Leo Klinkers Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF) 24 Oktober 2019
What happened?
In October 2019, the European Council decided, on the advice of the EU ministers concerned, to stop accession negotiations with Albania and Northern-Macedonia. France, the Netherlands, Spain and Denmark no longer had any confidence in it. Measures to combat corruption and crime, and improvements in public administration, were not yet sufficiently implemented.
I am attacking this decision with five lines of thought. Note the way in which France (Macron) and the Netherlands (Rutte) are dealt with in this article.
The European Council has no democratic mandate
One of the foundations of democracy is that administrators are accountable for their decisions to a constitutionally elected parliament.
Well, the European Union is not based on a constitution but on a treaty – in this context, the Treaty of Lisbon. It is, therefore, merely a form of cooperation between governments. This form of cooperation is called intergovernmental government within which government leaders and heads of state make up the decision-making body. Not the people’s representatives. Either because a parliament does not exist or because it does not have the authority to call the administrators to account.
The European Parliament only has a few powers to authorize or disapprove of something. The European Council of twenty-seven government leaders and heads of state takes the most important decisions, but it is not elected by the people. The Council therefore has no constitutionally established democratic mandate. And because the members of the European Council cannot be called to account, they are untouchable.
The members of the European Council can ignore criticism from the European Parliament, the European Commission and the media. The Treaty gives the Council the power to take any decision that it considers serving the EU’s objectives. Basta.
The European Council is a form of autocratizing oligarchy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau taught us that any representation of the people is an elective aristocracy. And that it will always evolve in the direction of an oligarchy. Then, an oligarchy always tends to slip into a form of autocracy. History has many examples of real and would be autocrats. Today’s world too: Trump, Johnson, Erdogan, Putin, Bolsonaro, Orban, Assad, Xi Jingpin, Maduro, Netanyahu, to name but a few.
Defensive mechanisms are needed to slow down such an evolution, which is harmful to the people. They must be built into the constitutional and institutional system of a democratic state. Where they are lacking or weak, autocrats seize the opportunity.
In section 6.3.5 of my book ‘Sovereignty, Security and Solidarity’ I discuss how Valérie Giscard d’Estaing’s attempt to design a true European Constitution (2003) has been torpedoed by the rejection of the referendum in France and the Netherlands (2005). Then the EU leaders took over the work and, with the construction of the Lisbon Treaty, they put themselves at the head of the ultimate decision-making process as a European Council. As a result – i.e. due to the absence of a real parliament with the power to hold government officials to account – the first defence mechanism against persons who aspire to (more and more) administrative power without having to account for the use of that power is lacking. This can only be solved by exchanging the treaty for a constitution. And thus, sending the heads of government back to their own country because double mandates (incompatibilité des fonctions) are constitutionally reprehensible.
The European Parliament can be seen as a form of elective aristocracy. The trick with which the European Council has placed itself at the head of this is an example of creeping oligarchy, derived from the European Parliament as the elective aristocracy. And within that oligarchy of twenty-seven people, it is always two members who push through the real decisions: France and Germany. Recently, there seems to be a tendency for it to become a tandem of France and the Netherlands. More on that later.
The Treaty of Lisbon does not contain any defence mechanisms against autocratizing oligarchy. It is a chaotic treaty with conflicting articles and many exceptions to rules. This makes it the worst legal document ever produced in the history of Europe. I refer to the European Federalist Papers and to the book mentioned above for the arguments that go with this position. For an excellent article on the need to build in mechanisms to defend democracy, I refer to ‘The institutional defences of democracy’ by Matteo Laruffa.
The European Council hides behind the principle of unanimity
One of the tricks with which the European Council – like the Security Council in the UN – has organised its inviolability is to take decisions by unanimous vote. This has the advantage that the Council can say on controversial issues: ‘We all agree’. This silences criticism and prevents that its members can be played off against each other after the decision has been taken.
Not every issue is subject to the unanimity rule. For some issues, the European Council decides by a majority. However, when it comes to the accession of new member states – as is the case with Albania and Northern-Macedonia – the principle of unanimity applies. It has been widely reported in the media that France and the Netherlands in particular – supported by Denmark and Spain – wished to stop the accession negotiations. That is a veto. After which the entire European Council had to support a unanimous decision to reject the proposal.
In the next line of thought, I will elaborate on this further.
Macron and Rutte commit ‘abuses of power’.
Macron and Rutte are playing a curious game when it comes to unanimity in the European Council. In my article ‘Macron and Rutte: intergovernmentalism 2.0’ I explain how Macron, in his Sorbonne speech of September 2017, attacked the principle of unanimity in the European Council. He advocated majority voting in order to prevent vetoes by one or more heads of government from blocking decision-making on important issues.
In his Churchill Lecture in Zurich in February 2019, Rutte took an even stronger stand against the principle of unanimity. At least for a few subjects, such as the imposition of sanctions on countries outside the EU. It does not take much knowledge and experience of public administration to predict that soon after the abolition of the unanimity principle for such a subject, the European Council will, by means of majority decisions, also impose sanctions on EU-countries that do not comply with the treaty obligations and with further agreements, such as the reception of immigrants.
It should be noted that I am opposed to the principle of unanimity because, with its disguised right of veto, it only serves to protect national and nationalistic interests. It is therefore not in the interests of the EU, let alone in the interests of Europe.
But what do we see in the Albania/North-Macedonia dossier? This principle of unanimity is being manipulated. In public, Macron and Rutte insist on the need to abolish the principle of unanimity. However, in order to block Albania’s and Northern-Macedonia’s access to the EU, they are making good use of it.
I must now introduce a few legal concepts, knowing that this article does not offer sufficient scope for explaining them in detail.
In the past century French law gave the legal systems of other European countries some important principles of good administration. For example, judges prohibit decisions based on détournement de pouvoir. This is the use of a power for a purpose other than that for which it was granted. Closely related to this is the principle of abus de droit. This is the abuse of rights. One can argue about the question whether one of these two is at issue in this case. But it is difficult to deny that a combination of both principles is certainly applicable: abus de pouvoir, misuse of power. In the field of European law, this is now regarded as a general principle that should not be violated by EU-bodies. I would advise Albania and Northern-Macedonia to seek legal advice as to whether, on this basis, a lawsuit can be brought against the Europe Council.
I see Macron’s and Rutte’s fiddling with the principle of unanimity as policy-waste from autocratizing oligarchy. Policy-waste in the sense of corruption. But beware. I am not talking about the common perception of corruption in the sense of accepting money for lending services. The term ‘corruption’ comes from the Latin word ‘corrumpere’. And that means ‘spoiling’. Autocratizing oligarchy will always produce spoiling. Or, as Voltaire once said, ‘Une droit porté trop loin devient une injustice’ (A right that is implemented too far becomes an injustice).
A federal Europe would not have this problem
I cannot set out the democratic values of a federal Europe in this article. For the sake of brevity, I refer again to the literature mentioned above. I will suffice to say that everything that goes wrong in this dossier stems directly from the fact that the Treaty of Lisbon is a legal monstrosity that must be replaced as soon as possible by a federal constitution of the United States of Europe.
If Europe would have a federal state structure, the arguments put forward by France, the Netherlands, Spain and Denmark in October 2019 against opening further accession negotiations would not apply. In a federal Europe, although the member states remain sovereign, they entrust a federal body with the task of dealing with a limitative range of issues that they cannot deal with themselves. One of these issues concerns justice. Matters relating to the fight against corruption and crime would then fall within the remit of federal judicial bodies such as the federal police and federal judges.
Leo Klinkers, Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF) 29 September 2019
Introduction On 27 September 2019, Yannis Karamitsios placed an important post on Facebook. In short, his argument boils down to this:
President Trump will not be removed from office for the simple reason that there is no two-thirds majority in the Senate.
The Senate is composed of two senators per state. So, a total of 50×2=100 senators.
Two senators per state – irrespective its size and number of inhabitants – may have had a good reason for founding the federation of the USA in 1787-1789 but should be considered now an outdated matter, as a result of which Trump cannot be removed from office.
However, the fact that a majority of Republicans in the Senate will most likely not cooperate with the House of Representatives to remove Trump is not caused by the fact that each state can provide two senators, but by something else. That doesn’t make Karamitsios’ criticism any less correct. His observation that something is wrong with that Senate is correct for another reason. This has nothing to do with the fact that America is a federation, nor with the fact that every state, regardless of its size and population, sends two senators to the Senate. The cause lies elsewhere.
The composition of the American Senate In 1787, the Founding Fathers of the Philadelphia Convention, in the composition of the world’s first federal constitution, opted for a representative system of two chambers: a House of Representatives and a Senate. The House of Representatives was to represent the citizens. The Senate would act as a representative of the states. This is one example of why the American constitution is brilliant. The Founding Fathers knew from Aristotle that one had to organize decision-making by the people through a system of representation of the people. From Althusius they had learned how to create a federal state from the people. But because they were extremely afraid that representatives of the people would eventually behave like autocrats, just like the King of England, whom they had renounced in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they devised a specific elaboration of Montesquieu’s trias politica – the separation of powers – namely the checks and balances, in order to elaborate the trias politica of Montesquieu. I do not know of any (federal) constitution in which a system of checks and balances for the concrete application of the trias politica is so ingeniously and consistently conceived and laid down in binding rules as in the American one. I cannot list them all and limit myself to the way in which they have been applied in the composition of the Senate.
The representatives of sparsely populated states in the Convention objected to a composition of the Senate based on the size of the population. The large states would then have a predominance in both chambers, which could lead to a form of oppression. They won the debate. The Convention decided that the parliaments of each state would appoint two senators, regardless of the size of the state and regardless of the size of the population. Here is an example of checks and balances: the small states did not have to fear supremacy on the part of the large ones.
Amendment No 17 of 1913 modified this system. From that moment on, the senators were no longer chosen by the parliaments, but were elected by the people. In the European Federalist Papers Herbert Tombeur and I do not think this amendment was a sensible decision. The amendment undermined the original intention of the bicameral system. The House of Representatives was to operate on the basis of a mandate from the people, the voters. And the Senate would operate on the basis of a mandate from the parliaments of the states. An example of a true form of checks and balances. By also allowing the senators to be elected by the voters of a state, this form of checks and balances has been abolished. But the delegation of two senators per state has continued to exist, and that aspect of checks and balances has been preserved: in the Senate, the large states cannot overrule the small ones in terms of numbers.
In Paper 22 of our European Federalist Papers we discuss the way in which a Senate is composed on the basis of a federal constitution for the United States of Europe that we have drawn up. If you click on the link, you can follow our argument at Article II. Organisation of the Legislative Branch / Section 3. The House of the States, or the Senate. In the Explanation of Section 3 you can see why we have opted for having eight senators, chosen by the parliaments of each member state of the United States of Europe. In this way, Luxembourg has as many seats in the Senate as Germany. I refer to the link in order to have you understand the whole reasoning behind this choice.
The American electoral system The problem Yannis Karamitsios rightly mentions is caused by the rotten American electoral system. It is based on a district system with the adage: ‘the winner takes all’. The one who gets 51% of the votes gets the representatives of all voters of that district. Through a system called the Electoral College they will later vote for the candidate president of their party. Because the district system leads to a system of two parties – i.e. without the possibility of forming coalitions with a few parties – the other 49% are essentially not represented.
