Let us review the agenda. The number one problem in the world today, and Trump’s greatest threat, is the climate crisis, which is accelerating its destructive consequences. Trump will undoubtedly promote fossil production, but the Environmental Protection Agency will maintain the protective and preventive regulations established over the past few years, 12 states will continue to apply restrictions on emissions, and large cities will continue to spread renewable energy.

Regarding immigration, this time Trump did not insist on the wall (most of which he failed to build while he was last in the White House). In this campaign, he turned to “mass deportations,” which can mean common-sense controls to cross the border, as already agreed with the Mexican government regarding non-Mexicans, or an illusory hunt for individuals without proper documents in neighborhoods, workplaces and family homes, which would not only be savage but logistically unfeasible. In reality, it is to be hoped that Congress will reactivate the bipartisan agreement for immigrants’ legalization and access to citizenship that Trump ordered to be stopped not because of its content but because it would have been approved during the campaign and would have taken away his favorite topic for demagoguery.

As for Israel and Palestine, the biggest problem is that Trump is now prioritizing enmity with Iran, which finances and pushes Hamas and Hezbollah and whose agents tried to assassinate him twice (or perhaps thrice). He will have a hard time resurrecting the Abraham Accords that his Jewish son-in-law negotiated during his first term: exploring again the two-state solution in exchange for diplomatic recognition of Israel by Arab countries. Now, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will only accept it if Trump diminishes his hostility against Iran, where a “reformist” candidate won the presidential election and seems to have appeased the fury.

Regarding Ukraine, Trump boasted that he would “fix it in 24 hours,” but was not very specific. Two days after the election, at the Valdai Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin rushed to offer a peace agreement based on the “self-determination” of the people of Donbas in exchange for respecting Ukraine’s borders. Putin also hinted that Russia could restore natural gas supplies through the Baltic to Germany, which Ukrainian agents destroyed. A Trump adviser has outlined a plan to defend Ukraine’s neutrality outside NATO for the next twenty years. All this sounds similar to the Minsk Agreements reached a few years ago by Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, which US President Barack Obama ignored.

In the face of Trump’s disdain, the European Union may reinforce internal solidity and external autonomy. Many NATO members are already ceasing to be free-riders on the United States and are fulfilling their commitment to invest at least 2% of GDP in defense. Their number has risen from four to 23 in just six years.

The biggest alarm raised by Trump’s election is that the future of democracy and legal security in the United States may be in jeopardy. Will there be “revenge” against “internal enemies,” and will he go after politicians, judges, generals, officials, journalists and other opponents? He may not need to once the pending court cases are canceled and he has satisfied his obsession with returning to power. The Senate Republican group has already rejected Trump’s nominee to lead it, and the Senate can veto some of his announced appointees. It is worth remembering that in his first term, Trump appointed three Chiefs of Staff in four years and changed most members of the Cabinet, including State, Defense, Justice, Interior and Homeland Security, a tenor of personal instability that is likely to continue.

Some of Trump’s boasts may end in a major ridicule, such as ordering Elon Musk to cut a third of the budget. Incompetence could also sink him in the face of some unforeseen catastrophe, as happened to during US President George Bush’s second term with Hurricane Katrina and to himself with the COVID-19 pandemic. Will Trump be able to maintain a regular daily work schedule in his eighties, or will he, like Joe Biden, be busy only from 10 AM to 4 PM? It is not guaranteed that he will complete four years in good shape.

Ultimately, Trump could also become a chaotic parody of the befuddled White House visitor in the film Being There (1979). As Mister Chance says, “I can’t write. I can’t read. But I like to watch television.” Just like Donald the Returned.

[The author’s blog first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post To Understand Trump, Take Him Seriously, but Not Literally appeared first on Fair Observer.

As physicists explain, a closed system invariably tends towards disorder. In more common political terms: Since the public agenda of viable issues is limited, if the government removes foreign policy from the main focus of attention, it opens space for the emergence of all the domestic issues that have never been resolved.

Trump’s priority was isolationism: closing the country to immigrants, imposing tariffs on imports, disengaging from NATO, and telling Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un and other satraps that they could do whatever they wanted.

The consequence of global withdrawal was the emergence of internal conflicts over immigration, race and police brutality, climate, sex and gender, religion, family and education, public health, gun control, voting rights, and so on. Of course, the unrest was aggravated by Trump’s racism and incompetence, as well as by the imbalances of the institutional system, but the strategic error is obvious.

For a great power like the United States, the most successful example of good government is the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. Historian Michael Rostovtzeff said that “the real diarchy” was not between the Emperor and the Senate (since the Emperor prevailed), but between the central government and the provinces and cities. The government should have two focuses: The central government should focus on public finances, defense and foreign policy (the opposite of what Trump did) while many smaller-scale matters should be widely decentralized to territorial units: the provinces or, in the case of the US, the states and cities.

In some ways, this was the model of government used by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. They focused on World War II and the Cold War while declining to interfere much in the internal affairs of states and giving ample space to the private economy. One of the costs was the territorial fragmentation of social policies, including the survival of racial segregation in some southern states. 

Again, this was the model for the second Cold War against the Soviet Union launched by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The US victory in this contest created a relatively short period of world hegemony, the last victory of which was the 1990 Persian Gulf War. President Bill Clinton continued an internal policy of decentralization until the end of the century, again at the expense of social policies on welfare and family issues.

The main risk of this approach is that, in the long term, it can produce imperial overload. Eisenhower already warned about this in 1961 when he denounced the excessive power of the military-industrial complex in his farewell speech. His successor, John F. Kennedy, initiated a major turnaround: He began a troop withdrawal from Vietnam, tried to stop secret CIA operations in Cuba and other countries, and reached several agreements with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear bombs — but he was not allowed to go any further. Immediately, protest movements began to emerge over civil rights and the forced recruitment of young people to go to wars of aggression in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Military defeats abroad generated political defeats at home: neither Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter completed two terms. 

The cycle began again after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. The government of President George W. Bush embarked on a series of “preventive” wars, including a phantasmagorical “Global War on Terrorism,” which could have excited patriotic emotions capable of calming internal tensions. However, even though the army was now made up of volunteers and professional soldiers rather than conscripts, the US suffered a series of humiliating military defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

The War on Terror: 22 Years On

Trump’s challenge was a reaction to all these costly failures. But his entropic isolationism opened space for the expression of a wide internal discontent and a diversity of demands and protests, a high political polarization between the two parties and a blockage between the presidency and Congress. 

