Conceptualizing Politics

4.   The pacification of Europe
A discussion of peace and war cannot ignore the European Union (EU), so far 
the only successful case of institutional pacifism applied among nation states in 
modern history. It has come into being by the word (intellectual debate, diplo-
matic talk, wording of the treaties), not the sword (Napoleon’s artillery, or Hitler’s 
 Panzerdivisionen) – though this origin may be one reason for its weakness.
Now known as an economic giant with low political capacity, Europe was, on 
the contrary, born as a political project in the minds of its founding fathers: the 
French Jean Monnet and Maurice Schuman, who as Foreign Minister started the 
process with his declaration of 9 May 1950, the German Konrad Adenauer, the Ital-
ian Alcide De Gasperi and the Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak. The paramount goal of 
the project was to bring stable peace to Europe, shaken by two world wars started 
and fought on this continent, by bringing the countries closer together in a fed-
erative process. The strategy, however, did not start with political moves, whose 
acceptance was unlikely among recent enemies, but rather with economic inte-
gration, pooling basic resources (European Coal and Steel Community, Treaty of 
Paris 1951, later complemented by the European Atomic Energy Commission) and 
opening the way to a customs union (European Economic Community, EC, Treaty 
of Rome 1957), which generated a common, and later, in the 1980–1990s, a single 
market. The leading idea was that integrating the economy of the member states 
would have generated a prosperity that European peoples and governments would 
have found more attractive than enmity and war: it was somehow a resurrection 
of the belief heeded in the eighteenth and nineteenth century by thinkers of the 
Enlightenment and Manchesterian liberals in the douce commerce/sweet commerce 
as an evolutionary alternative to war. This time it worked because it was embedded 
in a political project.
The governance of this integrated, but not unified Europe was and is as complex 
as the architecture of the process itself. It is also little known, even to European 
citizens; it seems therefore advisable to start with some information. The European 
Union is a federative but not federal institution: there is no overwhelming central 
power, sovereignty is not transferred to Brussels, but is rather ‘pooled and shared’, 
and the EU is not, nor can it be expected to become the United States of Europe, 
even if this remains the dream of old-fashioned federalists. European nation states 
are still too important hubs of political will formation to be restricted into a classi-
cal federal frame. We should rather regard the EU as a post-national or post-modern 
version of the mixed government model well-known to the ancients, as we saw in 
Chapter 5, §3: it comprises
• 
an intergovernmental (European Council, made of the heads of state or execu-
tive, plus the area-specific Councils of ministers) and

---

The states  121
• 
a supranational or ‘communitarian’ (EU newspeak) level, which is made of
◦  the Commission (which can be likened to the executive, but has some 
more power than this)
◦  the Parliament (which has more power than before the Lisbon Treaty of 
2007, but not yet as much as a national parliament does)
• 
the European Court of Justice, whose jurisprudence in European legal matters 
supersedes that of the national courts and has constitutional rank (the ECJ has 
nothing to do with the European Court of Human Rights, which refers to the 
Council of Europe, an intergovernmental convention of 44 states, not linked 
to the EU)
• 
the European Court of Auditors
•  only for the countries that have adopted the euro (
€): the European Cen-
tral Bank, at the time of writing the most powerful supranational instance in 
the EU.
This so-called m