This has been given a name: spoil system. As is the case in the United Kingdom, elections on the basis of a district system cause a political monopoly. Just as any monopoly corrupts, so it is with this system of elections. The party in power destroys what the previous government of the other party had built up and starts again from scratch. The spoil system is opposed to the merit system.
Since 1800, dozens of attempts have been made in the USA to abolish this electoral system and to switch to a system of proportional representation via popular voting. Any amendment to the Constitution to that effect, however, has failed.
That is not to say that the opposition against it has stopped. When George Bush won the elections via the district system, it appeared that Al Gore would have won if the popular vote had been taken as the basis. The same thing happened with the election of Donald Trump. In terms of popular vote, Hillary Clinton would have won. As a result of this development, around ten states are currently coming up with an interim solution. At the next presidential election, based on the district system, they will also jointly discuss the results of the popular votes. In this way, they are trying to increase the necessary political pressure on the current system.
What is the core of this problem? Karamitsios sees an outdated way of assembling the Senate as the cause of the current Senate’s unwillingness or inability to cooperate in the deposition of the President. The cause, however, lies in the absence of defensive mechanisms within constitutional and institutional building blocks of a democracy against idiots, adventurers, pirates and other villains who know how to master the procedures of democracy. Every country has to deal with this. Whether it is a unitary state, or a federal state is irrelevant. There is only one question: has sufficient constitutional and institutional defence mechanisms been put in place against those who, by manipulating the procedures of democracy, creep to the center of power in order to dismantle that democracy?
This creeping to the center of power by autocrats in order to dismantle that democracy is now happening in America, but also in the United Kingdom. Though not only in those two states. It is creeping in Europe as well, caused by the lack of adequate defence mechanisms that prevent political pirates from declaring democracy their property. Elections based on a district system – with the ‘winner takes all’ as the leading criterion – are the same for democracy as a computer without an antivirus programme and without a firewall. That is why it is called a ‘spoil system’.
The spoilage of that system is reinforced by at least two other systems. In the first place the ‘gerrymandering’. There is no room to describe this in detail, but in short: both parties – the Democrats and the Republicans – can periodically adjust the boundaries of constituencies in such a way that they can optimize their election profits. And thus, to be able to organise the loss of the other party. The protest against this is growing. Secondly, the Supreme Court has ruled that it is permitted to finance the party’s election programme with large sums of money (superpacks) via a non-profit organisation that supports a political party. Both systems make a serious contribution to increasing the spoilage of the spoil system, because they open doors that should be closed to wrong politicians. I would like to refer to an article by Matteo Laruffa entitled ‘The institutional defences of democracy’.
In our draft federal constitution for the United States of Europe, Herbert Tombeur and I have improved this, and some other, flaws in the American system. For the sake of brevity, I refer to my book ‘Sovereignty, Security and Solidarity’ in which that design is included.
So, what’s to be done? It is clear that the post-war democracies in Europe, too, are experiencing an identity crisis. The autocrats are advancing. We are faced with the task of giving in-depth consideration to the need to look again at the type and strength of the built-in mechanisms that must defend our democracies against being taken over by wrong people. This is an important task for political parties. Just as we now need finely tuned filters to capture and remove even the smallest particles of plastic before they reach the ocean, so political parties must design new filters (like the equivalent of antivirus and firewall programs) to prevent the sovereignty of the people from being destroyed by autocrats.
As a non-political Federation of federalist movements, the Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF) sees it as its responsibility to share its knowledge with political parties that are willing to face up to their own filtering system to keep out villains. In doing so, we – the FAEF – allow ourselves to be guided by a refutation of the ex-president Bill Clinton’s statement “It’s the economy, stupid.” For the rest of this century, the adage must be for a united Europe:
“It is NOT the economy, stupid. It is the sovereignty of the people, organized within a true democracy, based on a federal constitution, ratified by the people of Europe, under the rule of law, protected by constitutionally and institutionally built-in defense mechanisms against autocracy.”
Leo Klinkers, September 2019 Federal Alliance of European Federalists
The defenceless nature of values The Dutch poet Lucebert wrote in 1953: “Everything of value is defenceless.” However, no matter how defenceless something of value is, people still want to keep them as good as possible: photos of our parents in an album, jewellery in a safe, money in the bank, fresh milk in the fridge, a baby in a safe cradle. We are always looking for a good place to protect the defenceless and vulnerable nature of valuable things as well as possible.
In this article I focus on
the protection of values,
within the perspective of popular sovereignty in the sense of: ‘All sovereignty rests with the people’,
which must be organised by representing the people because the people cannot meet every day to make decisions about their own affairs,
which makes it necessary to make a constitution that contains the rules by which the administrators (executive power) are accountable to the representatives of the people (legislative power), while those representatives of the people in turn are accountable to the citizens (elections),
which means that the protection of values must have a clearly unique place within that constitution.
As a federalist, I am working with many others to establish a federal Europe. So, of course, I am thinking of a federal constitution. But that is not relevant here. For everything that I say in this article about the protection of values, it makes no difference whether we are talking about a unitary state or a federal state.
The need to protect values Values such as – for example – people’s free development in search of a happy life in solidarity, security and prosperity are vulnerable and defenceless against the autocracy that is emerging in many parts of the world. Fed and supported by populist nationalism, with contempt for the rule of law, autocrats manipulate the procedures of their democracy, thereby undermining the inalienable sovereignty of the people.
Every people has autocrats. They usually lie in the caverns of a poorly formulated and poorly organised democratic system. They only emerge when defence mechanisms against their manipulation and deception are absent or so weakened that, with the concept of ‘democracy’ as a weapon, they can destroy this same democracy.
Autocracy is the ultimate oligarchy, revealing itself by governing from above by means of decrees. Without respect for representing the people from the bottom up. Let alone accounting for administrating from the top down to a people’s representation.
Europe, too, has a few such people. But let us not mention names now. It is more important to point out the contagious nature of autocracy. It also affects leading European politicians who certainly cannot yet be called autocrats. But they do show clearly that they like to govern from the top down much better than to look for their strength in constitutions and institutions that preserve and guard the values of ‘popular sovereignty’ from the bottom up.
They are not interested in offering a safe place for such values. Partly because they lack sufficient knowledge, partly because it restricts their free room for manoeuvre and partly because they are given too much room by the people to indulge themselves – without an understanding of the true constitutional and institutional building blocks of democracy – in ever more fierce government from above. And then – fed by the aftermath of the extreme economic neo-liberal thinking – they think they are doing a good job of it.
In another publication, entitled ‘People’s Sovereignty: the basis for circular policy making and federalisation’ (August 2019), I concluded with a refutation of a statement by Bill Clinton as President of the United States: “It is the economy, stupid. That may have been a valid adage in his day, but now it is no longer true. Under the threat of increasing autocracy, including in Europe, I think the adage should read now:
“It is NOT the economy, stupid. It is the sovereignty of the people, organized within a true democracy, based on a federal constitution, under the rule of law.”
Where do we guard the value of ‘popular sovereignty’? It is a common way of thinking that value judgments in the context of popular sovereignty and democracy can best be included in a charter. I do not deny that a charter is a good place, but it is not the best place. With the adage written above, I take the view that the best place to protect the fundamental values, seen from the point of view of ‘popular sovereignty’, lies within a constitution.
With the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR, Council of Europe, Rome 1950) we already have such a charter. But after a de facto autocratic violation, the distance to the charter’s protection against the violated values is too great and too uncertain. Let me try to make this clear with a metaphor.
Suppose you have valuable things in your home. In order to protect them, you have installed an alarm system. In the event of a burglary, the police are automatically warned, but they are only there after 15 minutes. Then, the thief is long gone. Whether he will ever be caught is the question. The same goes for whether you will ever see those jewels again. An alarm system, connected to the police, is only a second-best option. The best option is to use day and night security in the house itself to immediately catch the thief before he can reach the value.
The meaning of this metaphor is: build in a defence mechanism that prevents damage to values from occurring. It is more effective to cut off autocrats who want to violate the values of popular sovereignty – and of the system of democratic accountability based on it – with an inbuilt defence mechanism, rather than trying to bring them to order after the violation by means of long-term and uncertain procedures of a charter. Without denying the usefulness of a treaty as a protection of values in the context of popular sovereignty, I would argue that this protection should first and foremost take place within a constitution.
In order to strengthen the in-built first defence mechanism the second best option should be applied as well by a constitutional provision that the state in question will be a party to the ECHR, with so-called direct effect. This means that the judicial authorities of the states that are members of the ECHR must examine all legislation and administration in the light of the ECHR. As an aside, all EU Member States are currently parties to the ECHR, but the EU itself is not.
With regard to the need to build in better defence mechanisms within democracies, I refer to an excellent article by Matteo Laruffa entitled ‘The institutional defences of democracy’.
Where in the constitution should the protection take place? By taking the view that a constitution is the first and best place for the protection of the values of ‘popular sovereignty’, we enter the domain of legislation. This is not an area familiar to everyone. Without a little explanation of legislative technique, my position may not be sufficiently convincing.
The core of legislative technique Laws have three essential parts. The quality of each part determines the strength of a law. The first part is usually quite short, only a few sentences, and contains the considerationof why that law is made. So that is a description of the goal. Goal equals value. That value must be protected by norms. With its articles 1 to X, the norms are the second indispensable part of the law. The third part is called the explanatorymemorandum. It explains the background, intention and argumentation of the law. Without that part, a judge is in the dark when interpreting a court case.
Well, when it comes to an ordinary law, we simply call the consideration: consideration. On the understanding that we in the Netherlands use a Latin word for this: Considerans. But when it comes to the consideration of a constitution (the mother of the laws) we call it: Preamble.
I ignore discussions among legislative lawyers about whether or not a constitution needs a preamble. For me, that is not a question. As a public administration expert with a constitutional background, it is unthinkable that you should be allowed to make binding rules for citizens without describing their goal, the value. Then, with the instrumental norms, i.e. the articles of the constitution, to indicate how you think you can protect that value. I therefore see the fact that the Dutch constitution does not have a preamble as a shortcoming of the Dutch constitutional system. I also ignore the question of whether a preamble should be short and powerful, or thorough, embedded in a well-considered motivation and argumentation. I opt for the second option.
The preamble as the soul of the constitution The view that the protection of values should be regulated primarily within the domain of constitutional law itself – as the best defence mechanism against autocratic seizures of power – forces me to indicate where the right place is. Well, that is the Preamble, the consideration of why the constitution is made.
Values in the context of popular sovereignty and so on are the soul of inalienable rights of citizens. The text of this – part legal text, part explanatory text – should be extremely precise. And it requires the utmost skill on at least two points: knowing what the content should be and knowing how it should be formulated. The content is a matter best expressed by the citizens themselves in accordance with ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. Whereas form is a task and a matter for professionals who know how to design a correct constitution for that content. Metaphor: the customer explains what he wants on the pizza and the pizza chef makes something tasty out of it, while the pizza chef, as a professional, refuses to make a pizza if the customer says that he would like to have a whipped cream pastry on top of the salami and anchovies. That’s not appropriate on a pizza.
