Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

particular problems emerge and are solved politically by state governments
and not in accordance with any functional logic. However, intergovern-
mental bargaining could lead in some circumstances to a degree of ‘pooling
of sovereignty’ and the emergence of ‘policy networks’ on a European scale
may be responsible for some kinds of change. In any event, it seems clear
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Understanding International Relations

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that the European experience really is sui generis and it may not be sensible
to look to find here any general lessons about the processes of cooperation
and international institution building.
However, before turning to the institutions of the global economy and the
United Nations system, it may be worth briefly returning to the starting-
point of the post-war European experience, the aspiration to create a
‘Federal Europe’. A great deal of debate in Britain in the last quarter-century,
and especially since the creation of a single European currency in 1999 (the
‘euro’), has centred on whether a federal Europe is desirable – an important
issue since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 specifically refers to this ambition,
and the recently-drafted (2004) new constitution for the Union has a
number of obviously federal features. Resistance to this step in the UK (and
possibly elsewhere in Europe) is considerable, and it is not clear that the
promised referendum on the constitution will produce a positive result –
readers may know the answer to this question. Part of the problem here
rests in the fact that ‘federalism’ has different connotations in Britain from
much of the rest of Europe, especially Germany. In Britain, federalism is
seen as a process of centralization that takes power away from the regions
(i.e., the nation-states of Europe); in Germany, on the other hand, federal-
ism is seen in the light of the movement from the Second and Third Reich to
the Federal Republic of Germany – that is, as a process of decentralization.
When Continental politicians talk of a European Federation they do not
have in mind the ‘European Superstate’ deplored by British Eurosceptics.
What makes this issue very complex is that on some accounts the European
Union is already a federal system. Murray Forsyth points out that the defin-
ing characteristic of a federal system is that the federal authority has some
powers that it can exercise effectively without reference to the lower levels
and vice versa, and this is certainly the case within the European Union
(Forsyth, in Brown 1994c: 56). The EU is a ‘weak’ federal system but a
federal system nonetheless. There may be a wider point here. There are in
the world today quite a number of organizations that have some powers of
this kind, including, on some interpretations, the United Nations itself, and
it may be that the general unwillingness of analysts to use older categories
such as ‘federalism’ to describe this situation is a mistake.