These repeated cycles in American politics show a permanent dilemma: If the empire develops an aggressive foreign policy, it can gain a certain international dominance but also an overload of military defeats and financial deterioration. If, on the contrary, isolationism prevails, it can provide savings in defense but also internal disorder and chaos. 

The way out of the dilemma could be a corrected diarchy. A great power has to prioritize foreign policy and defense, yes, but not multiple aggressive wars. It needs to maintain and expand the number of its allies, which can help reduce deficits and defeats and promote international cooperation, open trade and peace. At the same time, an internal decentralization on controversial issues, such as some “woke” issues right now, could decrease national polarization. 

Trump has learned nothing from his experience. Should she become president instead, Vice President Harris will have to reflect and plan carefully before acting.

[The author’s blog first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s Imperial Dilemma appeared first on Fair Observer.

Indian democracy thrived despite economic headwinds

The success of democracy in India has dismissed the pessimistic auguries after Independence and the first election in 1952. But India is not an isolated case. Let’s look at the numbers. A little more than half of the world’s population lives in democracy. Let’s consider “rich” countries are to be those above the world average per capita income in purchasing power, around $18,000 per year. About half of the world population living in democracies lives in relatively poor countries like India, Indonesia and South Africa, while about half of the population living in dictatorships lives in relatively rich countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The case of India has puzzled some traditional sociologists because it does not fit the classical doctrine that economic development must precede democracy. Analysts from Seymour Lipset to Adam Przeworski have made this observation; the latter has repeatedly predicted that India would become a dictatorship before 2030. Yet India is not an exception or an anomaly. The earliest modern democracies, such as Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, had also enforced broad (male) suffrage for competitive elections in the nineteenth century, before industrialization and when they were fairly poor — as poor as India was in the mid-twentieth century or as it is now.

For about forty years after independence, when the Indian National Congress party, initially led by Jawaharlal Nehru, dominated the government, the centralized and closed Indian economy grew at an often-mocked annual rate of 1%. But since the early 1990s, when it has liberalized and opened to new technologies and globalization, India has enjoyed significant benefits from open trade and capital inflows. Against all expectations, the Indian per capita income at purchasing power has multiplied by six in thirty years.

Precisely because India was late in adopting more sophisticated institutions and policies, it has been able to adapt more readily to the global economy. In contrast to developed countries with old technologies and onerous preexisting social arrangements, India has not had to dismantle former industrial and bureaucratic structures that might have obstructed innovation.

Indian democracy is healthy in the 21st century

Consequently, Indian citizens declare that they prefer democracy to an authoritarian regime by a proportion of four to one. In the most recent international poll by the Pew Research Center, 72% of Indian citizens declared that they were satisfied with the way democracy works in their country — thus coming second only to Sweden and far above, for example, the United States at 33%.

The Congress Party, always led by Nehru’s descendants in the Gandhi family has traded power with the current incumbent People’s Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi seven times.

The electoral system is a copy of the colonial British tradition of single-member districts with simple plurality rule, which permits a party with less than 40% of votes to get an absolute majority of seats in the lower chamber of parliament. Yet, while numerous minor parties run independently, the two larger parties run in very broad electoral coalitions: In this year’s election, the BJP ran with a National Democratic Alliance with 12 mostly state-based or ethnic parties, while the opposition Congress is ran the “India National Development Inclusive Alliance” (so named to fit the acronym INDIA) with 23 parties, including several on the far left. Their participation in federal politics also works as a factor of the Indian union.

After the end of the Cold War, India initially replaced its old foreign policy of “non-alignment” with one of “strategic autonomy.” India still lacks a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council despite having become a nuclear power, and it is not a member of the Group of Seven despite being the fourth democratic economy in size. Nevertheless, India has become more dynamic in supporting the democratization of its neighboring countries in South Asia, which is still a poorly integrated region. It is also the oldest and most stable democracy of the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group, now enlarged to nine members, and has recently increased its relations and deals with the United States and the European Union in a world of fluctuating international coalitions. From a global and historical perspective, democracy in India is already one of the most remarkable contemporary achievements of humankind.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Indian Elections: The Greatest Democratic Celebration on Earth appeared first on Fair Observer.

An experiment in republican government

When Americans look back on their history, they tend to think — sometimes explicitly — that the framers of the constitution were divinely guided, producing a perfect document which was to endure for all time. Yet the truth is that framers were novices, and they did not have a solid conception of how the future republic would work. They had very few historical examples to go on.

Up until their time, republics had only governed cities, subnational entities or small nations like the Netherlands, Venice or Switzerland. Never before did a nation on the scale of the US adopt a republican constitution. At its inception, the US was already a nation of four million people (among whom 700,000 were slaves) with a land area four times the size of Great Britain.

Attempting something that had never been done before, the framers naturally made mistakes. Chief among these was the separation of powers. Following Montesquieu, they separated the executive from the legislature and divided the legislature into two chambers. Thus, they created a system full of veto points, where either the president or the Senate or the House of Representatives can stop legislation dead in its tracks.

The founders did not predict the emergence of the two-party system. At the time, formal parties did not exist. The founders expected that the best and most able men would be able to rise above party spirit and govern for the good of everyone. Yet a binary party system quickly arose, and it has dominated the US for the rest of its history. Most of the time, the president will find at least one of the chambers of Congress controlled by the opposite party. This means that deadlock typically rules the day.

With the hindsight of history, we now understand the minds of the framers better than the generation that ratified the constitution did. The delegates at the Constitutional Convention swore an oath of secrecy that was to last until their deaths. The reasoning that they published openly in writings like the Federalist Papers was not always the same as the reasoning they aired in the convention debates. In truth, the Federalist Papers neither describe what the framers intended to do or what they actually did.

The constitution was not an experiment in democracy, but an attempt to create a strong government that could unite the former colonies and resist the British Empire — with which the young nation still shared a continent. Thus, the framers created an extremely powerful president with war powers, a legislative veto and indefinite reelection, making him effectively an elected king. Alexander Hamilton even suggested giving the presidency legislative powers and toyed with the idea of making it hereditary.