Both aspects – the methodologically correct deployment of citizens and professionals – were trampled in the process of drafting a European constitution led by Valérie Giscard d’Estaing (2003 to 2005). The result was the Treaty of Lisbon, the worst conceivable legal document ever written in Europe. For more information on the role of citizens and professionals in the design of a federal constitution for Europe, I refer to my book ‘Sovereignty, Security and Solidarity’.
The seriousness of the case considered in more detail In recent years, there has been so much rebellion in the world against authorities that we have to ask ourselves: what is going on here? Democracies seem to be eroding, autocracies seem to be exploding, citizens are desperately and fruitlessly searching for their role and position in these processes of democratic breakdown. For this seriously increasing problem, I refer to an excellent article by Shany Mor: ‘Nobody understands democracy anymore’.
Whether it concerns the yellow shirts in France, the demonstrations in Hong Kong, in England the resistance against Brexit and the suspension of parliament, in Russia the demonstrations against Putin, in South-East Indonesia in the Moluccas and in West Papua the ever-increasing resistance against Indonesia, the relentless struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, the aspirations of regions such as Catalonia, the Basque Country, Scotland, Wales to break away from the motherland, the tensions in Cyprus between the Greek and Turkish parts, the division in Ukraine between the East, the West and the Crimea and how the Lisbon Treaty works as a split within the EU on issues such as immigration and the euro.
This list of rebellion and resistance versus autocracy is longer, but I will leave it at that. It is not a question of whether we should support Scotland’s quest for independence or not. It is not a question of taking sides. The question is: do we or do we not want to give every people in the world – and hence the people of Europe – constitutions with a preamble based on the values of popular sovereignty and all that goes with it?
If European Heads of Government think that the next decade will be a period of calm and tranquillity, they are probably making one of the most important mistakes of their lives. They will be thrown back, with or without force, to the need to reinvent the links that make up the chain of ‘popular sovereignty’:
representation of the people,
based on a full-fledged Constitution,
with a Preamble that is the first and most important defence mechanism that expresses the values of humanity,
which then contain in the articles of the Constitution the first line of defence for the effective protection of the Preamble-values,
supported remotely by the second line of defence in the form of a charter, for example the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
Conclusion What I have said so far applies both to unitary states and to federal states. As a federalist, I designed together with Herbert Tombeur in the European Federalist Papers (2012-2013), a federal constitution with a Preamble for a federal Europe. In the context of the Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF), we are working on an improvement of this Preamble because the seriousness of the erosion of democracy within Europe forces us to be extremely alert. Because everything can always be improved, a working group of the World Federalist Movement Netherlands (WFBN) has set itself the task of improving our existing version in the course of this autumn 2019. This will then be the subject of consultation with the citizens of Europe.
Leo Klinkers, The Hague, August 2019 Federal Alliance of European Federalists
The purpose of this memorandum This memorandum is intended for all those who endorse the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’, but who regularly read in the newspaper that political authorities are violating this concept. It is not only citizens who have problems with this. Some representatives of the people, administrators and civil servants also struggle with the question of how society and government should relate to each other. As a federalist, however, I am particularly thinking of those who advocate a federal Europe.
It disturbs federalists that, for more than two hundred years, the federal United States of Europe has been unsuccessfully attempted. I am going to try to make it clear that the reason for this lies not only with unwilling and ignorant European politicians, but also – and perhaps above all – with the federalists themselves. In the forty years that I have spent on the subject of a federal Europe, two things have become clear to me.
First of all. I estimate that 95% of the thousands of Europeans who profess federalism do not know the essence of federalism. On a large scale, federalist movements lack basic knowledge of this particular form of state organisation. The lack of the necessary knowledge also means that there is a lack of a motive for action and a lack of prospects for action. Those who do not know where the north is, will continue to wander. It took Moses only forty years to reach the promised land. The European federalists – after the successful first federation in America between 1787-1789 – have been on the road for two hundred years. When they meet each other in ‘the desert of the anarchy of European nation states’, they prefer to argue rather than organise collectivity.
Second. Because they fail to organise collectivity, the many federalist movements are unable to unite in a federation of federalist movements. Their degree of organisation is shamefully flat. Whatever it is said, the well-known federalist movements in Europe are decentralised unitary movements. They have not organised themselves one level higher in a federation of federalist movements with a diversity of motives and cultures. A federation that can provide for the common interest of the individual movements: the creation of a federal Europe.
In this respect, they are blind to the existence of thousands of private federations in Europe, of which the world of football is perhaps the most striking: individual clubs > federal national bond > federal European UEFA > federal global FIFA. Now pay attention: those individual football clubs that form the basis of this federal system are the bosses in their own homes, they are and remain sovereign, autonomous with their own cultural identity, their own administration, their own members’ council, their own stadium, their own shirt, their own fan club, their own club song, their own champion’s party and their own Christmas party. The federal bond only takes care of things that individual clubs cannot arrange themselves, such as, for example, a match schedule that makes it clear who is to be played against the next week. Also, for example, the training of referees and the introduction of the VAR. Federalist movements that aspire to a federal Europe have so far learned nothing from the power of the wide array of thousands of private federal organizations.
Let me now turn to the three concepts in the title of this document: sovereignty of the people, circular policy making and federalisation.
By the way, when I organized my thoughts, it turned out that this memorandum would be an exposé of everything I have learned since 1970. So, you are reading the path of my career.
The concepts of popular sovereignty, circular policy making and federalisation
The sovereignty of the people Since Aristotle, many books have been written about the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’. However, it can also be written in one sentence. People’s sovereignty means: ‘all sovereignty rests with the people’. Any form of state organization and the resulting policy must be traceable to this adage. For citizens, anywhere in the world, there is only one value, namely the inalienable right to pursue their happiness, supported by such an arrangement of the state that it is not concerned with itself but with an adequate arrangement of the state from which policy emerges that supports the happiness of those citizens. Happiness in the broadest sense of the word: freedom, security, development, prosperity, solidarity and enjoyment of one’s own cultural identity.
Creating circular policy making The concept of ‘circular policy making’ is derived from the concept of ‘circular economy’. That is economy that does not produce waste. So, without destroying nature and the environment. ‘Making circular policy’ is designing and implementing policy without producing policywaste, such as over-organization, over-legalization, over-bureaucratization, organizing citizens’ participation without drawing consequences and expensive policy notes that disappear into a drawer. ‘Making circular policy’ implies intercepting systematically relevant signals from society, and then also responding to these signals with measures that can be traced back to that adage ‘all sovereignty rests with the people’. All wisdom and truth also rest with the people. Provided it is acquired in a good way. Circular policy making is part of the more comprehensive concept of ‘Societal Policy Making’.
Between 1970 and 2017, I called this way of working ‘interactive policy making’ because it is the result of an in-depth dialogue with the citizens and implementers involved: this is working from the outside in and from the bottom up. I was not alone in this. In 2004 James Surowiecki came up with the name ‘The wisdom of the crowds’. In the meantime, the term ‘interactive working’ has become seriously polluted. Thinking about innovation, however, never stands still. My colleague Peter Hovens made the relationship with circular economy and so our work is henceforth called ‘the methodology of circular policy making’. I’ll sketch that in a moment.
Federalisation In 1787, thirteen states in America (former colonies of England) made the first federation in the world – based on the thinking of European philosophers. Federalisation is a form of cooperation between countries in which the member states remain sovereign and autonomous but place a few interests that they themselves can no longer represent in the hands of a federal organ. Where serious problems sometimes arise within federations, as is currently the case in America, this cannot be traced back to the constitutional federal structure of the state, but to the lack of built-in defence mechanisms by which wrong people can manipulate the procedures of democracy in order to gain positions for their own benefit.
Since the arrival of the first federation in America, thousands of European citizens have been trying to establish a federal Europe for 200 years. This has always failed, even though 40% of the world’s population now lives in twenty-seven federations. It has been understood in those countries that, in changing circumstances, the creation of a federal state structure is the best instrument for supporting the citizens’ quest for happiness.
Designing the methodology During my studies at the Law Faculty of the University of Utrecht (1964-1968) I learned concepts such as sovereignty, democracy, trias politica, checks and balances, constitutional monarchy, confederal and federal states. Incidentally, without any awareness of their real meaning. Like most students, I studied not to deepen my knowledge, but to reproduce compulsory knowledge on exams and then forget it as soon as possible to make room in my head for a new load of flat knowledge for the next exam.
In 1969 I got a job at a municipality and only then did I learn the deeper meaning of principles of constitutional and administrative law. I was surprised, however, that policies were made from above; from the knowledge, experience and dossiers of politicians and civil servants; without consulting the citizens concerned. They made policy as they have done for years. To the best of their knowledge, on the assumption that people at the town hall knew what was good for those citizens. And that is no different today.
In 1970, I accepted the invitation to return to the Faculty of Law to build up teaching and research in public administration. Only then did I start studying. Supported by extensive libraries, I started to analyse the functioning of governments. I discovered that more than ten different academic disciplines contain knowledge that is applicable to the functioning of governments. In addition to constitutional and administrative law, think of political/ theological/humanistic philosophy, systems theory, social psychology, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, international law, organisation theory, management theory, communication theory, forensic psychiatry, theory of argumentation, causality theory, formal logic, methods and techniques of scientific research and a few more that do not come to my mind now.
By connecting parts of those disciplines, I was able to design a methodology for result-oriented policy, with full involvement of citizens and practitioners from the very beginning of such a process. Not, therefore, as is the case with citizens’ participation, where a government has already identified the problem and has already devised the solution. And then – fighting against a defensive government – it will not be possible for citizens to recognise either the problem or the solution. No, I am talking about policy that can count on the support of deeply involved citizens in the process of policy making, assured of an active attitude on the part of those who implement it. This methodology – under the name ‘Societal Policy Making’ – consists of four architectures as the building blocks for a successful process of change:
The architecture of breaking through the status quo. It is necessary to set up a process in such a way that enough energy is created to drive a rocket through the atmosphere. So, to develop so much power that the intended process resists gravity and does not fall back to the ground.
The architecture of goal setting. Without careful analysis and synthesis, in nine of the ten policy processes goals are formulated in accordance with the so-called ‘pitfall of solution thinking’ (jumping to solutions). A goal is a solution to a problem. Without analysis (diagnosis) of the problem in its underlying causes, it is impossible to imagine a workable synthesis (therapy).
The architecture of goal achieving. If you have established the goal in a methodically careful manner, this does not mean that you will achieve it. This architecture does not focus blindly on the result to be achieved but on reducing uncertainties that stand in the way of the result.
The architecture of circular policy making. In this architecture, the three previous ones come together in actual application in the next three phases A, B and C.
