As an American I am perfectly qualified to opine on the current and future states of European unity. As an American I declare myself qualified to opine on anything and everything, and to expect that my voice will be heard and recognized and that any wisdom that might hide in my blithering will be heeded. That is, after all, what we Americans do, no?
Here is why I really feel I can add an inquisitive perpective to the debate about European unity. I studied international economics in Ireland in '88, when the conversation about the upcoming ratification of the Single European Act was in full bluster, and before the Celtic Tiger began to roar, so the Irish penchant for debate was not dampened by the insidious need to make money. I found the discussion so vibrant and relevant that I wrote the thesis of my interdisciplinary degree about it. In my thesis I made several predictions, all of which were borne out to be true in the fullness of time. Toot, toot. Oh, was that my own horn?
I will give you the three word conclusion of that lengthy scholarly work (if a contraction counts as one word): It's about power.
A small pond suddenly became a big pond and constituent firms in Irish industries had to make the conscious decision to stop trying to do for themselves individually and get together and do for themselves as a whole. They had to roll one giant wheel of Irish cheese over the continent, on a road that ran right through Holland. I can't expect the reading audience (either of you guys) to understand the analogy, but believe that it is apt.
The writing of this thesis helped me to realize that the paradigmatic interaction of leverage / countervailing leverage is at work in almost every field of human and evolutionary endeavor. That is to say, almost everything is about the power.
I have recently moved to the erstwhile capital of the American Confederacy (the second one, Richmond) and have been seeing the Jeffersonian- Hamiltonian conflict through new eyes, the eyes of a society which has taken the issue to the extreme, and has as a result matured. How is this appropriate to European unity? I know, I'm coming to that. The American experiment in democracy was a boon to the whole world, but in the 1860s its success almost brought about its failure. The ideas and the philosophical framework provided by the Enlightenment architects had to be made to fit the contemporary social and political realities of the time.
The nation that blood and steel hammered into the federalism that prevailed through the industrial revolution became the model for the reconstructed democracies of Western Europe (except for the proportional representation thing that we won't get into here). These democracies "stood on the shoulders" of American democracy, and over the next forty or so years perfected the models of federalism that worked best for them. I think the best example is Italy, right?
When the European federations began to coalesce economically they were in a way playing out the next step in the political evolution of the world. A federation of mature federations engaged in the tumultuous rebalancing of the real power; money and the perception of opportunity. Therefore, when the "Anschluss" of the political systems began, as a means for facilitating crisis displacement between the social, economic, and political systems, the explosive potential of the changes was mitigated.
If the Europeans can come up with a working model for the interaction of fully federated nation states then we could have a genuine new paradigm for supranational government functioning legislatively with executive oversight across national and , more importantly, cultural boundaries. The entire world is relying on the Europeans to make the most of their experiment. There is a magnificent opportunity here which should not be lost, so you knuckleheads don't screw it up.