The delegates were united in their wariness of democracy, which they viewed as a destabilizing and anarchic element. During the ratification debates in New York, James Madison warned that democracies “have ever been found spectacles of turbulence and contention … and as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Hamilton wrote that democracies were dominated by people who “commence as demagogues and end being tyrants.”

Yet the United States had just fought a revolution against unjust taxation without representation, so the framers needed to allow some kind of popular representation in the federal government. Thus, they created the House of Representatives, whose members the people elected directly. But the democratic principle ended here. The Senate was an appointed body. (It would only become elected with the 17th Amendment in 1913). Likewise, the president was chosen by electors empowered by the states. Both the upper house and the executive, with its veto power, had the ability to block any initiative from the popularly elected lower house. Thus, the framers ensured that democracy could not take over the federal government.

The framers hoped to create a system that required gentlemanly deliberation and consensus-building. Yet the constitution was a first (or second) try, and they were aware that it would need to be revised and corrected with the experience of history. They were not able to predict how the operation of the government would turn out in practice. Neither did they predict how fiendishly difficult it would be to amend the constitution in light of its revealed flaws.

United in war, divided in peace

So, the framers installed a system that was riddled with divisions and veto points. It may have been effective at preventing the passage of bad laws, but it was not very effective at allowing the passage of good laws. Indeed, the system only works when Americans have a common purpose around which the different parties and branches of government can unite and coordinate their action. The British Empire was the common enemy that played that role for the founding generation. Indeed, the US would have to fight another war for its very existence against the British in 1812. The various political forces were more-or-less able to cooperate until the threat receded.

Then came the Jacksonian age, marked by increased political strife to the point of physical altercations on the house floor. Sectarian and regional divisions grew, and Americans learned to hate one another. It became impossible to build a political or cultural consensus, and this strife eventually culminated in the Civil War, which is to this day the bloodiest war in American history.

After the war, the victorious North was unable to pick up the pieces in a conclusive way. The project of reconstruction failed to reintegrate the fractured nation, and it continued to be divided until it faced a new external threat — fascism. In World War II, Americans put aside their differences for the cause of defeating fascism. After the war, they remained united in a common purpose to defeat communism in the Cold War. The political system, united to make war on external foes, rallied behind the president whose function it is to make war and to negotiate with foreign powers. Thus, it granted the president increasingly broad authority. Likewise, the population feared external threats and was more inclined to trust and cooperate with the government. Voters did not demand as much public scrutiny of politicians.

Yet the communist threat too receded. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mentality of the Cold War morphed into an internal cold war wherein the two parties began casting each other as ideological threats and existential enemies. The past 30 years have thus been another period of low external threat and high internal conflict and, thus, political dysfunction. These days, we can hardly pass a budget without destructive political wrangling and brinksmanship.

America is only functional and free from domestic strife when it has an enemy to fight. When it does not, the divisions inherent in the system come out, and the nation descends into polarization, infighting and dysfunction.

A system built to fail

Some analysts would blame polarization right-wing populists who stir up anger and mistrust. But every large nation has some of those. What makes America different are its divided institutions that make it uniquely susceptible to this kind of politics.

In Germany, for example, there are nationalists, but they are largely sidelined by a majoritarian parliamentary system that encourages more consensus-building in the center than a binary divide. In the American system, there are only two options. In both local and national elections, people can merely vote for the lesser evil candidate, who thus wins a large mandate and has litte incentive to compromise.

To make matters worse, since the two candidates are chosen by primary voters who tend to be the most motivated and ideological voters in a party, the candidates skew even farther towards the extremes and away from the center. The result is that candidates fail to represent what most Americans actually want. This, too, is a privation of democratic governance.

Eventually, people will lose patience with an ineffective system that cannot provide solutions to the problems they have. They will turn away from divided legislatures to the only actor that can act unilaterally, which is the presidency. Thus, the president concentrates power and rules by executive order. In this way, too, the system fails to be democratic.

Something has to change. Yet the only mechanism for changing the constitution itself — the amendment process — is itself riddled with veto points, and it is almost impossible to actually use. But all hope is not lost. There are some methods that we could implement now without needing to pass an amendment.

First, we can reform electoral practices. Right now, some local and state governments are experimenting new voting methods, such as approval voting or ranked choice voting, which would be more open to numerous candidates and promote the formation of a consensus around the winner instead of an adversarial relationship. These experiments may become more widely imitated in the future.

Second, we need a more cooperative relationship between the president and Congress. One seldom-talked-about aspect of the constitution is that the vice president is also the president of the Senate. Thus, the vice president is a figure that can function as a liaison between the legislature and the executive, smoothing processes and helping to build agreement.

Third, the US should draw upon the resources of its federal structure. Not every conflict needs to be resolved in an all-or-nothing manner on the federal level. A greater degree of decentralization, which allows different jurisdictions to try different things and for deliberation to happen closest to those affected by it, could go a long way in diffusing the conflicts and polarization that bedevil federal politics today.

[Anton Schauble wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Why Are US Politics Dysfunctional? Look at the Constitution. appeared first on Fair Observer.

The controversial policy is the public debt. The United States’ national debt reached nearly 100% of GDP, prompting Congress to suspend its debt ceiling months ago. Last month, Congress failed to reach an agreement for the annual budget. Ultras in the Republican party wanted to scrap certain expenses, in particular those regarding the supply of weapons and aid to Ukraine.

A last-minute agreement avoided shutdown for a few weeks, but the wacky little wing of the Republican caucus accused Speaker McCarthy of betraying the party and triggered a motion to remove him. The episode is not completely new, as the past three Republican speakers of the House were pestered by their own side and resigned or retired before being ousted. But this is the first time in history that they’ve succeeded in actually firing the Speaker.

A conflict over policy

The policy conflict should not be dismissed as simply the result of acrimony. Bipartisanship and cooperation in Congress flourished during several decades of foreign tension through World War II and the Cold War as external existential threats triggered national unity. But when the mortal external risk became paltry, it looked like there were no limits to internal confrontation.

Over the last thirty years, the public agenda of controversial issues has grown enormously. With just a little exaggeration, one could say that the international Cold War was replaced with a domestic political war. Right now, it is not coincidental that the most aggressive Republicans spurn US aid to Ukraine. A focus on external conflict would reduce the space for domestic policy and make internal confrontation less easy. The new war in Israel may increase their malaise.