A. Analysis phase:
a. Team composition: includes team formation, team building, housing, materials, equipment, budget. b. Environmental Analysis: analysis of everyone who needs to be involved; the number is not relevant; if there are thirty, okay; if there are thirty thousand, then okay as well. c. Consultation Round: the key figures in the Environmental Analysis are preferably consulted by means of an one-on-one interview; they are, and will continue to be, involved in the policy process; in addition to one-on-one interviews, we use other interviewing techniques for larger groups of people in accordance with the method of the so-called ‘nominal group’. d. Anthology: the contributions made by the people consulted are recorded as literally as possible and sent back (after having the input systemized) to the people consulted so that they can see that the input is actually being taken seriously. e. Problem and Cause Analyses: The material of the Anthology is analysed for causal chains and their layered structure. Moral: only by concentrating policy on an approach to the lower causal layers can you achieve success. Otherwise, you will get stuck in treating the symptoms. f. Expert Meetings: experts are put to work to detect and remove any blind spots in the analysis.
B. Synthesis phase
g. Vision note: in a few pages, a sketch of the final goal to be achieved is presented. h. Strategic solution directions: just as there are several roads leading to Rome, there are always several solution directions. i. Sub-targets: within those strategic solution directions, there are intermediate goals. Example. If you travel from The Hague to Rome – via Belgium, Germany and Switzerland – you should definitely reach Maastricht or Brussels as an intermediate goal. Achieving such an intermediate goal is important because then you know two things: you are no longer in The Hague and you are on the right track. However, when you see the sign Hamburg you also know two things: you’re not in The Hague anymore, but you’re on the wrong road. j. Concrete actions: the conclusion of the development of a circular policy process is contained in an Action Book. Making it requires a great deal of knowledge and effort, otherwise it becomes nonsense actions. The actions are aimed at eliminating the causes that have emerged from the analysis.
C. Implementation phase
And only then does the ‘real’ work begin: the concrete implementation of the concrete actions to achieve the concrete intermediate goals, to achieve the final goal.
The method is guided according to the principles of process management, including knowledge management and structural management under the adage: ‘The process is more important than the result’. And that means that you have to know whatyou need and howto do it.
The application of this method in practice The construction of the four architectures came into being in the course of the seventies. At first in rough contours but slowly refined by discussing them with my public administration students and small projects outside the university. As a result, the work gained some fame, leading to a commission, in 1982, from the chief of police of Amsterdam.
Due to all kinds of circumstances and developments, the police force was involved in matters of corruption and fraud, had a quarrel with the city council, the public prosecutor’s office and with many organisations such as public transport, the taxi world, the hotel and catering industry, etc. The new chief of police had the task of cleaning up and – having been informed about this methodology by his staff – put me to work. This led to an entirely new policy on policing in Amsterdam, a new organisation and a new management. With a turnaround time of three years. The Action Book to be carried out included about 150 projects, laid down in a Covenant, signed by the Mayor of Amsterdam, the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Justice, the Chief Public Prosecutor in Amsterdam and the Chief of Police himself.
This assignment made me decide to leave the university in 1983. Since then, this method has been used in dozens of projects. A few examples:
The Second Structure Plan for Traffic and Transport. Commissioned by the then Minister of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, a policy was developed for the Lower House of Parliament to unite the goals of traffic and transport, of the economy and of nature and the environment. Involvement of everyone with authority in the economy, traffic and transport, nature and the environment. It led to the fall of the Lubbers II cabinet in 1989.
In the early 1990s, a European structure scheme for transnational traffic and transport through all the countries of the then EEC, commissioned by the European Commissioner for Transport. Input from ministers, top officials, captains of industry, experts and committed citizens throughout the world.
In the 1990s, for the municipality of Amsterdam – in addition to the strategy of the police and the Public Prosecution Service – the creation of its own municipal strategy with concrete actions to combat organised crime. Involvement from all sectors and layers of society.
Also in the 1990s, the ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management commissioned a safety policy for all interactions in the North Sea: boats, fishermen, tourists, oil and gas installations, nature and the environment.
In the 1990s, the United Nations (partly at the request of the EU) also commissioned me to tackle in Bangkok the increasing deterioration of the living conditions and impoverishment of that part of the city where the King’s palace is located, some of the most important ministries, the largest markets and the most beautiful temples. Huge crowds of people and the emission of gases from vehicles caused the quality of life to deteriorate, civil servants were unable to reach their workplaces, citizens were unable to get their food from the markets, temples fell into disrepair and tourism declined. The method of working outlined above was incorporated by the UN in an instruction that was distributed by the UN office in the countries of Southeast Asia.
For the government of Suriname:
an integrated traffic and transport policy on behalf of the Minister for Transport and Communications;
the design of an integrated national security policy on behalf of the Minister for Justice and Police and the Minister for Defence;
on behalf of the International Development Bank (IDB) a policy to strengthen the Surinamese economy;
a policy for the EU and the Suriname Business Forum to improve in Suriname the ‘ease of doing business’ in accordance with the methodology of the World Bank;
on behalf of the Vice President, the design of a policy to fill the gaps in the legislation that should be present under the constitution, as well as the modernisation of outdated legislation;
more recently, a study by the municipality of Voorst (Netherlands) into the possibilities of working preventively within the social domain in order to prevent problems that seriously impede the happiness of (vulnerable) residents. This project was excellently led by Koen van Bremen; he is one of the founders of our Cooperative Societal World.
I’ll leave it at this list. It is only intended to indicate that this method applies to every issue, that is to say, independently of the policy area. It can handle any complexity, provided that …… we can work as it should be, that is, according to Standard Operational Procedures (SOP), which I have outlined in pages 4-6.
In order to transfer knowledge of this SOP, I conducted many multi-day courses between 1983 and 2000. In and outside the Netherlands. One of the students was Peter Hovens. Although others also started to work with this methodology, Peter turned out to be the only one who committed himself to it in principle and thus became my colleague. Now, in 2019, he believes that the time has come to write a book about ‘circular policy making’ with all the gained knowledge and experience. This will be published in 2020.
The relationship with the concept of ‘federalisation of Europe’ I was co-founder of the Association for Public Administration in 1972 and then as vice-chairman in charge of the portfolio to set up public administration education in the Netherlands and internationally. The international work took place within the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS), the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) and the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA).
In these contexts, I met a number of Flemish colleagues at various Belgian universities. I discussed with them the progress of the far-reaching constitutional reforms in Belgium (started in 1960), aimed at transforming the unitary state into a federal state. Only by means of a federal state could Wallonia (French-speaking) and Flanders (Dutch-speaking), and a small German-speaking part, continue to live and work together without shooting at each other. Only then did I learn the intrinsic meaning of a federal state organization to support the citizens in the pursuit of their happiness. Since the principles of federalisation therefore come from the same source as the creation of bottom-up policy – namely from the concept of ‘all sovereignty rests with the people’ – in addition to developing the method of interactive policy, I went on to study the basic building blocks of federalisation, to be applied to the establishment of a federal Europe.
In order to get closer to the far-reaching federalisation process in Belgium, I decided to move to Belgium in 1996. There I met a director of the Flemish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Herbert Tombeur. His knowledge of federalism filled the gaps that had arisen in my case despite my intensive studies on the subject.
I was particularly interested in the way in which the world’s first federal state was established through the work of the 55 members of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, supported by the 85 Federalist Papers of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay between 1787 and 1788. One of the claims was that the American federation was based on the philosophical thinking of European philosophers (Aristotle, Althusius, Montesquieu, Rousseau), while after 1787 there had always been a vain attempt to choose a federal form of government for Europe as well.
In 1999, Robert A. Levine, a top official in America’s federal administration, wrote in the New York Times that the then EEC was doing itself no favours in establishing a monetary union (under the Maastricht Treaty in 1992) without first establishing a federal foundation. He argued that this was an uncertain future for the euro and advised to start by writing a European version of the Federalist Papers. That advice remained in the conversations between Herbert and me for a long time. As no one else in Europe had taken that advice, we decided to write the European Federalist Papers ourselves between August 2012 and May 2013. In 26 Papers we explain how bad the EU’s intergovernmental operating system under treaty law is, why that is bad, what the power of a federal state is, why it should replace the current system and what a strong European federal constitution looks like.
Result? Zero. The political, academic and media attention to the way to govern a group of countries that want to preserve their sovereignty and cultural identity but want to find protection in a federal body that defends their common interests was zero and is still zero.
A Citizens’ Convention as a link between popular sovereignty, circular policy making and federalization If you look again at the beginning of this article, you will see the link between popular sovereignty, circular policy making and federalisation. It is the link of what one needs to know and to handle in cases of a complex process of change.
People’s sovereignty is the fundamental source for the creation of a federal state. This implies that the people themselves sign up to a federal constitution. No federal constitution of, for and by the people? Then no federal state. But this signing – constitutional termed ‘ratification’ – requires such an organisation that two things are guaranteed:
that the constitution really is of, for and by the citizens; this implies the organisation of the fundamental involvement of the citizens in describing the important content of the constitution;
that the constitution itself must be perfectly professional craftsmanship; this implies that well-meaning amateurs and foolish bunglers must not interfere with it.
A Citizens’ Convention such as that of Philadelphia in 1787 – an unparalleled constitutional and institutional formula for success – is the instrument for offering these two guarantees. In a book that you can see at the end of this note, I explain in detail how to set up a Convention of 56 people, what its mission is, how it is to be carried out, and what role and influence it will give to the citizens of Europe in its implementation. Now I mention that role and impact by referring, for the sake of brevity, to our methodology of circular policy making, outlined at the beginning of this article. This methodology involves the citizens of Europe in the composition of a federal constitution in a planned and systematic manner. And thus, not by means of well-meaning but mis organised collections of so-called ‘citizens’ assemblies’ that can only achieve quasi involvement because of a lack of methodological knowledge.
The need for anchoring In line with the principle that all sovereignty rests with the citizen, I have therefore been dealing with two expressions of sovereignty since 1970. Firstly, the methodology of policy making from within society itself. In 2000, I needed to anchor my knowledge – and the experiences with its application – in a trilogy. Here are the title pages. The first two books can be downloaded for free via the links:
In the first book I recorded the experiences with the methodology, applied from the beginning of the eighties until the turn of the century. The second book contains about 180 essays on commandments and prohibitions in politics and policy. The third book is an online course (onlinecursus) Dutch language only) to learn this subject under our guidance. The archer with his arrow symbolizes that you will only hit your target if you know what you have to do before you let the arrow go. Now we call it ‘making circular policy’.
The pursuit of a federal Europe is also anchored. One of the main reasons for the continuing lack of a federal Europe after two hundred years is the curious absence – I have already mentioned this – of a federation of federalist movements. No matter how many such movements we have had, they are all decentralised unitary movements. They have never been able and/or willing to increase their level of organisation.
Federalist organisations that share the same goal – the establishment of a federal Europe in this context – but are not prepared to strengthen their degree of organisation will never achieve their goal. That is why six people, two from Italy (Lorenzo Sparviero and Mauro Casarotto), two from France (Catherine Guibourg and Michel Caillouët) and two from the Netherlands (Peter Hovens and I) founded the Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF) in Milan in May 2018. Its aim is to offer federalist movements and, furthermore, any organisation that aspires to a federal Europe, the protection of a federation. In this way, to create critical mass through ‘Federating the Federalists’.
