Constituting Federal Sovereignty: The European Union in Comparative Context

5 Conclusions: State Behavior in Suprastate Unions

chapter 5 Conclusions: State Behavior in Suprastate Unions “Confederations . . . are usually stepping-stones to a federal state” (Murray Forsyth).1 “Federation, as opposed to unitary government, is only alive where there is an underlying confederative situation, a submerged ethnicity, . . . or a passionately held allegiance to past ‘history’ as a cantonal state amounting to an ethnicity” (Christopher Hughes).2 “It is unclear whether the motive of trade restriction is sufficient to replace the military motive in creating a European federation” (William Riker).3 Framing the Problem Attempts to generalize about confederations and federations as abstract categories have produced diametrically opposed conclusions, as the preceding quotations, produced within a span of fifteen years, illustrate. Murray Forsyth perceives a dominant tendency toward increased centralization , a tendency that Christopher Hughes sees as contributing to the extreme of unitary government save for the rare instances where truly powerful, countervailing cultural forces preserve citizen loyalty to regional units. William Riker, by contrast, sees a general tendency for federations to break apart whenever the military alliance motive—or tradewar -substitute motive—fades in importance. Studies in comparative politics face the alternative dangers of foundering on either the Scylla of generalizations so abstract as to be of little practical import in specific situations, or the Charybdis of immersion in particular details specific to a single polity to a degree that makes gener- alization impossible. This study has attempted to steer between these problems by examining a specific subcategory of federated union—those formed voluntarily, by independent states, in the modern Euro-American cultural context. This work has attempted to avoid entering the categorization debate over whether the European Union is best understood as a confederation, a federation, or a consociation.4 What is clear is that the form of the union has evolved rapidly in its first forty years; what is not clear is what the stopping point will be of what its own members agreed in Maastricht to call “an ever closer union.” Several scholars have asserted that it is already “a polity,” and should be analyzed as such (although typically the label is qualified by some adjective, as in “contested polity,” “multilevel polity,” or “compound polity.”)5 The goal here has been to ascertain what forces, in a nonconquest situation , cause formerly sovereign states to continue to maintain their willingness to cede sovereignty to a suprastate unit after their initial decision to join that unit. The question is particularly salient of late, in part because of the continued strengthening of the European Union, but also, more broadly, because modern states around the world are exhibiting an increased willingness to engage in multilateral commitments to be rendered enforceable by new suprastate courts.6 It is certainly plausible that some of this impetus toward joining larger governmental units is an attempt to form countervailing power blocs suitable for coping with the enormous consolidations of economic power visible in multinational corporations, and formations such as the International Monetary Fund. Not only do trade, finance, and labor forces cross state borders; so do environmental problems. Multigovernmental cooperation and the use of transgovernmental authorities for coping with those issues have already been going on for years. Indeed, the most recent works on what motivates transstate regional formations have stressed the fundamental motor force of responses to transstate economic forces—whether via domestic political leaders’ responding to domestic economic groups, or via interactions directly between transstate economic groups and EC supranational institutions, or both.7 Not only economic forces, however, have been at work. The more powerful nations of the world increasingly display an interest in establishing some sort of basic human rights regime, as evidenced by the strengthening of the European Court of Human Rights, the trial of Pinochet, the United Nations efforts in Bosnia, and the NATO effort in Kosovo.8 The recent explosion of suprastate free-trade regimes and human rights 142 constituting federal sovereignty regimes has, naturally, produced a new wave of scholarship that emphasizes economic motives for the former and ideological motives for the latter .9 This development contrasts with an earlier generation of scholarship on federated formations that tended to emphasize military or defense motives .10 Still, military and diplomatic concerns have not been entirely absent from scholarly analysis of motives for joining, for instance, the EC/ EU. The 1995 timing of the entry into the EC/EU of Cold War–neutral countries Austria, Finland, and Sweden was at the...