A conflict caused by institutions

The institutional flaw is that the framework based on the separation of powers with only two parties incentivizes and exacerbates political animosity. With pervasive partisan antagonism, the filters and “checks” between the House, the Senate and the presidency do not produce fair balances as expected. Actually, mutual checks between institutions boost parties’ hostilities and preclude effective governance.

The two major political parties in the US encompass a range of policy proposals and ideological orientations comparable to the typical European system with multiple parties: There are liberals and socialists within the Democratic Party, conservatives and populists within the Republican Party, and the minor Greens and Libertarians flanking each side. The system has produced factional candidacies and long disputes within each party to select its candidates. There is ideological plurality within parties, but not at the level of competitive bidding for public office. This forces political polarization, as I analyze in my book, Constitutional Polarization: A Critical Review of the U.S. Political System.

An additional factor is the system of primary elections to select candidates. In traditional closed-party primaries, low participation heavily skews the vote toward extreme positions on issues with no social or political consensus. The participants in primaries are typically the most active and ideologically motivated people in the entire electorate, so they often favor candidates prone to foster antagonism.

In congressional primaries, only about a fifth of eligible voters tend to participate. On many occasions, the winner in a primary for an open seat, which tends to attract multiple candidates, wins only a plurality of the vote. Thus, many candidates for House seats have been selected by less than a tenth of their party voters. Closed-party primaries can select minority-supported candidates that might not be most preferred by the general public. This is how the House of Representatives is formed and why some of its members sometimes behave like firebrands.

It may be significant that none of the eight Republicans who voted to overthrow McCarthy were elected in any of the five states that select their representatives by top-two open primaries or by ranked-choice voting, alternative systems to closed party primaries that favor more moderate and consensual winners (Louisiana, Washington, California, Alaska, and Maine). 

The immediate consequence of the current calamity is the blockage of legislation for the next few weeks. Yet even if the House resumes its activity soon, the threat of a government shutdown in November remains on the horizon.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Why Is Congress So Polarized? It’s the Institutions appeared first on Fair Observer.

Like many other European countries, Spain’s party system is fragmented and polarized, which renders the country ungovernable. And as in other countries, when it is able to form governments, they will be governments of the Frankenstein type, formed by stitching together multiple heterogeneous parties into an improbable and lackluster unity.

For one thing, votes are now more dispersed across parties. In the nine elections from 1982 to 2011, the two largest parties, the Socialist Party and the People’s Party, averaged a total of 75% of the votes. In the most recent four elections, from 2015 to 2019, however, the main parties’ combined average was only 50%. In last week’s election, it was 65%, which is not a clear indication of any return to solid bipartisanship; both the Socialists and the People’s Party will need the support of other parties if they hope to govern. This seems to be becoming something of a new normal for Spain.

As a consequence of the parties’ inability to form parliamentary majorities, snap elections were called in 2016 and 2019, leaving the country without a government for many months. If Spain holds one more snap election, its record of misgovernment will approach those of that Bulgaria, Romania and Israel which have likewise undergone repeated elections.

Disintegration of political norms

Since the country’s modern democratic constitution came into force in 1978, Spain did not have a successful vote of no confidence for 39 years. This streak was broken in 2018 with the confidence motion that brought down Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. This development signified instability and dissatisfaction with the system.

The second election in 2019 ruptured another Spanish political tradition. For 37 years, Spain had avoided the need for a coalition government. Each ruling party governed alone until Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists found themselves constrained to form a coalition with the leftist Podemos party in 2020. Spain thus lost its distinction as the only country in Europe where a coalition government had never been formed.

What’s worse, it was a minority coalition; on top of the difficulties of negotiating and agreeing between government partners, it needed to transact with other parties in Parliament that lacked a general commitment to cooperate. There were opportunities to form a grand coalition government in both 2015 and 2019, but cowardice prevented it. The evaporation of the centrist party Citizens, which would have been the bridge, sealed the possibility altogether.

Another tradition that fell by the wayside in recent years was the absence of far-right parties, a trait due to the memory of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. In other European countries, the engine of the populist reaction was the financial crisis, austerity policies, and massive immigration. But the Spanish far-right did not gain a voice when those parties jumped on the stage, but later, immediately after the referendum for the independence of Catalonia in 2017. The Vox party—the “Voice” of the nation, which jumps, exasperated, like an automatic spring at any sign of territorial tension—was, above all, a jingoistic overreaction to Catalan nationalist provocations.

Now, it has backfired. As a counter-reaction to Vox, the Catalan independentists have become a pivot to form a majority in the Spanish Parliament. The incumbent prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, needs the votes or at least the abstention of the Catalan pro-independence parties to govern again. They will ask for the moon in return.

Spain is at an impasse

The People’s Party and the Socialist Party may be tempted to hold another catastrophic snap election because they can expect that, as occurred on both previous occasions, both abstention and the percentage of votes for the two larger parties would increase.

Given this situation of Frankensteinian normality, some of the democratic reforms that many Spaniards have desired for years may no longer be a priority and could even become counterproductive. A more proportional electoral system, which has been long demanded, would allow even more parties to enter Parliament and make it even more difficult to form a majority, aggravating the governance problem.

Any complex, open and pluralistic political system entails high transaction costs. That is to say, it tends to reproduce the problems of information, coordination, negotiation and implementation of collective decisions that society cannot solve for itself and that, precisely for this reason, it transfers to the institutional sphere.

In today’s Europe and today’s world, with large scale and very high transaction costs, the most effective way to improve governance would be more transfers to other levels of government, especially the European Union and global institutions. As we are faced with problems of the magnitude of financial fragility, energy and food interdependence, vulnerability to epidemics, transcontinental migrations, the deployment of artificial intelligence, climate change, and new border conflicts, our highest priority is to execute competent decisions and recommendations in a way that is accountable to the public for their results. 

In this context, citizens’ relatively high electoral abstention may be inevitable and not very hurting. More necessary and beneficial would be higher abstention from superfluous and conflict-prone legislation on the part of a Frankenstein government.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Must Spain Cobble Together Another Frankenstein Government? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The two countries, the United States and Spain, had similar populations at the time, about 30 million and 25 million, respectively, and in both cases, the number of casualties was about 2.5% of the country’s population: about 750,000 in the US and about 540,000, plus 50,000 executed in the immediate postwar, in Spain. In neither of the two cases did the civil war explode overnight, however.