A second objective that we are pursuing with FAEF is ‘Educating the Federalists’. We see that on a very large scale there is a lack of thorough knowledge of what a federation is. There are plenty of opinions, but knowledge is what we need. Politicians who, since the failed Maastricht Treaty of 1992, have been making false statements about federalisation and a federal Europe through conceptual ignorance, have led citizens to believe that federalisation is a bad thing. Well, that is on the same level as claiming that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it.
Our goal is to create the United States of Europe, following as closely as possible the process that took place in America in the 18th century. Without increasing the degree of organisation of federalist movements and without sharing the basic knowledge needed to create a federal Europe, we will not make any progress.
Here, too, there is a need for anchoring in order to prevent this federalist FAEF initiative from being swept away by the banalities of history.
Finally President Bill Clinton once made the following comment to underline the importance of economics: “It is the economy, stupid.” Now that in many countries in the world, and certainly not only in Europe, the foundations of the concept of democracy are eroding, it is time to choose a different adage:
“It is NOT the economy, stupid. It is the sovereignty of the people, organized within a true democracy, based on a federal constitution, under the rule of law.”
Dr. Leo Klinkers, Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF)
August 2019
In December 1949, Indonesia concluded an agreement with the Netherlands to establish a federal state under the name of the United States of Indonesia. This consisted of seven states. The Moluccas fell under the state of Eastern Indonesia.
The president of the federation, Sukarno, started to dismantle the federation after only a week, in January 1950. His aim was to establish a unitary state, the Republic of Indonesia. The conclusion of the agreement with the Netherlands on the establishment of the federation was only a strategic move towards becoming an UN-sanctioned sovereign state. Sukarno did not intend to lead a federal state but wanted to become the autocratic ruler of all the peoples that were part of the federation in December 1949. The Indonesian signature on the agreement in December 1949 was therefore based on a false motive.
Contrary to what is claimed, it is a characteristic of a federal state that the its member states are sovereign and autonomous. They have the power to regulate their own affairs, whereby interests that the federated states cannot represent on their own are taken care of by a federal body that has the power to take decisions on a limitative range of subjects.
The Moluccas did not want to lose their sovereignty as part of a federal state of the federation and decided in the fourth month of the federation, April 1950, to proclaim their own independence. As Sukarno had done in 1945. The long and bloody struggle for freedom that followed was won by Indonesia with the execution of the leader of the Moluccan resistance in 1966, Dr. Chris Soumokil. In the meantime, Indonesia had already completely dismantled the federation in August 1950 and in the sixties also occupied West Papua.
This is one of the many examples in which violence against oppression and the fight for freedom is sanctioned by the UN for the simple reason that the winner is more powerful than the loser. Followed by sanctioning by other countries because good relations with the winner mean economic advantage.
The peoples of the Moluccas and West Papua have never accepted Indonesia’s violent annexation. This has regularly led to bloody action against rebel movements in the Moluccas and West Papua. Sometimes with the character of a religious war. Around the year 2000, for example, Christian villages in the Moluccas were attacked by Indonesian Muslim army units. This also resulted in profits in the area of divide and rule because part of the Moluccan population is Muslim.
The current rulers of totalitarian Indonesia should not forget that freedom fighters have the time factor on their side. The Netherlands fought against the dominant Spain for eighty years, declared independence during that struggle in 1581 and gained that independence in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. And let’s not forget Vietnam. Suppressing peoples with an occupying power is not a quiet possession.
If Indonesia assumes that in the long run there will be peace in the Moluccas and West Papua, then they are mistaken. There will never be peace as long as injustice and violence are more important to those in power than allowing a people their freedom under the principles of sovereignty, democracy and the rule of law.
Today, 40% of the world’s population lives in 27 federal states. And more are becoming so as the 21st century progresses. Against this background, Indonesia has only two alternatives. Either continue the repression by force or restore the original federation of December 1949. Including West Papua as part of the state of the East Indies.
Presidents come, presidents go, but an oppressed people who want their legitimate freedom will always exist.
The establishment of a state The way in which a state is designed largely determines the question of whether the people within that state feel happy. A well-built state is no different than a well-constructed chair or a well-prepared meal. On a wrongly made chair you get back pain and a bad meal makes you vomit. It’s about craftsmanship, based on standards.
If we assume that a democratically-implemented state is the least bad form of government (Churchill’s words), there are still different constitutional and institutional forms. The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy in the form of a decentralized unitary state. France is a republic in the form of a centralized unitary state. Germany is a republic in the form of a federation.
I am now only talking about the creation of a federal state and base what follows on the ideas of political philosophers from Aristotle onwards, combined with a few examples from federal practice.
Popular sovereignty as a philosophical principle A federation is based on a philosophical and a practical starting point. The philosophical starting point is based on popular sovereignty. In other words, all sovereignty rests with the people. This sentence dominated the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the first federal constitution in America in 1787. In other words, for the first time in Earth’s history, a number of politico-philosophical considerations were contained in concrete binding law (constitutional) and a form of organization attached to it (institutional).
Those who do not accept that sovereignty rests with the people accept that all power is in the hands of an autocrat. And then the people are always the losers.
Representation of the people as practical principle But the people cannot meet every day on the square to make all the decisions. So, it must be represented. That implies elections with the guarantee that they are free, can take place in seclusion and guarantee that minorities are also represented. The latter – representation of minorities – means that elections based on a district system with the adage ‘the winner takes all’ should be avoided in any case. See the misery with the two-party system in America and England.
The federal state from the bottom up The sovereignty of the people plays in layers, from the bottom up. The first and bottom layer is the family. It can make decisions autonomously. However, the family has interests and/or concerns that it cannot control itself. It therefore asks a higher level – for example, a neighborhood body – to share the sovereignty of the family with some of the family’s powers in order to represent these interests/concerns. In this way, a federal state is built from the bottom up. From layer to layer.
A simple example: if, on the occasion of the World Cup football, many people in the Netherlands want to show the colour orange (which is the colour of the royal family), but not one family in the street can provide orange in the entire street, then an occasional body can be set up that, with a donation from all the families in that street, will provide a beautiful orange scene.
That is federal organizing. But the federal body that takes care of orange throughout the street does not have the authority to decide that only hamburgers may be served on the joint barbecue after the final victory, unless the residents of that street have granted that authority to that federal body. The powers of a federal body are always limitative and precisely defined. The fact that, in practice, public officials will always try to push the limits of these limitative powers and even go beyond them is not a characteristic of the structure of a federation, but of the quality of the people within a federation who are looking for more and more power. This is a characteristic of political functioning and not of federal organizing.
The most important values of a federal state: freedom and happiness The most important value that the federal state must guarantee is to support the people in freely pursuing their own happiness. Nothing more and nothing less. In order to clarify the essence of this, I recently wrote a (new) preamble for a European federal constitution: see https://www.faef.eu/the-europe-of-the-citizens/.
A preamble to a constitution describes the values that need to be preserved and guarded. Next, the articles of the constitution determine how this preservation and monitoring will be guaranteed.
These concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’ played a central role in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the first federal constitution eleven years later in 1787 in America. The concept of happiness within freedom then became the basis of those rules in the constitution that were to be called the ‘checks and balances’. Just as the English had curtailed the autocratic powers of King John Lackland in the Magna Carta in 1215, and the Netherlands in 1581 with the Declaration of Abandonment said adieu to the Spanish ruler, so the thirteen colonies in America in 1776 said that they would no longer wished to obey the English king. But to say that you want to be free is one thing, to make sure that this is legally valid is two. And that’s what they did by designing the federal constitution.
They knew from philosophers like Aristotle and Rousseau what popular sovereignty meant, they knew from Althusius what the building blocks of federal thinking were, they knew from Montesquieu what the trias politica meant and for the first time in the history of mankind they came up with a political form in which those different pieces of the politico-philosophical puzzle were put together.
The ‘trias politica’ and the ‘checks and balances’ But the ‘trias politica’ are just two words. The underlying meaning is as follows: ‘You shall separate the three branches of the state – the legislative, the executive and the judiciary – in order to prevent one from taking over the other and re-establishing autocratic rule’. However, they also knew that it would be inevitable that these three branches would have to intervene in the territory of others from time to time. So, the trick was: build in so-called ‘countervailing powers’. So, if one of the branches were to operate in the territory of another, that other branch would have to have the power to push that one back into its own territory.
They designed a brilliant system of checks and balances within a brilliant constitution. The most important aspect of the brilliant constitution was to make as few articles as possible. So not a millimeter of rules that would be about the interests of the individual states. Only the general interest of the thirteen should be regulated jointly. So they made a constitution of only seven articles, the core of which was a) the countervailing powers of the thirteen states vis-à-vis the federal body, b) the countervailing powers between the three branches within each state (it should be noted that in a federation the member states remain independent and each has its own legislative, executive and judicial power) and c) the countervailing powers between the three branches at the federal level.
A small example from the American constitution that Herbert Tombeur and I have adopted in the draft of the European federal constitution (see our European Federalist Papers 2012-2013): the legislative branch consists of the House of Citizens and the Senate. Both can make laws. If the House drafts a law, it must be submitted to the Senate. If it rejects it, they have to start over. If both Houses agree it goes to the President. He must decide within ten days: agreement or a well-founded veto. If a veto, then return to the House which either throws it away or accepts it again by a two-thirds majority, with or without adjustment based on the President’s arguments. Then back to the Senate. Same procedure. If both bodies agree, the President must also accept it.
This structure is perfectly transparent. Whether or not it meets the value of the state supporting the people in their free pursuit of happiness does not depend on that structure but, once again, on the level of quality of the people/politicians in that structure. At the moment, we can see that the US President is trying, through an outdated and therefore retarded system of elections, to achieve autocratic monopoly. But it is precisely the ingenious system of checks and balances that puts him in his place.
Only if he succeeds in creating an international conflict – after provocations – in such a way that it becomes an armed conflict will he be the master of some constitutionally based ’emergency laws’. And then the ‘shit hits the fan’, because then he no longer has to answer to anyone. De-escalating action is now required. Although, if at all it will be possible to de-escalate the conflict with Iran created by Trump himself, he will immediately start a new conflict because he knows that he can only establish autocratic rule if he gets his hands on the emergency laws. On the other hand, I think it is conceivable that he will then start a new civil war within America, which he will lose anyway.
The rule of law as the core of a democratic state As an administrator, being accountable to a people’s representative body is at the heart of a democratic constitutional state. This refers to the rule of law. That means: no one is above the law. If there is one principle that must be observed, it is this. It is one and indivisible with federalism. And thus, the absolute counterpart of the intergovernmentalism of the European Union.
In this intergovernmentalist system, administrators – based on a treaty instead of a constitution – take all the important decisions, binding on the citizens, without having to justify them to a transnational parliament freely elected by the people. Rousseau has already made it clear that within a democracy there will always be a tendency to turn it into an ‘elective aristocracy’, which then always tends towards an oligarchy. In this way, the most important functions are divided among themselves in a small circle.
