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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 562
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WCL 562 June 2007
Semi-federal
When the United States of America was born from its constitution making in the 18th century, joining together 13 newly sovereign states, it was rightly hailed as an innovation. It was seen as of great importance by more far-sighted political analysts and from that time has been widely assumed to be the model pattern of a federal state. Two particular defects in 1787 were overlooked, both of which came to haunt the new federation.
A constitution based upon the rights of man could only accommodate slavery by assuming, tacitly, that slaves were not fully human. The other waiting problem was the failure to spell out the rights, or lack of right, for the founding states to secede from the federation. These two defects were effectively tackled in the bloody carnage of the civil war and it aftermath, not an auspicious way to handle the problems of a federation.
Nowadays we are facing the different problem of how to manage a new grouping of states, not 13 speaking a common language, recently sovereign and of similar background, but 27 whose chief common history is one of interminable squabbling and intermittent warfare. So there can be no tidy constitution drafted and accepted, but rather a piece-meal adaption, item by item, lurching from one expedient to another, in order to reach a satisfactory goal.
Which will be, and will have to be, federal. Either the states will continue to possess the final right to make war in order to maintain their sovereign powers, or they must accept an over-arching law. Ultimately, there will be no half-way house at that time. But on the way, there is, and will be, a great deal of argy-bargy, with striving for often temporary gain and political advantage. Politicians do not cease to look for support from their immediate electors just because they have their minds focused partly of the completed structure of a better system.
But since the European Union is already equipped with most of the organs necessary for developing a fully-functioning federation and because it uses some of these all the time, authority in the Union is divided. That is to say, it possesses the chief attribute of a federal state. It is, in fact, a semi-federal state. It has to be. And watching the messy disaster of Yugoslavia in the 90's, anyone can see why.
So the impending European summit and its future successors will inevitably be carried on with the same negotiating and politicking that is already established practice. The only real question is how soon reality takes over in the minds of the electorates in the more backward parts, like Britain and Poland, so that the Union can turn its attention to the more significant ways to improve democratic participation and legitimacy, instead of dwelling in a mythical past of independent sovereignties.
John Roberts
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