Factional Violence is America’s Normal

In the United States, angry riots and revolts, such as we have seen in recent times, are no new phenomenon, and the period previous to its civil war was likewise one of increasing confrontation.

America Needed Something to Smash

The generation of the so-called Founding Fathers provided the revered first five presidents. But the election of General Andrew Jackson, who is Donald Trump’s favorite president, as the seventh president opened thirty years of partisan turbulence and mayhem. For several decades, the average turnout in presidential elections was 80% of eligible voters, a level that would never be reached again by far. Congress was a verbal and physical battlefield, including more than one hundred incidents of violence in the House and Senate chambers.

In her recent book, historian Joanne B. Freeman has studied that “field of blood,” in which “armed groups of Northern and Southern congressmen engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the floor… Fighting became endemic and congressmen strapped on knives and guns before heading to the Capitol every morning.” By her description, the incidents “involved physical action —punching, slapping, caning, lunging, shoving, dueling, wielding weapons, flipping desks, breaking windows, and the like.”

Divided Politics Breed Resentment

This polarization, mostly around the slavery issue, culminated in the 1856 and 1860 presidential elections. In the former, the pro-slavery Democrat candidate, James Buchanan, won the majority in the Electoral College with a minority of around 45% of the popular vote against the divided anti-slavery candidacies. In 1860, reversing the situation, the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln carried eighteen of the thirty-three states then existing, with less than 40% of the popular vote, against the divided pro-slavery candidacies. The subsequent secession of eleven Southern states triggered Lincoln’s military response and the civil war.

In Spain likewise, the institutional crisis previous to the civil war had been developing at least since the military coup d’état in 1923. During the period of the Second Republic (1931–1939), there were also elections with less-than-straightforward results. In 1933, the right, consisting of Catholics and monarchists, received support from 34% of voters, but together with some center-right republican parties managed to collect a majority of seats in parliament against the divided republicans and socialists. Then, in 1936, the united left, as the Popular Front, won a majority of seats with the support of only 46% of voters against the divided center-right and right. The subsequent military uprising triggered civil war.

Civil War Memories More Alive Than Most Think

If you visit Washington, DC, today, you will see that the civil war still appears as a major foundational moment. The Lincoln Memorial, which is an enlarged copy of the Parthenon, is the most revered and visited monument both by American and foreign tourists. All across the city, there are equestrian statues with generals of the Civil War, more numerous than those commemorating the previous American Revolutionary War. On the other side of the Potomac, the civil war seems just as present. Some time ago, I was at a high-level academic event at George Mason University, in Virginia, when the keynote speaker ended a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of decentralization with the reflection: “And that’s why we lost the war.” It has been only in the last few years that monuments and street names dedicated to the leaders of the defeated secessionist Confederacy have begun to be removed in some southern states.

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

Of course, the big difference is that in the United States the winners restored democracy (although slavery was to be replaced with racial segregation for several decades), while in Spain, the winners held the country down and secluded for forty years. Nevertheless, the foundation of the Spanish democracy in the 1970s was also strongly marked by the dissuasive memory of the civil war. Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez commented that he won the first election “because I was moving the Spaniards away from the danger of a confrontation after Franco’s death. They did not support me out of wishful thinking and longing for liberties, but out of fear of that confrontation; because I separated them from the horns of that bull.”

With a little emotional and physical distance, one can notice how, in Spain, a verbal civil war is still often latent in bitter partisan confrontations, the shouting of certain opinion-makers in the media, and the quarrels that take place in a polarized parliament. In the United States, one might have expected more forgetfulness because nobody alive has ever met a person who had seen a slave. Yet, political polarization between the North and the South remains a deep rift, still heralded by the extreme right with Confederate flags.

When does a civil war stop being a major element of political confrontation? It may be that any traumatic civil war can produce endless reverberations.

[The author’s blog first published this piece.]
[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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I take the view that the conflict arose from the expansion of NATO to ex-communist countries in breach of initial promises to Moscow. The unstated aim was to block any attempt by Russia to reemerge as a major world power. The list of new NATO members after the Cold War includes the former East Germany, three former members of the Soviet Union and five former members of the Warsaw Pact. 

It is also well known that some de facto powers in the US have a private financial interest in the war industry. President Dwight Eisenhower, who was Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Chief of Staff of United States Army, knew what he was talking about when he warned citizens in his farewell address in 1961 to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower predicted that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” 

An enemy has its uses

It is well known that warmongering think tanks in Washington pushed to arm Ukraine after the Russian occupation of Crimea. Many Washington, DC strategists believe that the lesson of American defeats in the Middle East is that the US must sell arms without sending soldiers. That benefits shareholders, creates jobs and keeps America as the dominant superpower.

Private geopolitical and economic interests for the foreign conflict need a favorable internal political situation, something I discuss in my forthcoming book Constitutional Polarization: A critical review of the U.S. political system. When the country was under internal construction during the 19th century, it had no foreign policy. 

The issues at that time were territorial expansion from the thirteen independent colonies, the structure of new territories and states and the layout of their boundaries. Only since the early 20th century, when the United States established fixed continental borders and became internally organized as a more stable federation, has it been able to pursue an independent foreign policy. 

However, American foreign policy is heavily clouded by the ineffectiveness of the domestic political system. The constitutional formula for the separation of powers between a legislative Congress and an executive President with only two political parties tends to produce deadlocks. They often lead to legislative paralysis, frequent government shutdowns and presidential impeachments. 

Only existential threats make bipartisan cooperation possible. Only then do the White House and Capitol Hill work together. This proved to be the case during both World War II and the Cold War. The call for war in the 1940s, the “Red Scare” in the 1950s and its second edition in the 1980s were accompanied by popular feelings of fear and national unity, as well as low electoral participation and widespread political apathy. 

In contrast, during the last thirty years of relative peace, unresolved internal political issues and new demands have emerged on all sorts of issues: health, climate, immigration, race, religion, gender, sex, family, education, gun control and voting rights. These  have caused mass mobilizations, protests, confrontations and partisan polarization. External fear has been replaced by internal anger. 

An external enemy helps political leaders

When President Bill Clinton was under siege from Republicans on all sides, he confessed, “I would have preferred to be president during World War II” and “I was envious that Kennedy had an enemy.” President George W. Bush also longed for such a past when he launched the fight against a new “axis of evil” and Islamist terrorism that, according to his nonsensical logic, “followed the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” 

President Barack Obama was paralyzed by the suspicion that ending those wars might open up too many divisive domestic issues. It was President Donald Trump who started the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East and the first president in many years who did not start a new war; as a result, he faced an inner hell. 