These tendencies are to some extent present in every democratic state. Also, in the Netherlands. In scientifically substantiated figures: approximately 2.5% of the electorate (approximately 300,000 people) divide the most important posts among themselves in the political, administrative and official bodies, in the permanent and ad hoc committees, in science and in industry. Governing on the basis of a Coalition Agreement strengthens this process to the detriment of the strength of the parliament that must be in place as the representative of the adage ‘all sovereignty rests with the people’, which implies that the executive power is always accountable to the parliament. But in reality, the parliament is there to cover the pre-cooked measures of the Coalition Agreement. Only when a minister operates too bad, he or she will be sent away. The way in which the executive power determines what the legislative power of the House of Representatives should find and decide has now also reached the decision-making spectrum of the Senate. It is no longer a body that, regardless of the political delusion of the day, assesses whether a law is good or bad, but follows – albeit often under protest – what the Coalition Agreement prescribes.
This is extremely important in an intergovernmentalist system such as that of the European Union. Look again at the way in which two to three leaders of the European Council recently set aside the ‘Spitzen Candidates’ earmarked by the European Parliament for the Presidency of the European Commission, preferring someone who would not endanger the unbridled power of the European Council.
In the long run, any intergovernmentalist system will crack and squeak, conflicts will arise because there is top-down government without accountability, Member States do not comply with agreements under treaty law, decisions are not taken on the basis of a vision of the general European interest of the Member States as a whole, but on the basis of an exchange of the national interests of nation states. And then we have to wait for the ignition of the fuse in the powder keg.
The Convention of Philadelphia Between 1776 and 1787, the 55 members of the Philadelphia Convention realized this. The thirteen states were about to attack each other with weapons. What was done? Contrary to the task of repairing the errors in the treaty, they threw away their confederal treaty and in two weeks they came up with the basis for designing a draft federal constitution. They took a few more months to work it out and presented it to the people of the thirteen states. If the people of nine states agreed, the federation would legally enter into force. And that took place in 1789.
Federalists have been making, for many decades, a classic mistake in their pursuit of a federal Europe. A mistake that stubbornly blocks the intended result – a federal Europe. That is the repeated and pointless attempt to adapt the treaty basis of the intergovernmental EU system in such a way that it automatically becomes a federation. Well, you may disagree as to whether an apple is tastier than a pear, but there is no point in disagreeing as to whether you can turn an apple pie into a pear pie.
There is only one way to create a federal Europe, and that is to follow exactly the same procedure that the founding fathers of the Philadelphia Convention did in 1787: throw the treaty in the bin, never look after it again and, from the point of view of European philosophers, design a federal constitution in accordance with the standards that apply to it: from, for and by the people. I could also put it another way: because the standards are known, but two hundred years after the first federation in 1787, and seventy years after the Second World War, there is still no European federation, then there has always been a wrong way of operating. Time to stop pumping around opinions and to start studying how things should be done. Namely as the founding fathers did in 1787.
Exactly the same procedure should be used for the United Nations. Stop making pointless attempts to amend the UN Charter so that the UN can finally become a federal body that provides for a number of common interests that individual Member States can no longer take care of on their own. All the energy that is directed towards the wrong construction will only lead to more back pain and the need to vomit. These include the 60 million refugees in camps and the many refugees who are drowning in the Mediterranean. The recent appeal by the United Nations to the European Union to resume rescuing refugees in that sea marks the meaningless control of both intergovernmentalist operating systems. They are at the end of their political life cycle and therefore belong in the bin. Trying to repair system errors in a non-functional treaty only leads to new problems in the 2-4-8-16 series and so on.
The concept ‘federalism’ and the most important standards Federalists have an inexhaustible tendency to speak out on policy issues in endless debates. However, there is no federal agricultural policy, no federal migration policy, no federal education policy and so on. You do not have to be a federalist to have a particular view of a particular political and social issue. In other words, federalism is not about specific policies, but only about the way in which cooperation between independent entities is regulated in legal and organizational terms. When it comes to a combination of states, it is the organization of the state. When it comes to private cooperation, such as the relationship between individual football clubs, their national federal bond, their European UEFA bond and their FIFA as a world bond, we are talking about a private federation. There are many hundreds of them in Europe. Big and small. But after 200 years of complaining, there is still no federal Europe. Why not? Because there is no craftsmanship. European federalists lack sufficient knowledge how to make a federal Europe.
Providing craftsmanship requires a) acquiring fundamental knowledge about elementary federalism (i.e. the task of educating the federalists), b) increasing the degree of organization of all single federal movements (i.e. federating the federalists) and c) building a federal Europe with the standards of federalism (i.e. applying standard operational procedures). And zero energy to spend on things that have nothing to do with it.
Not only is there no federalist policy, but there is also no diversity of federal systems, contrary to what many federalists claim. Some talk about Dual Federalism, Co-operative Federalism, Competitive Federalism,’Fiscal Federalism, New Federalism and other inventions. Nonsense.
There is only one concept of ‘federation’, based on standards. If these standards are 100% adhered to, it is a strong federation. If one is unwilling or unable to adhere 100% to these standards – as is the case with the Belgian federation, for example – then we are dealing with a weak federation. The further one deviates from the standards, the greater the risk of the federation collapsing. This has happened a few times in Africa, Asia and Europe. Nevertheless, 40% of the world’s population now lives in 27 – partly strong, partly weak – federations. It is this way of talking about federalism, which deviates from the standards, that has led some federalists to the misconception that ‘the intergovernmentalist EU also looks like a federation’.
The most important standards are:
The people of a collection of independent states decide to form a federation. They do so because there are interests and concerns that individual states can no longer take care of themselves.
The people of the member states ratify a federal constitution – from, for and by the people – that defines the limitative powers of the federal body and the articles that guarantee the checks and balances.
The Member States themselves remain sovereign, independent with their own cultural identity, i.e. with their own parliament, government, judiciary, their own monarchy if any, their own tax system, their own policy areas.
They allow a federal body to share in that sovereignty by means of a vertical separation of powers. In other words, the federal body may, with the powers of the Member States, deal with those limitative matters of which the Member States say: ‘Please, would you look after that for us, because we can no longer take care of that ourselves’.
Both the Member States and the federal body have parliaments. The executive power of the federal body is accountable to it.
Unlike in America, for example, the members of the federal parliament are elected transnationally on the basis of proportional representation.
What the policies of that federal state will be depends on the members of that parliament. The political composition of the parliament determines whether Europe will be a fortress or whether it has open borders. Whether or not a joint army will be deployed in areas of conflict. Whether the sanctions against other states will be continued or abolished. Whether or not agricultural subsidies will be phased out.
One can speak of ‘the policy of a federation’, but not of ‘federalist policy’.
Within the use of standards there is room to vary. Two examples. In one federation one can conclude that foreign affairs as a whole must be at the federal level. In other federations, for example in Belgium, foreign affairs have been identified as a common interest to be promoted by the federation, but Flanders and Wallonia are allowed to pursue their own foreign policy for subjects that do not fall under the federal authority. Another example concerns the tax system. Normally, a fiscal union is built within a federation. For example, in America. The Member States levy tax for the federal body and therefore pay it off. The federal body pays out money to the Member States in the event of investments or calamities. In practice, it may then be the case that a Member State pays more federal tax one year than it receives benefits in return, and the opposite situation the following year. The Member States themselves retain their own tax systems and are allowed to compete with them. Texas, for example, tries to attract with low rates companies and individuals from California, which has the highest rates. These examples therefore relate only to space that exists within fixed standards for the construction of a federation.
In short: striving for a federal Europe is only the professional construction of a safe and sustainable house. Which furniture should be in that house is not a property of a federation, but of the taste of those who are going to live in it.
Our assignment and task And that – the construction of the federal house – is what still needs to be done in Europe: zero energy spending on the senseless attempts to transform the Lisbon Treaty into a federation. This will exacerbate the internal conflict, the external weakness of the geopolitical position and the antagonistic cooperation on policy issues that have to be considered in the general interest, even more than is already the case.
Here, too, is a task for the world’s federalists to stop trying to amend the UN Charter and, above all, to stop spending all their energy on considering policy issues, however essential they may be for the survival of our Earth. These important issues can only be addressed within a state structure that acts on the basis of the common interest of the Member States.
If countries want and need to cooperate but are no longer able to control certain interests or concerns on their own and still want to remain sovereign, then only a federal state can guarantee this. An intergovernmental operating system cannot do that. Making Europe a federation, building a federal house in which those policy issues are in good hands, that is the task we face.
This task can only be carried out successfully if the approach to the pursuit of a federal Europe changes in accordance with the adage: ‘If you continue to do today what you did yesterday, you will get the same results tomorrow as you received today. If you don’t like those results, you have to change today. Then you will get different results tomorrow. Change starts with yourself. If you don’t, why would your neighbor want to change?’
I hope that this brief note will provide some clarity about standards of federalism. Supporting information can be found in ‘Connectivity, Security and Prosperity’, trailer: https://www.faef.eu/trailer/. It also contains a draft of a ten-article federal constitution for Europe and a scenario for a Citizens’ Convention in accordance with the set-up of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, the founding fathers of the first federal constitution.
According to media reports, the European summit of 20 June 2019 on appointing candidates to succeed Donald Tusk and Jean Claude Juncker ended in a deadlock. Nothing could be further from the truth. At least from the perspective of the three protagonists Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Rutte. They play the power game exactly according to the classic rules.
Rule 1: first eliminate the candidates who are not (or are not allowed to be) eligible. That worked out well on 20 June. The three ‘Spitzen’ candidates, earmarked by the European Parliament, have been rejected.
Rule 2: then discuss in a small group the way in which the real candidates – who have been known already – can be put forward. Merkel, Macron and Rutte will go to the G20 in Japan on 28 and 29 June and will hold these discussions there, far beyond the Brussels limelight. And also to consult some of the G20 key players about the appointment of Rutte as President of the European Council.
Rule 3: launch Mark Rutte at the Brussels summit on 30 June as a candidate to succeed Donald Tusk. The reason for the appointment of Rutte is the interest of Merkel, Macron and Rutte in exchanging the principle of unanimity of decision-making in the European Council for majority voting in order to make it easier to decide on the imposition of sanctions on a country like Iran, for example. See my article about Macron and Rutte.
Rule 4: At the same time, to succeed Juncker, they are nominating a candidate from a small country, such as Greece. As a reward for the efforts to put the financial situation in that country back in order. By appointing the Dutch Rutte as President of the European Council, the Dutch Frans Timmermans will not be able to succeed Juncker. The real reason is that the very ambitious Timmermans as President of the European Commission would pose a permanent threat to any President of the European Council.
Leo Klinkers, 25 May 2019 Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF)
The European Union has some Member States that are unwilling – or unable – to meet their budgetary commitments. That is why there are financial transfers from rich to poor Member States. Opponents of a federal Europe base their view on the proposition that a federal form of government would strengthen those financial transfers. Well, exactly the opposite is true. It is precisely with the creation of a federal Europe that the current conflictual situation of north-south financial transfers can come to an end.
To understand this, we need to go back to 1787, the creation of the United States of America. After the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the thirteen former colonies concluded a confederation on the basis of a Treaty, and each built its own state. That proved unsuccessful. They had no money, no good governance, no strong external relations and no common defence against external threats. After eleven years, it turned out that the confederal Treaty was unable to prevent or resolve the growing mutual tensions.
