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United States of Europe
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A federal Europe is a theory that much of Europe be unified in the manner of a federation. The idea has been common with ambitions of European unification with the term United States of Europe echoing the federal nature of the United States of America.
The EU was formed partly out of this desire, with the early architects seeing its predecessors as the first step to a European federation. Since the 1950s, European integration in this manner has seen the development of a supranational system of governance, as its institutions move further from the concept of intergovernmentalism.
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Encyclopedia
A federal Europe is a theory that much of Europe be unified in the manner of a federation. The idea has been common with ambitions of European unification with the term United States of Europe echoing the federal nature of the United States of America.
The EU was formed partly out of this desire, with the early architects seeing its predecessors as the first step to a European federation. Since the 1950s, European integration in this manner has seen the development of a supranational system of governance, as its institutions move further from the concept of intergovernmentalism. However, with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, new intergovernmental elements have been introduced alongside the more federal systems making the definition of the European Union much more complex. The European Union, which operates through a hybrid system of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, is not officially a federation – though various academic observers treat it as a federal system.
History
One of the first to conceive of a union of European nations was Hungarian Prime Minister Pál Teleki. Hungary had lost over two-thirds of its territory at the end of World War I in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. In early 1941 during the World War II, he was striving to preserve his country's autonomy in the face of Germany's coercion to join in their invasion of Yugoslavia. In the book, Transylvania. The Land Beyond the Forest, Louis C. Cornish described how Teleki, under constant surveillance by the German Gestapo during 1941, sent a secret communication to contacts in America.
Journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1941 supported the statement of others. "I took from Count Teleki's office a monograph which he had written upon the structure of European nations. A distinguished geographer, he was developing a plan for regional federation, based upon geographical and economic realities." Teleki received no response from the Americans to his ideas and upon Germany's military advance into Hungary on April 2-3, 1941, committed suicide.
At the end of World War II, the political climate favoured unity in Western Europe, seen by many as an escape from the extreme forms of nationalism which had devastated the continent. One of the first successful proposals for European cooperation came in 1951 with the European Coal and Steel Community. Since then, the European Community has reformed itself from being an organisation creating and ensuring internal free trade through wielding certain supranational powers strictly related to economy and trade, to one in which a whole range of policy areas where its member states believe they benefit from working together.
The Americans were secretly making an aggressive effort to unite Europe, through organizations such as the American Committee on United Europe and the European Youth Campaign.
The process of intergovernmentally pooling powers, harmonising national policies and creating and enforcing supranational institutions, is called European integration. Other than the vague aim of "ever closer union" in the Solemn Declaration on European Union, the Union (meaning its member governments) has no current policy to create either a federation or a confederation.
Debate on European unity is often vague as to the boundaries of 'Europe'. The word 'Europe' is widely used as a synonym for the European Union, although much of the European continent is still not in the EU.
'Multi-speed integration'
A thesis, sometimes referred to as a 'Multi-speed Europe', envisions an alternative type of European integration, where the EU countries who want a federal EU, can boost their own integration, while other countries may go at a slower pace. Specific current examples include the euro, the single currency not used by all members, and the Schengen Agreement for common external border controls without inter-state frontiers, but which includes some states that are not in the EU and excludes some states that are in the EU.
Present situation
The European Union (EU) is not de jure a federation but various academic observers conclude that it is one.
Here is the view of Professor R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers University) on how various brands of scholars approach the issue:
"Unencumbered by the prejudice that the EU is sui generis and uncomparable, federalism scholars now regularly treat the EU as a case in their comparative studies (Friedman-Goldstein, 2001; Fillippov, Ordeshook, Shevtsova, 2004; Roden, 2005; Bednar, 2006). For the purposes of the present analysis, the EU has the necessary minimal attributes of a federal system and crucially the EU is riven with many of the same tensions that afflict federal systems."
According to Joseph H. H. Weiler, "Europe has charted its own brand of constitutional federalism". Jean-Michel Josselin and Alain Marciano see the European Court of Justice as being a primary force behind building a federal legal order in the Union with Josselin stating that "A complete shift from a confederation to a federation would have required to straightforwardly replace the principalship of the member states vis-ŕ-vis the Union by that of the European citizens. [. . .] As a consequence, both confederate and federate features coexist in the judicial landscape."
According to Thomas Risse and Tanja A. Börzel , "The EU only lacks two significant features of a federation. First, the Member States remain the `masters' of the treaties, i.e., they have the exclusive power to amend or change the constitutive treaties of the EU. Second, the EU lacks a real `tax and spend' capacity, in other words, there is no fiscal federalism."
This view is not simply confined to academics, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing found opposition from the United Kingdom towards including the word "federal" in the European Constitution, and hence replaced the word with "Community".
See also
External links
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- , where he used the term United States of Europe.
- Habermas, Jürgen. , signandsight.com
- , BBC News
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