President Joe Biden and the Democrats know that the Republicans will block any initiative on economic, social and cultural issues in the House of Representatives. To attract their cooperation in this context of yet another divided government, the Democrats may adopt a belligerent foreign policy. A bipartisan foreign policy could satisfy the geopolitical interest of expanding NATO, containing Russia and making money for the American defense industry. 

The US faces a constant dilemma between internal anger and external fear. This constantly creates political tension. This tension is resolved when faced by a transparently bad foreign enemy. Russia plays this role perfectly today. In the past, the Soviet Union, its earlier avatar, played the same role.

Yet, we are not living the nationalist hysteria of the Cold War, but a flimsy bad copy of it. Security and military chiefs, including William Burns, the former ambassador to Russia and current CIA director, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, remember Eisenhower’s warning. They are more aware of the human costs of war than politicians who are worrying about the next election. Hence, both Burns and Milley have no overriding interest in another long-running conflict and are pushing for peace negotiations. It remains to be seen if the politicians let them succeed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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On the eastern side, the Russian rulers are strongly interested in maintaining control over Siberia, which gives the country access to the Pacific Ocean. Hence, they have a geopolitical interest in having friendly relations with China. On the western side, Russia retains access to the Baltic Sea in Saint Petersburg and has managed to keep the enclave of Kaliningrad despite the three Baltic republics declaring independence from the Soviet Union. On the southern side, Russia wants access to the Black Sea, which is the gateway to the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. Hence, Crimea is of vital importance to Russia.

If Putin were a new Peter the Great or a new Stalin, a settlement between great powers would be within reach: a Yalta-Potsdam-style division of spheres of influence. But as a country in decline with repeated loss of territories, Russia views the hostility from its neighbors as an existential threat. Therefore, it has responded with exasperated despair.

Not a very good war so far

The invasion has not worked as well for Russia as Putin expected. We have learned that, in war, it is more difficult to conquer than to defend. Some experts in military history and strategy estimate that for an attack to succeed in conquering adverse territory, the attacker may need three times more resources, in troops and weapons, than the defender. This alone can explain why, so far, the Russians haven’t entered Kyiv or Kharkiv, while the Ukrainians have not arrived in Crimea or most of the Donbas.

The attacker’s disadvantage is aggravated by bad management, typical of authoritarian governments. As stated by strategist Lawrence Freedman, “A lot of most catastrophic decisions come from autocratic decision-making.” Autocracies lack open and often critical feedback. They believe that “the advantage of autocracy is bold and decisive decision-making.” However, the lack of feedback mechanisms mean that “one poor decision or bit of bad luck can put [them] out completely.”

Along with catastrophic decisions, Russia has been hampered by the fact that some crucial potential allies have not joined its adventure. A few weeks before the invasion, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed an agreement for “unlimited cooperation,” but the Chinese have kept their distance since the war broke out. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has gone further than Xi and told Putin in public that today’s era is not an era of war.

A long bloody war looms

The current protracted stalemate has so far not yielded a clear winner. In a lecture at Georgetown University, CIA Director William Burns said that the next six months will be critically decisive. He suggested that the alternatives are either a quick military overturn followed by negotiation and peace or an escalation towards a long war.

A negotiated peace would require that none of the two sides achieves absolute victory or faces bitter defeat. In his recent visit to Warsaw, US President Joe Biden declared that “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never.” This is a very different declaration to a call for Ukrainian victory or Russian defeat.

So far, both Russia and Ukraine are still at the rhetorical stage of being maximalist in their demands. Each expects to be in a strong position if a real negotiation ever starts. In the past, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy explicitly stated he could accept painful concessions on Crimea and Donbas, which were the original objectives of the Russian “special military operation.” As the war has gone on, Zelenskyy has changed his position. He regularly proclaims his determination to move back to Ukraine’s 2014 borders. Zelenskyy also insists on applying for EU and NATO memberships. Russia, in turn, verbally rejects any concession of moving backward.

For an escalation in conflict, the Kremlin would have to make risky domestic moves, including new conscriptions and mass mobilizations. This would make Russian politics the continuation of war by other means, which is what Clausewitz meant even if he phrased it the other way. It is from impatience and distress that Putin toys with using tactical nuclear weapons over Kyiv. He is playing a game of chicken with the US on the assumption that Washington wants to avoid the risk of World War III.

As of now, it seems that Ukraine might be able to sustain its belligerence for as long as the US and NATO keep providing increasingly effective and lethal weapons, including drones, missiles, tanks and even fighter jets. However, political calculations and concern about excessive financial costs of war might make the US Congress and several European countries restrict unrestricted support.

The conflict has already lasted longer than many regional wars and might degenerate into a war of attrition. An end might come from changes away from the war fronts. There should be elections in Russia and Ukraine twelve months from now. There is uncertainty not only about the results of these elections but also whether they will actually be held. The US, the UK and the European Parliament also face elections in 2024, which will come in the middle of a war.One thing we certainly know and can be sure about is that war is the worst human activity with tragic consequences of death and destruction. We have plenty of information and images about the human tragedy in Ukraine. To understand the gruesome nature of war further, you could watch the movie All Quiet on the Western Front. It is probably the best war movie ever because of the way it captures the horrors of war. Sadly, that horror continue for a while in Ukraine.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The growing possibility that Nicholas Sarkozy can lose the second round of the presidential election in France, suggests that the political consequences of the economic crisis in Europe are bad for both leftist and rightist governments. Electorates are "firing the coach", as sport teams do when their performance worsens, even though many people might realize that the coach or prime minister is not always fully responsible for the economy’s performance.

Together with Pedro Magalhaes, we organized an international academic conference on this topic at Georgetown University a few days ago. You can click below for the full version of our paper, which is summarized here:

Government parties in the EU countries have been losing elections in high frequency during the last few years. The electoral performance of the incumbent ruling party appears to be clearly associated with the economic performance of the country just prior to the election. The relative losses of votes are somewhat higher for large parties, which typically form single-party governments or party-dominated coalitions, than for smaller parties participating in multiparty coalition governments, as the former can more easily be made responsible for bad economic performance than the latter can. Defeat of incumbents is a possibility for both leftist and rightist governments, depending on the economic conditions in which they run for reelection.