In 1787, a group of fifty-five persons in the Philadelphia Convention began executing a legal mandate from the confederal Congress to correct the errors in that Treaty. After two weeks they came to the conclusion that this was not possible because the Treaty itself was the cause of their internal conflicts and their weak geopolitical position. As is the case today in the EU with the Treaty of Lisbon.
The Convention decided on its own authority to throw the Treaty into the dustbin and made the world’s first federal Constitution. Instead of falling apart, they eventually became fifty sovereign states, united by a federal Constitution, with an unmistakably strong geopolitical position.
In order to gain the support of the Citizens of the thirteen conflicting states for accession to the federal union, the Philadelphia Convention first submitted the federal Constitution to the Citizens themselves for ratification. By allowing the Citizens themselves to ratify the Constitution, they came as close as possible to the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’ of Rousseau. Within two years, the Citizens of the thirteen states had ratified the federal Constitution.
Money played an important role in this. Article VI of the submitted Constitution stipulated that the states that would join the federation would be released from their debts. From that moment on, these would be the debts of the federation: a one-off settlement of the debts. But after joining the federation, they would henceforth be responsible for their own finances. It was also a signal to the creditors that the debts would be paid off.
Aside: Herbert Tombeur and I have included this one-off debt settlement in our draft of a federal constitution for Europe. I refer you to our European Federalist Papers and to my book https://www.faef.eu/trailer/.
This, of course, raises the question: where will the federation get the money to take over the debts of the participating states? In America, this was achieved through the work of Alexander Hamilton, one of the three authors of the American Federalist Papers, and soon after the Constitution’s ratification becoming the federation’s finance minister. Hamilton was able to see the huge mountain of debt not as a problem but as an advantage. With, among other things, handy tax measures including taxes on luxury goods such as alcohol, the sale of land and import taxes, despite the initial resistance, he received enough money to clear his debts. He also managed to create a national bank to stabilize the national credit position and to play an active role in stimulating the economy. Today’s federal America owns about 24% of the combined national income of all Member States. The EU only 1%. This gives an idea of the financial strength of the federal part of America.
Aside: in section 1.5 of the 2012 Annual Report, the National Bank of the Netherlands clearly explained why and how the federal system in America was able to get the banking and economic crisis under control soon after 2008. The EU’s intergovernmental tampering with its ineffective financial system means a) that we are still far from a solution, b) the financial transfers from north to south are creating increasing conflicts and c) the EU is not able to withstand a possible new global financial crisis.
A one-off settlement of Member States’ debts – in line with the US example – makes it attractive to join a European federation. It corrects the mistake made by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 of creating the euro without a federal foundation, and it also puts an end to the quarrel between rich EU Member States who are increasingly reluctant to put money into the financial sinkholes of poor Member States who do not wish (or are not able) to comply with the budgetary obligations under the Lisbon Treaty and further agreements. (Incidentally, it is not only the poor countries that are failing to meet their budgetary obligations.) With such a one-off settlement, a federal Europe is not a transfer union.
It can be argued that this settlement will give poor countries a bonus for their bad budgetary behavior. But that is the price that Europe is paying for its failure to introduce this measure as early as the Treaty of Maastricht. If they had done that back then, we wouldn’t be in this financial mess by now.
The necessary federal budget can come from three sources: 1) from import levies by adapting the existing system to a federal system, 2) from federal taxes with simultaneous reduction of national tax rates and 3) from the introduction of the Spahn tax at federal level. The Spahn tax is an improved, but not yet introduced, version of the rejected Tobin tax, a form of taxation on money transactions in order to control the volatility of exchange rates.
As an aside, in 2004 the ECB rejected a proposal from Belgium to introduce the Spahn tax in Belgium on the grounds that it would be contrary to the Lisbon Treaty. In my proposal – to introduce the Spahn tax as one of the sources of a federal budget – there is no longer any question of a Treaty of Lisbon and this form of taxation could help to put an end to the uneven distribution of the financial burden between the Member States.
I invite readers to put forward ideas for improving these resources for a federal budget of the United States of Europe that is to be created. Ideas on the best institutional organization of the federal financial system are also welcome.
In this respect, we should be guided by the words of Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004 and Prime Minister of Italy from 2006 to 2008: “Great reforms will make a great Europe”.
Leo Klinkers, 6 June 2019 Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF)
Introduction The recent election of the new European Parliament has been described in the media as a cry from ‘the Europe of the citizens’. This applies both to the citizens who care about Europe and to those who reject it. But both parties want to develop their own version of ‘the Europe of the citizens’ in a different way. The opponents are seeking the path of a radical dismantling of the European Union, back to the nation-state anarchy of previous centuries with their inevitable wars. The supporters advocate a radical renewal of European cooperation with improved sovereignty, security and solidarity.
This article offers Europe’s supporters a perspective in the form of a Preamble to a federal constitution for a European federation. It gives their version of ‘the Europe of the citizens’ a soul and a heart.
The Preamble We, the citizens of the states [enumeration of participating member states],
I. Considering:
that the federation of the United States of Europe, which we hereby establish, has the mission and duty to support us as citizens in our quest for happiness in freedom;
that the federation should base the support of our quest for happiness
on working restlessly to preserve the diversity of all forms of life on Earth,
on unconditional respect for the diversity of sciences, cultures, ethnicities and beliefs of the citizens within the federation,
and on human compassion for citizens from outside the federation who want to find their happiness within the United States of Europe;
that in the execution thereof it should bear witness to wisdom, knowledge, humanity, righteousness and integrity, in full consciousness that it derives its powers from the people, that all men on earth are equal, and that no one is above the law.
II. Considering furthermore:
that this federal constitution is based on the wealth of ideas, considerations and wishes of European philosophers – and of European political leaders after the Second World War – to unite Europe in a federal form of government;
that the federal system is based on a vertical separation of powers between the Member States and the federal body through which the Member States and the federal body share sovereignty;
that the horizontal separation of the legislative, executive and judicial powers (trias politica) both at the level of the federal body and at the level of the Member States is guaranteed by a tight system of checks and balances;
III. Finally, without prejudice to our right to adjust the political composition of the federal body in elections, we have the inalienable right to remove the authorities from the federation if, in our view, they violate the provisions under I and II,
Establish the following articles for the constitution of the United States of Europe,
Article 1 ….
Article 2 ….
And so on.
The Explanatory Memorandum of the Preamble
Preliminary The opening words ‘We, the citizens of the states …..’ show that this constitution is being ratified by the citizens themselves. It therefore belongs by, for and of the citizens of the United States of Europe, in accordance with the adage ‘All sovereignty rests with the people’.
The United States of Europe consists of the citizens, the member states and the federal body.
It is a constitution and not a treaty. If countries or regions want to live together in peace and have to cooperate through historically defined borders, but nevertheless want to retain their autonomy and sovereignty, a federation is the only form of state that can guarantee this. This is not possible with a treaty. A treaty is an instrument for administrators to cooperate in policy areas without being fully-fledged democratically accountable for their decisions.
The fact that this constitution is first ratified by the citizens and only then by the parliaments of the member states shows that, in accordance with the basic aspects of federalism, formulated by Johannes Althusius around 1600, it is based from the bottom up and not imposed from the top down.
This federal constitution guarantees the common interests of the citizens of the United States of Europe and leaves to the citizens of the member states and to the member states themselves the powers to serve their own interests.
That is why this federal constitution consists of a limited number of rules of a general binding nature. It has no exceptions – driven by national interests – to these generally binding rules.
Explanatory note to Consideration Ia The obvious ‘quest for happiness in freedom’ of the citizens and the mission and task of governments to support the citizens in this is a cornerstone of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and of the subsequent American Constitution (1787-1789), the first federal constitution in the world. This was the model for the federations that were set up afterwards and that currently house 40% of the world’s population. The pursuit of happiness is therefore also a cornerstone of the federal constitution of the United States of Europe. The quest for happiness includes values such as peace, security and social security.
Explanatory note to Consideration Ib In the first place, this consideration gives the federation the task to work restlessly to preserve the diversity of all forms of life on Earth. Unsuccessful preservation of the diversity of all forms of life threatens the life of mankind on Earth. This task requires maximum cooperation, expertise and reliability from the federation’s authorities.
Secondly, the federation offers maximum respect for diversity in social life. Where it disappears, monocracies develop, which destroy those parts of society by inbreeding. Diversity of sciences, cultures, ethnicities and beliefs creates new sciences, cultures, ethnicities and beliefs. This constitution therefore rejects any action aimed at protecting the so-called ‘own people first’ and will use all legal means to combat such action.
Thirdly, as a consequence of the foregoing, this Preamble explicitly states that there is no room for a slogan such as ‘Europe first’. The federation of the United States of Europe shares its place on Earth with all other peoples and does not shut itself up behind the walls of a ‘fortress Europe’. Closing the external borders for the purpose of protecting one’s own people is not listed as a crime against humanity, but it is punishable by a serious penalty: the eventual disappearance – by demographic decay – of what one wishes to preserve. In other words: there will be open external borders, no closed borders. That creates obligations:
the design and implementation of plans such as the Marshall Plan (1948-1952) to support poor countries in their economic development in order to eliminate the need for seeking refuge in Europe;
with immediate effect offering a human existence to the approximately sixty million war refugees;
to strengthen Europe’s demographic and geopolitical position by providing – through wisdom, knowledge, humanity, justice and integrity – immigrants with a secure life within the federation;
to consider the implementation of a-c as one of the federation’s common interests.
This constitution is therefore a task and an opportunity for fundamental political renewal now that the post-war democracies have reached the end of a 70-year life cycle and have led to the exclusion of citizens in favour of treaty-based government, which by its very nature has become increasingly oligarchic and protectionist.
Explanatory note to Consideration Ic The end of the political life cycle of the post-war democracies, mentioned above, places those countries that consider democracy to be of great importance on a tour de force, similar to the revolution of the Enlightenment. Democracy and the representation of the people must be reinvented on the basis of the principle of ‘All sovereignty rests with the people’.
The Treaty of Lisbon is giving way to a constitution based on the representation of citizens. This implies, among other things, the abolition of the European Council of Heads of Government and State, the creation of a European Parliament on the basis of proportional representation within one electoral district – the territory of the federation – and a government under the leadership of a President, elected by the citizens. So, equipped with a democratic mandate.
This can only be achieved with wisdom, knowledge, humanity, justice and integrity. With just two certainties: if it succeeds, it will be a crucial revolution for the preservation of Europe. If it fails, by the end of this century, after the last tribal war in Europe initiated by nation-state anarchy, someone will turn off the lights in Europe.
Democracies cannot prevent elections from leading to groups within the democratic institutions that wish to use their power against democracy. This constitution enables the institutions of democracy, as far as possible, to deal with the abuse of democratic procedures by building in defence mechanisms. The task is therefore a fundamental reorientation of the concept of ‘democracy’ in 21st century Europe. With a task for political parties to reflect on their own responsibility to design instruments to defend democracy against parties that (would like to) abuse the procedures of democracy in order to destroy that democracy. Probably more than any other organisation within a democratic system, political parties will have to consider wisdom, knowledge, humanity, justice and integrity in order to guarantee the viability of a federally united Europe.
