of membership since 1963, but the political and cultural barriers to membership posed by its authoritarian government and its largely Muslim population have so far been insuperable.
The process of joining the EU further illustrates its unique supranationality. In order to accede to the EU, a country must fulfill all of the requirements of the acquis communautaire, a French term roughly translatable as “that which the community has agreed upon.” The acquis contains thirty-five chapters of EU regulation covering subjects as wide-ranging as taxation, education and culture, environmental policy, freedom of movement within the EU of goods, workers, services and capital, and many more. According to an estimate of the think tank Open Europe, the acquis communautaire, which it aptly defines as “the body of EU legislation which European companies, charities and individuals have to comply with,” is more than 170,000 pages long.9
The long negotiations in which agreement is reached on how the aspiring EU member will fulfill all of the acquis’s stipulations are very intrusive. The process involves EU monitoring of whether a country is actually implementing all of the acquis-mandated changes. Only upon unanimous agreement of the member states, and with the support of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, is the way cleared for a candidate country to join. In the final steps, the candidate country and all of the EU member states sign and ratify the accession treaty. Clearly, any country that wants to join the EU pays a high price in national sovereignty. In order to be a part of the EU, each member state must fit the EU mold in terms of democracy, the economy, the rule of law, efficiency, and – it must be stressed – values and ideology.
WHAT IS THE EU?
The EU is not like the OAS or NAFTA, or any other international organization. It is a supranational organization exercising significant sovereign powers of its own that often trump the powers of the member states. EU law supersedes member-state national law, for example, and EU edicts and regulation affect everyday life in every member state.
Is the EU therefore comparable to a federal nation-state, such as the United States, with its members roughly equivalent to the fifty states? Some would say so, but the comparison is false. Unlike the United States, the EU cannot claim to have a citizenry with a common understanding of its national history and a sense of belonging to the same nation. “Europeans” persist in thinking of themselves first in national terms – as Italians, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Greeks, etc. – before they think of themselves as Europeans.10 And this is not surprising. There is no European demos. Although ethnicities and languages do not track exactly with national borders, each European nation-state has its own long history, culture and self-understanding. There is no unifying language. The EU has twenty-four official languages. English is now the lingua franca, having replaced French at the latest in 2004, when ten new member states joined, mainly from Eastern Europe, where the second language of elites was generally English.
So what is the EU? To repeat what I said earlier, here is the best definition I can think of: the EU is a constantly evolving union of twenty-eight Western and Central European nation-states in which the governing and intellectual elites, in the interest of realizing an unprecedented degree of global peace, stability and prosperity, are pooling, and thus relinquishing, significant elements of the member states’ national sovereignty, and doing so over the heads of their national electorates.
But as we will see in the following chapter, to try to define the EU is to go out on a limb and risk being sawed off. There is a caveat to everything one could attempt to say about the EU. On the one hand, the essence of the EU is supranationalism. But what does it mean to be supranational in an organization in which the member states jealously but inconsistently and confusedly – sometimes in deed but not in word and sometimes in word but not in deed – guard their national prerogatives? Because of this unresolved conflict, and as a tactical response to it, the essence of the EU is also to have no definable essence: to exist in the “in-between-ness” described earlier. The constant change, uncertainty and flux of postmodernity are integral features of the EU.
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, the EU is the EU is the EU. It must be understood on its own terms. After you have finished this book, you will know the EU as well as it can be known, and you will understand how the fate of democracy in the EU will affect the transatlantic alliance and the future of liberal democracy in the world.
* It is important to distinguish the terms “international,” “transnational” and “supranational.” To quote John Fonte, “The term international is used mainly to denote relations among sovereign nation-states. . . . On the other hand, transnational means ‘across’ or ‘beyond’ nations . . . the term signifies legal action and authority beyond national laws, constitutions, and officials. Transnational politics is activity directed at the internal political affairs of nation-states, undertaken by both foreign and domestic non-state actors and by foreign states. . . . Supranational means ‘above’ or ‘over’ the nation-state. While advocates of transnational law are sometimes ambiguous about respect for national sovereignty, those who champion supranational law are more explicit about their aim to transfer decision-making authority (sovereign self-government) from the nation-state to global institutions, superior to any national institution.” Fonte, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), xxiii–xxiv. The EU could be characterized as either a transnational or a supranational organization, depending on the context. The vision of the global governance advocates in the EU is a supranational future for the EU and the world.
POSTMODERN: THE EU AS AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
In late 1951, in the heady days when the postwar dream of peace through European integration was in the air, Alcide De Gasperi, prime minister of Italy and a founding father of European integration, mused about what steps Europe should take toward a more harmonious future: “Which road are we to choose,” he asked, “if we are to preserve all that is noble and humane within these national forces, while co-ordinating them to build a supranational civilisation which can give them balance, absorb them, and harmonise them in one irresistible drive towards progress?”1
This query captures the great unanswered question of the European Union – the foundational uncertainty that has stymied so many attempts to understand what the EU really is. Is it a group of states that work very closely together in almost every realm but nevertheless retain their national sovereignty, or is it a supranational entity that absorbs and digests the member states? And this foundational uncertainty, in turn, arises out of a disagreement so profound that it encompasses both means and ends. De Gasperi directly asked, “Which road must we take?” He assumed agreement on the ultimate end: the building of a “supranational civilization.” But there is no agreement there, either – no consensus among EU elites on the question “What do we want to achieve?” Both of these basic questions – which road must we take and where do we want to end up – are still very much subjects of heated disagreement.
CLASHING VISIONS
Selected pronouncements from some of the greatest European statesmen suffice to illustrate the clash of visions for the EU. Almost all of these competing visions cluster around one of two paradigms: the intergovernmental, sovereigntist paradigm, or the supranational, integrationist paradigm. The first sees the EU as an organization of sovereign member states whose power supersedes that of the EU. The second envisions the EU as a supranational governing entity distinct from the EU member states and exercising significant sovereign powers over them.
On the sovereigntist side, Charles de Gaulle, president of France, called