European electorates may be experiencing an increasing frustration of previously accumulated expectations regarding their government’s management. The increasing trans-nationalization of economic relations has further weakened the state governments’ capability to face economic difficulties, and has subsequently weakened the voter’s trust and support. Parties have a tendency to converge on economic policy positions, which is greatly a result of the increasingly authoritative role of EU institutions over the state governments. This, combined with trans-nationalization, has made the voter’s electoral choices in state-level elections less relevant for policy making.

We suggest a comparison between the voter’s and the sport team’s typical “fire the coach” reaction. As elaborated in the growing discipline of the economics of football, firing the coach is analyzed as a ritual scapegoating. Sport club members, like voters in state-level elections in our case, can be aware of the fact that a failure, such a team’s or an economy’s underperformance, is due to a number of factors that cannot be fairly simplified as only bad management. But managers and governments are punished nonetheless, even if many people realize that they are not always fully responsible for the team’s or economy’s performance. This happens because bad government performance makes voters unlikely to trust their promises for the future, and regular democratic functioning requires making the managers and the rulers accountable.

Nevertheless, just as the appointment of a new coach may not enhance team performance, the choice of a new prime minister may make no difference to a country’s economic performance. Rather, increasing political instability can even add a new element of distrust and trouble to the numerous previously existing factors that caused economic recession and high unemployment. In many elections across Europe in the last few years, voters have offered the prime minister’s head in ritual sacrifice. But as a change of prime minister may not improve the government’s capacity for facing the crisis effectively, further disappointments may further increase the frequency of government turnover and the degree of political instability.

*[This article was originally published on Dr. Colomer's blog.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The future can be Italy. Mark Leonard envisages different scenarios for the future of the European Union, all implying clear choices of institutional formulas and diverse relations between member states and the Union. But Italy is already working on the basis of just broad policy consensus and non-party government. This could become the actual model for the EU and its member states in the short term.

A little more than one hundred days ago, Mario Monti became Italian Prime Minister after winning the confidence of 90% of members of parliament. Yet his government does not include any member of any political party. It is not enforcing partisan electoral promises, but the budgetary, tax, pension and other policies approved at the top of the European Union. This and comparable developments in Portugal, Greece, Spain and other countries, is making political elections at the state level in Europe almost irrelevant for policy-making.

Actually, governments are losing elections like never before. There have been 30 parliamentary elections in 26 EU member-states (including Croatia) since the moment when the current economic crisis exploded more visibly in September 2008. After 19 of these elections the incumbent prime minister’s party has been replaced with a member of another party. This ratio of two-thirds of government defeats is in dramatic contrast with the traditional incumbent advantage which made governments win about two-thirds of the elections in the previous six decades. The most dramatic cases in the last few years include Hungary, where the government party lost more than half of its previous electoral support; Ireland, where the most common ruling party since the country’s independence slipped to third in terms of votes; and Spain, where the governing party got its worst results and the opposition party its best results ever. The coming election in Greece may even beat these records, according to some pre-electoral polls.

Yet it may well also be the case that if the economic situation does not improve clearly in the next few years – as is widely forecasted – some of the current winners may become losers at the following election. This has already happened in the two cases of anticipated elections in the last few months, in Slovenia and Croatia, where the recent winners were crushed. Entire party systems, that have sustained the working of democratic regimes in many countries of Europe for decades, can be shaken.

Can a country survive without a partisan state government? The popularity of the Italian government seems to indicate that it actually can do it better than many of its predecessors. A variant of this type of experience has taken place in Belgium, which has been under interim or caretaker federal governments for about half of the last five years, including a world record 18-month absence after the 2010 election. This has not been a direct consequence of the economic crisis, but was rather mainly due to the country’s territorial division. Nonetheless, as Belgian political scientists Kris Deschouwer and Marc Hooghe aver in a forthcoming collection of articles, the Belgian case informs us more generally about “the conditions of governance given the current trend towards multi-level governance in the European Union”.

In fact, the absence of partisan state governments is having only a limited impact on governance. Technical or caretaker governments, as in Italy, Greece and Belgium, limit themselves to implementing earlier agreed EU obligations, especially with regard to budget and economic policy. The existence of multiple level governments including local, regional, state and Union bodies is a safeguard against government ineffectiveness. Non-party governance is also helped by the role of non-elected and non-partisan bodies, including the civil service and the judicial system, which rely on standard administrative procedures.

Nowadays, whether a member state of the European Union has right-wing or left-wing parties in government does not make a significant difference in practice. It’s the EU, or at least the small ruling group informally formed recently around the presidency of the European Council, that has taken over some of the most fundamental and traditional tasks of state governments. The opportunity created by the current financial and economic crisis is completing the loss of sovereignty of the states. If there is no sovereignty, there is no state. And if there is no state, there is no state democracy, to be sure. A crucial mismatch, then, is that while consensual policy-making and effectiveness is increasingly placed at the EU level, Europe-wide policy-makers are still based on state-level elections. For democracy to survive and retrieve in Europe, responsiveness and accountability of rulers should be moving from the state level to the EU level, where so many crucial decisions are already being made.

This piece is one of a series by influential thinkers and academics, as part of ECFR’s Reinvention of Europe project.

*[This article was originally published by ECFR on February 27, 2012.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Europe is certainly at a crossroads. The current economic crisis challenges previous institutional arrangements and induces innovative Europe-wide responses in favour of more integration and less state sovereignty. For some, the process of building the EU begun in the mid-twentieth century has been too long and too slow and the Union’s decision-making mechanisms are still too inefficient. However, if we adopt a comparative historical perspective of the most similar experience of building a continental democratic federation in modern times – the United States of America – the EU can still make it and may soon reach a crucial, irreversible point.

Where does Europe end?

Before discussing new processes of institution-building and reform, we should be aware of a crucial decision for the EU to make, which is the establishment of clear external borders. Only when the territorial limits of the Union will be stable, will Europe be able to make its internal institutions work effectively, achieve sufficient economic and legal integration, and develop a consistent foreign policy beyond the problems of dealing with potential members and uncertain neighbours. In this regard, the European Union may be close to the tipping point that was passed by the US about one hundred years ago.