Explanatory note to Consideration IIa The ‘building blocks’ of federalism as a form of state stem from the ‘Political Method’ of Johannes Althusius (1603). The ‘cement’ to connect these ‘building blocks’ indissolubly was provided in the writings of European political philosophers such as Aristotle, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Locke with their views on popular sovereignty and the doctrine of the trias politica. The American federal constitution is based on these writings, while Europe has condemned itself to wars for centuries.
It was not only philosophers who provided the ‘cement’ for the building blocks of federalism. Also political and social leaders – in the Interbellum period for example the British Philip Kerr, better known as Lord Lothian – and after the Second World War the Italian Altiero Spinelli who, with his Ventotene Manifesto (1942), laid the foundation for the post-war pursuit of federalism. A goal that between 1945 and 1950 was led by a large number of conferences and plans led by statesmen, scientists, culture bearers and civil movements, but which in 1950 radically ceased to exist with the Schuman Declaration. Although this declaration demanded the creation of a federal Europe in its entirety, it put its implementation in the hands of government leaders. In this way – unintentionally, but through guilty ignorance of the way in which a federation should be created – the Treaty-based intergovernmentalism that has brought the European Union to the end of its current political life cycle was created.
Explanatory note to Consideration IIb The thirteen former colonies in America at the end of the 18th century solved the dilemma of ‘never again a ruler versus the need for representation of the people’. They applied the system of shared sovereignty devised by Althusius by inventing the vertical separation of powers between the sovereign member states and a federal body. Without transferring the integral member state’s sovereignty, they asked a federal body to take care of a limitative number of common interests, to execute with the powers of the member states.
Contrary to the claim that in a federation member states transfer all or part of their sovereignty in the sense of ‘giving it away and thus losing it’, this is not the case. Parents who hand over their child to a teacher do not lose anything of their parenting but give the teacher the power to teach the child knowledge that the parents themselves cannot realise. That is why another popular view is also wrong. Namely the view that a federation is a superstate that destroys the sovereignty of the member states.
The vertical separation of powers, leading to shared sovereignty, also solves another problem. Namely, the principle of subsidiarity. This principle in the Treaty of Lisbon states: ‘The institutions of the European Union should leave to the member states what the member states can do better themselves’. Since Article 352 of the Treaty allows the European Council to take any decision that the Council considers serving the objectives of the Union, the Council can ignore this principle of subsidiarity. In a federal state, the principle of subsidiarity coincides with the vertical separation of powers and therefore does not need to be mentioned as such in the articles of the Constitution.
A final aspect of this Consideration IIb implies that, due to the exhaustive range of competences of the federal body, all other competences remain with the citizens and the member states. This means, among other things, that the member states retain their own constitution, parliament, government and judiciary, including their own policy areas insofar as these have not been laid down in the exhaustive list of interests that the federal body must represent on behalf of the member states by means of the vertical division of powers. Monarchies are also preserved.
Explanatory note to Consideration IIc The horizontal separation of the three powers – the legislative, the executive and the judiciary – is not a specific feature of a federal form of state alone but is the adage of any state that wants to prevent domination by one power. Within a federation, however, there are two particularities.
Firstly, from the first federal state – that of the United States of America – the trias politica must be established both at the level of the federal body and at that of the individual member states. Secondly, in addition to the invention of the vertical separation of powers mentioned above, the federal constitution of the United States of America has introduced a second innovation: the checks and balances. To say that a self-respecting state considers the trias politica to be a very important aspect is only a declaration of its value. But values can only be monitored and preserved through norms. That is why the American Constitution – and also this European Constitution – contains articles that prevent the inevitable action of the three powers in the field of another power from slipping into the supremacy of one power over the other. That is the purpose of the checks and balances. They are the indispensable countervailing powers to limit the ever-present striving of the three powers to expand their complex of powers, at the expense of the powers of the others.
Explanatory note to Consideration III The citizens derive from the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Dutch Plakkaat of Abandonment of 1581, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 the inalienable right to expel governments from the federal body if they violate the provisions under I and/or II.
In accordance with the adage ‘All sovereignty rests with the people’, the citizens of the United States of Europe are the alpha and omega of the federation. Alpha in the sense of: they ratify the federal constitution and thus establish a system of representation of the people, of executive administration on the basis of political decision-making by the representative body and of justice for the resolution of disputes. Omega in the sense of the inalienable right to dismiss those who abuse the federal system, for example by (attempted) establishment of an autocratic system.
Final This Preamble contains the complex of values of the constitution of the United States of Europe. It shows what the United States of Europe stands for.
Europe is like a Ferrari with a 70-year old engine
An interview by Olivia Muñoz-Rojas with Mauro Casarotto
Within the context of the upcoming European elections and the debate about the future of the EU, I interview Mauro Casarotto, secreatry of the Promoting Committee of the Federal Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF). Born in 1981 in Italy, he graduated in political sciences and international relations at Padova University, and has a long experience in non-profit organizations. In 2014 he published Krisis. Che cosa nasconde la più grande crisi del mondo occidentale (Armando Editore), where he explores some of the causes and possible solutions to the crisis of the Western world, which, he claims, is first and foremost a social and cultural one. A convinced European, he decided to involve himself in the adventure of ‘federating the federalists’ under a common umbrella in the face of mounting nationalism and populism in Europe. As part of FAEF, Casarotto is determined to defend the legacy of years of painful European construction as well as contribute to turning Europe into a veritable federation, working from the bottom and up
I ask him about federalism, why it is often presented as a more democratic political structure, but also why it seems so hard to trigger a proper debate on federalism in Europe and what can be done to catch more attention from the media and public opinion.
Could you explain in a few words the difference between the current structure of the EU and the kind of federal Europe that FAEF promotes?
In a federation you have a federal body and several sovereign member states. The member states share their sovereignty with the federal body, asking that body to take care of a limited set of specific powers (for instance defence and foreign policy, intelligence, general civil rights legislation, environmental protection, currency, etc.). All the other areas remain in the hands of the members states. The federation takes care only of the common interests of all member states; interests and problems that can no longer be solved by the individual states. The actual EU is not a federation, it is instead an ‘intergovernmental system’. It is not based on a constitution but on treaties or agreements on specific policy areas. If the governments reach an agreement, they can take any decision within the Council, without any limitations, because, unlike a federal system, you don’t have a constitution clearly defining the limits of the powers of federal governance.
Is a federal structure more democratic? Why?
Because, even if we have a European Parliament whose members are elected by the European citizens, all the important decisions are taken by the heads of government in the Council, in closed-door meetings. Sometimes they take decisions that erode individual countries’ sovereignty, including fields where this is not necessary and then you have lack of democracy. And if they don’t agree on anything, they can’t take decisions and you have the current paralysis. This has led to Brexit and disaffection towards the EU.
Why is it difficult for people to understand what federalism is? Because nobody explains it to them! And it is a shame, a lack of constitutional, political and sociological knowledge if you consider that federalism is already part of the philosophical heritage of Europe and that, for instance, it was developed in the United States of America more than two centuries ago based on the thought of European philosophers like Kant, Montesquieu, Locke, Rousseau, Althusius and others.
Who wants a federal Europe today?
If you think that there are issues for which the power and capacity for action of our small, individual European states is not sufficient anymore, you are probably in favour of a strong, fair cooperation among them. This must indeed include an administrative and governing body that takes care of these common interests with a real democratic checks-and-balances system in place. Do you agree with this? Probably, yes. At the same time, it is likely you believe that each country should maintain its autonomy, preserve its peculiarities, culture, institutions, language, which is all quite reasonable. Then you are a federalist, and you are in favour of the federalization of Europe.
Would a federal structure in Europe help addressing pressing public policy areas such as climate change and migration?
I reverse the question. Is it possible to solve the migration and climate change crises if states deal with them by their own, without any coordination or with different, maybe even conflicting approaches? Nobody can be so foolish to think so. Only a federal Europe will developing enough critical mass and coordination to develop fair agreements on such fundamental questions together with the other main global actors. If a player is small and divided it will have no power in the future global structure.
Many people think that a federal Europe means countries lose their specificities and blend into a homogenous political entity. Is this the case?
No, a federation is not a super-state which abolishes the peculiarities of all the individual states because, if the federal constitution is built the right way, there is a barrier between the limited set of powers that the member states share with the federal body and the powers that remain with the member states. The federal government cannot trespass this barrier because the constitution does not allow it. While, unfortunately, this is possible under article 352 of the intergovernmental Treaty of Lisbon currently in place: the governments can come up with a new treaty or agreement any time and regulate any aspect of the life of each of our countries. We don’t have this barrier, and the weak control of the European Parliament is insufficient to prevent abuses.
If a federal Europe would benefit ordinary Europeans while allowing them to preserve their national identities, why is it so challenging to make both the idea and the discussion attractive to a majority of people?
Again, because of the extensive lack of knowledge, considering that even a lot of politicians do not have a clear idea of what federalism really is and they confuse it with more ‘intergovernmentalism’. 99 per cent of politicians do not know enough about federalism, and some of the few who know are discouraged. They consider it a pornographic word given that the political discussion around them is corrupted by lack of knowledge and the need to drug electoral campaigns with the lure of quick, simplistic and immediate promises in order to be elected. This is populism, after all.
What is the role of FAEF in this sense?
To explain federalism and the potential of its accurate application to the European citizens. We also need to create a federation that includes all the organisations that are in favour of a more united and stronger Europe, so that we can put together our forces, and show in practice what federalism is in theory. After all, if the federalists are not able to federate themselves, how can they preach to countries to federalize?
In particular, how do you think that younger generations can be reached and involved in the debate about federalism?
By honestly speaking to them, answering their questions, involving them through both traditional methods such as schools, lectures, books, and new ones such as social media. Federalism is not rocket science, just the right application of a few logic key concepts, which are already part of European cultural heritage.
One of your members, Catherine Guibourg, suggests that literature and drama are among the most powerful means to explore Europe, its challenges and possibilities. Do you have any ideas or projects in this regard?
Yes, Catherine has written a theatrical play Nous, le peuple européen: six personnages en quête d’Europe (We the European people: six characters in search of Europe) that is currently performing very well in France. This is a different approach to engage people, discuss with them about Europe and federalism as a possible solution. We need a frank discussion, involving not only the establishment but the whole of civil society.
Many people fear the result of the upcoming European elections – specifically, the consolidation of a powerful alliance of the extreme right in the European Parliament. How does FAEF approach the elections and what do you expect from them?
We are not a party. We don’t run for elections or make electoral campaigns. The nature of FAEF is to involve all the movements that are in favour of a more united Europe. They can come from the left, the centre or the right, be progressive, conservative, liberal, provided they are democratic and accountable, and agree on the goal of creating a European Federation. As sovereign forces, they are free to participate in elections or support electoral campaigns. Meanwhile, we play a different role.
Europe, the first world economy, is actually like a Ferrari with a 70-year old engine inside it which simply cannot work in a modern luxury car. This old engine is the intergovernmental system. We need to change it before it is too late.
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