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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 578
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WCL 578 Feb 2008
English federalist roots of the EU
World citizens outside Europe may feel that English political rows have little relevance to them, but the European Union is the best, indeed the only likely, example of a political institution capable of showing the route to a united world. As the progenitor of several world wars and home to exceptionally aggressive nations, the pacification of Europe through political unification is a landmark in the direction that we shall have to travel in order to create a world safe for its citizens. Thus the battles over British policy towards Europe ultimately affect world citizens in many countries. Euroseptics in Britain wish to turn back the clock and insulate their islands from European integration.
Tracing the intellectual roots of federalism leads back to a distant past; the essence of federalism being the division and control of power, we need to consider the means and success of political practices that have achieved the twin objectives. And here we find ourselves investigating English history, where political development ha been perhaps the most innovative and rounded of any. For here is the starting-point. The revolutionary Americans of the 18th century were English traditionalists in most of their thinking. Their innovations built on the successful patterns of English local politics, notably self-government at a time when England was, in some real sense "a federation of counties".
British governments learned the lesson of American independence quite quickly and subsequently provided federal constitutions, notably for Canada, Australia and South Africa. Some eager imperialists even toyed with ideas of federating the whole empire. Thus, when the collapse of traditional balance of power policies became overwhelmingly apparent in the 1930s, English academics, principally economists and jurists, applied their minds to the problems of the divided Europe that was falling prey to the Italian and German dictators.
Lionel Curtis, who had learned his politics and ideas about federalism from experience of governing in South Africa, became an eminence grise in British internationalist circles. His close friend, Phillip Kerr, Lord Lothian, (a Scot, but working within the English political tradition) wrote some of the most persuasive tracts urging reform of the international political system. Others supported them in the second half of the decade. The most precisely aimed of their efforts was "A Federation for Western Europe", by Ivor Jennings, a distinguished jurist.
In 1938 and 39 a trio of young activists in London founded Federal Union and issued a series of Federal Tracts, which took up the ideas of these and other publicists, including William Beveridge, who in wartime Britain gained immense reclaim as the author of a pioneering social insurance report. By that time the war that Federal Union had been founded to forestall, was in its midst. The ideas of federalism, despite an offer of the prime minister, Winston Churchill, to a defeated France for an immediate federal union of Britain and France, were eclipsed.
But the story of the English contribution to federalist thinking did not stop. Instead, English writings, notably the Federalist Tracts, percolated through to the Resistance movement in Europe, most notably via a group of Italian political prisoners on the island of Ventotene, principal among them being Altiero Spinelli. As a result when the Resistance leaders came together after the war to plan for a future Europe without wars, they were deeply influenced by the federalist ideas that had been transmitted through the efforts of Federal Union.
John Roberts
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