For the US, the process of annexing the bulk of its current territory – once the initial 13 colonies became independent states – took more than 60 years (approximately between 1787 and 1850). The territory of the initial core was finally increased about four-fold. The population in the original territories at the time of independence from Britain constituted about half of the later total population.

Similarly, for the EU, the process of enlargements from its initial six member-states, which formally began in 1957, has already lasted more than 50 years, while several large territories remain potential subjects for further inclusion. So far, the initial territory of the founding members (not counting their former colonies overseas) has increased three-fold. As in the US, the population of the six initial EU member-states currently constitutes about half of the total EU population.

As with the present day EU, the establishment of the American Union’s external borders was not predetermined by geography or destiny. Several additional territories could have been included, while some current members could have remained outside. Specifically, the limits in the north-east corner sought not only to include the basin of the St. Lawrence River, but sufficient land in Canada to allow access to Quebec and Montreal. In the north-west, negotiations led to the former Oregon ‘Country’ being split with the British, subsequently forming part of the Canadian province of British Columbia. In the west, half of California was in, while the other half was out, in Mexico. In the south, Puerto Rico was associated with the Union, while Cuba, though geographically closer, was not. Not to mention territorially disconnected Alaska and the Pacific archipelagos. Rather than being shaped by natural features, the territorial limits of the American Union were established for the Union’s capacity for assimilation and the consistent institutionalization of its components.

Likewise, the external borders and the internal membership of the territories forming the EU are not entirely predetermined by Christendom or geography. The initial core of the European community was located at the territorial centre of the continent, largely coinciding with the lands of Charlemagne’s medieval empire which later evolved into the Holy Roman and German Empire. After successive enlargements, the frontiers of the Union are now at the Atlantic Ocean in the west, the Mediterranean Sea in the south, and the Arctic Ocean in the north.

Nevertheless, in the south-east corner in particular, the limits of the EU are still undefined. While Croatia has definitely confirmed its membership, official and officially potential candidates to join the European Union now include all the remaining former members of Yugoslavia, that is, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and the international protectorate of Kosovo, as well as enclosed Albania. All these countries already belong to the Stabilization and Association Agreement which gives them access to EU markets and financial support. They are now completely encircled by EU territory. The total population of these seven countries is only 5% of the total population of the EU, which may make them adaptable to EU rules and processes at not insurmountable costs. Some of the current candidates’ access to full membership to the EU may depend on pending democratization and institutionalization. A failure to integrate these countries might imply the persistence of conflicts and violence and make the area a kind of temporary ‘Wild East’ of the Union. If the Balkans remained outside, they would risk becoming the Caribbean of Europe, with comparable features of internal instability, mass emigration and recurrent hostility to the EU.

More controversial is Turkey’s candidacy. This remnant of the Ottoman Empire, a very large, underdeveloped, mostly Muslim and strongly nationalist country, is also subject to scrutiny regarding its civil rights and democratic credentials. Also, although the whole of Cyprus officially belongs to the EU, about one-third of the territory in the north of the island is a Turkish enclave beyond EU control. The exclusion of Turkey from the EU might evoke the exclusion of Mexico from the American Union, including its subsequent effects of isolationism and resentment. However, given the current situation, it seems unavoidable.

Abandoning sovereignty

The EU’s assimilation of new territories and states requires increasing efforts, as they are located at increasing distances from the initial centre and have significantly different populations in economic and ethnic terms. As occurred in America during the 19th century, territorial expansion was able to assimilate new, relatively close units at the beginning, but it had to adopt more flexible formulas of linkage and association with less cohesive territories in the more distant peripheries.

Nevertheless, building a stable, federal EU implies abandoning the concept of sovereignty that was forged around the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century and which has been gradually eroded as the process of Europe-wide integration has moved ahead. This was certainly anticipated by the founding fathers of the European community as the assertion of states’ sovereignty led to increasingly frequent and lethal inter-state wars. One of them, Jean Monnet, forecast during World War II:

‘There will be no peace in Europe if the states rebuild themselves on the basis of national sovereignty, with its implications of prestige politics and economic protection (…). The countries of Europe are not strong enough individually to be able to guarantee prosperity and social development for their peoples. The states of Europe must therefore form a federation or a European entity that would make them into a common economic unit.’

The current economic challenges make this diagnosis and recipe more relevant than ever. However, as for the process of territorial delimitation mentioned above, building federal political institutions from previously existing ‘sovereign’ states may take a while. In America, since the official establishment of the US in the late 18th century and for more than one hundred years, the founding states of the Union kept their ‘sovereign’ rights, very different institutions existed across the territory (including direct rule from Washington) and the territorial limits of the union were undefined. Only after the inter-state, intra-American Civil War, did the US begin to be referred to in the singular–the United States ‘is’, rather than ‘are’. A US-wide intelligence agency and security organization, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, only came into being in 1908, while the central bank known as the Federal Reserve, for conducting a common monetary policy, was established five years later in response to a series of financial crises. The union only managed to organize the whole territory into states with elected legislatures and governors as late as the early 20th century. As for the federal institutions, the number of seats in the House of Representatives was only established in 1911 and the federal Senate began to be elected with homogeneous rules in all the states just two years later.

In comparison, the EU1 has made very significant advancements during the last few decades. These have included the Schengen agreements on border control, police and judicial cooperation, which were incorporated into EU law in 1997, as well as the creation of the euro and a common monetary policy by the central bank, a process begun in 2002, although not yet including all countries. Democratization and the rule of law have been the European Union’s prerequisites for any potential candidate. In spite of all current anxiousness, the recent enforcement of the Treaty of Lisbon on the EU institutions could be a basic platform for shaping a well-defined balance between the two-chamber Council of Ministers and Parliament and a dual executive around the Commission and the innovative Presidency of the European Council.

In contrast to the US, the EU is still characterized by high economic inequality and varying degrees of attachment to certain institutions and policies among its members. However, the links across Europe are already sufficiently strong to make any hypothetical backlash extremely costly. If in response to the current crisis some member-states abandoned the euro or even the Union, if protectionist policies were adopted and inter-state rivalries were to re-emerge, the consequences for all Europe would probably be close to catastrophic. The union of Europe, as the union of America more than a century ago, has always advanced in response to crises and challenges. New Europe-wide financial regulations and common state budget and tax policies are now being approved. The outline of a potentially more democratic and efficient federal European Union is basically designed and positively tested. The current emergency demands nothing short of further continental integration.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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