The book

Which European Union (EU) is emerging from the euro crisis? The euro crisis has been a litmus test in terms of bringing the institutional properties of the EU to the surface. Those properties are the outcome of several compromises upon which the EU has been built. Those compromises reflected the different perspectives on the Union that have accompanied the latter's institutionalization as a political system. The EU has harbored more than one union within its legal and institutional order. The euro crisis has made the coexistence of those perspectives highly problematic, raising the necessity of thinking of a new political order in Europe.

The book is organized as follows. Part I identifies the institutional structure of the EU that has emerged from its multilinear institutionalization, showing how that structure reflects the interstate and political cleavages that have accompanied the formation of the EU as a political system. Part II discusses the different perspectives on the EU that have led to the numerous compromises upon which the EU has been built. I have defined them as the perspectives of economic community, intergovernmental union and parliamentary union. The euro crisis has shown their inadequacy both as descriptive and prescriptive interpretations of what the EU is and should become. Part III elaborates an alternative view on the EU's future through a comparative analysis of the models of democracy of nation states (both unitary and federal) and unions of states (such as the United States of America [USA] and Switzerland). I define as compound democracy (S. Fabbrini 2010) the democratic model of unions of states, in order to distinguish it from the models of competitive democracy and consensus democracy that characterize the democratic functioning of nation states (both unitary and federal). I argue (through the comparison of the USA and Switzerland) that the model of compound democracy, organized in a system of separate institutions sharing decision-making power, is the only suitable model for those federations constituted through the aggregation of previously independent states and politically characterized by inter-state cleavages.

Introduction

The EU is the result of the evolution and transformation of a historic agreement among, first, Western European nation states and then the Western and Eastern plus the Southern parts of Europe, aimed above all at bringing to a close a long sequence of hot and cold wars. This aim was entrusted to the formation of a common and then single market able to bring economic and social security to European states. European integration has been the response to the trauma and demons of the two halves of the twentieth century. The moral source of European integration resided in the need to avoid further wars and ideological divisions on the continent. After the 1954 failure of the more ambitious project of setting up a European Defence Community (EDC), its success has been dependent, on the military side, on the protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Association or NATO, while, on the economic side, it has rested on the formation and enlargement of a common and then single market. The EU is the outcome of choices made by national elites and supranational actors for peacefully aggregating nation states of different demographic size, historical identity and political cultures. The crucial choices were made at critical junctures, as in the first half of the 1950s, in the first years of the 1990s and then at the start of the 2010s.

Monnet (1978: 46) wrote in his Memoirs that “I have always believed that Europe would be built through crises and that it would be the sum of their solutions.” This means that the EU is the sum of the choices taken by actors with decision-making power in those crisis periods conceptualized as critical junctures. Critical junctures are windows of opportunity for pursuing new aims (Pierson and Skocpol 2002). In those moments, the path-dependent logic is suspended and different options potentially become available.

Introduction

The previous three perspectives have been based on weak analytical grounds because they have not recognized the precise nature of the EU and its democratic functioning. The economic community perspective has unrealistically equated the EU to a regional economic organization. The intergovernmental union perspective has assumed the EU as a sui generis union of governments. The parliamentary union perspective has considered the EU as a variant of the federal state, where European citizens matter more than national governments. However, the EU is not a simple economic community; it is more than a union of national governments; it is different from a national federal state. If it is a federal union of states, under which model of democracy does a federal union function? I call it the compound democracy model (S. Fabbrini 2010) and its combination with the political division and institutional features of a federal union is at the basis of the compound union perspective.

This perspective also has both a descriptive and prescriptive character. In order to meet the first requirement (analytical description), it is essential to identify the democratic models of established political systems; that is, the institutional and functional properties that distinguish, first, the different democratic models adopted by nation states and, second, the models of democracy of nation states and the model of democracy of unions of states. Once the model of democracy adopted by unions of states has been identified, then in Chapter 8 I will come back to the EU to compare it with the other unions of states in order to detect similarities and dissimilarities between them. Only on these analytical bases will it then be possible to advance prescriptive proposals for reforming the EU in coherence with the democratic logic of unions of states (as I will do in Chapter 9). A democratic model does not coincide with the specific constitutional form of a political system, although it is affected by that form, but it conceptualizes the logic through which a political system takes decisions, combining representation (legitimacy) and governability (effectiveness).