What Makes Europe strong: Treaties or a Federal Constitution?

Abstract

European integration is based on a treaty-based model of cooperation between sovereign states. For many decades, this model has promoted peace, economic development and institutional cooperation. At the same time, however, it has left one fundamental constitutional question unanswered: can a federal political order emerge from a system based exclusively on treaties between states?

This essay argues that this question must be answered in the negative. A federation is not merely a more intensive form of international cooperation, but a specific constitutional form of state in which powers, responsibilities and democratic legitimacy are directly embedded in a fundamental legal order. The European Union, by contrast, has based its development on successive treaties, thereby remaining a hybrid political construct: stronger than an international organisation, but without the constitutional foundation of a federal state.

Drawing on historical, constitutional-law and political-philosophical analyses, the essay examines why earlier attempts at European federalisation have stalled and why the constitutional question is once again becoming central. Particular attention is paid to the European Convention of 2002–2003, the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe of 2004, and the subsequent Treaty of Lisbon of 2007/2009.

The essay also considers citizens’ initiatives aimed at the federalisation of the European Union. It further discusses Polybius’s theory of the evolutionary cycle of states and the federal thought of Johannes Althusius as an early example of a political theory in which power is not organised exclusively from the top down but arises from the cooperation of communities.

The essay concludes that the future stability of Europe does not depend on further refinement of the existing treaty system, but on the willingness to take the constitutional dimension of federalism seriously.