between man's nature and the ultimate ends of his existence. The new science of politics moved along different tracks. One would try to derive from the study of human nature knowledge about man's life in society, knowledge of his rights and duties. This would become known as the tradition of natural law.

In his Alarums and Excursions, the Dutch political philosopher Luuk van Middelaar described the Brexit vote of June 2016 as a moment of existential crisis for the European Union: “The divorce disturbed its long-cherished self-image and for a moment it feared for its survival” (Van Middelaar 488). In the end, the EU's will to survive helped it to steer a course out of the crisis, towards a renewed sense of purpose.

Van Middelaar proceeded to give metaphysical meaning to this crisis by calling it a “Machiavellian moment,” a reference to arguably one of the finest works of intellectual history from the past half-century, written by the New Zealand historian J. G. A. Pocock. Pocock's study reconstructed the rise of an Atlantic tradition of republican political thought that linked the Renaissance Florence of Niccolo Machiavelli to the England of the Civil War period and the America of the Revolutionary era.

As Van Middelaar read it, the Machiavellian moment was an episode in which, “[o]ut of the experience of a democratic republic's own transience and mortality there may arise a political will to manifest itself as a sovereign player in historical time” (Van Middelaar 486). This European Machiavellian moment, which according to him effectively started with the international banking crisis of 2008, would see the Union gradually become an independent actor on the world stage. Like the original earlysixteenth- century Machiavellian moment, Van Middelaar claimed, this European moment also had an aspect of “theological liberation” (487), the theology in this case being the European belief in the idea of the Union's perpetuity, and in the universality of the ideals on which it was founded. Freed from these eschatological shackles, Europe could now, finally, as the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it, “take its destiny into its own hands” (512). Using Machiavelli's image of fortune as a stream, Van Middelaar placed the EU squarely in the middle of this stream, ready to respond to the changing tides – “an existential experience” (487).

It is difficult to disagree with Van Middelaar's assertion that the EU needs to fully grasp its “Machiavellian moment” and develop the capacity to become a credible actor on the world stage. And his point is well made that the EU has only been able to survive by periodically ignoring its own ground rules, through acts of pure political creativity.

Abstract

The American Founders formed not one but two federal unions. The first, the Articles of Confederation, was based on the old European models. The second was based on a number of constitutional innovations. On sovereignty, they found a way of dividing it between the states and the centre. On representation, they managed to accommodate both the people and the states. This allowed them to create a federal union that could span a continent. Checks and balances were supposed to prevent any one of the new powers from overwhelming the others. Anti-federalists, however, warned about the possibility of them being directed instead against the people. They demanded, and received, an additional safeguard in the form of a Bill of Rights.

Keywords: federal union, constitution, sovereignty, representation, checks and balances, extended republic

A firm league of friendship: the Articles of Confederation1

The American Founders were influenced by many different intellectual traditions. Beyond Greek and Roman republicanism there were also the British political discourses of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Smith), English radical Whiggism (Harrington, Algernon Sidney, Locke, and the Tacitus translator Thomas Gordon, among others), and British constitutionalism (Blackstone). There was a local American colonial tradition, of which arguably the most important representative was still very much active when the great debates of 1776–77 and 1787 took place (Benjamin Franklin).

There was also a highly visible native American tradition of federalism which served as a source of inspiration. Evidence suggests that the plan of Union which Benjamin Franklin helped to draw up at the Albany Congress in 1754 was at least in part inspired by the example of the Iroquoi Confederacy.2 During the debates in 1776 about the Articles of Confederation, Congressman James Wilson of Pennsylvania openly acknowledged the importance of this example: “Indians know the striking benefits of confederation; they have an example of it in the union of the Six Nations” (Adams II: 1159).

It would therefore be incorrect to suggest that the American constitution was entirely a product of European federal political thought and practice. But it is equally clear, both from their writings and from their public and private statements, that the Founders were deeply engaged with European theory and practice of federal unions. In 1776 this European tradition was quoted mainly uncritically in support of the American desire to form a union.