WHEN KARL DEUTSCH STARTED TO PREPARE THE ‘SECOND THEME’ OF the IXth World Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Montreal in August 1973, entitled ‘Key Issues in International Conflict and Peace Research’ he asked me to organize the Commission which was to deal with the problem: Pathways to Peace: National Sovereignty or Supranational Integration.

The task of trying to disentangle all the questions linked in this rather formidable subject seemed to me to require first of all a working defhition of its various aspects, then a great number of papers* to examine at least those aspects which I considered essential in the light of the working definition; and a good discussion to wrap them together again.

THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN NATION-STATE IS OBVIOUSLY A subjective notion. Objectively it would mean a complete breakdown in the capacity of the state to provide the minimum assurances for individual and collective endeavour and a situation in which the choice was between total anarchy and external intervention. Such situations have been known in some states outside Europe; it was at the origin of the Congo crisis of 1960–61. No Western European state has been in this situation since the re-establishment of selfgovernment in West Germany. Even when there has been a challenge to a regime verging on the revolutionary as in France in 1958, the only question was what alternative force of order would emerge to enable the life of the French state to continue.

AMONG ACADEMICS, ESPECIALLY IN AMERICAA, PSEUDO-THEORY OF stable democracies has recently been developed and there is keen competition to invent indices which grade countries according to a scale which runs from the highest possible degree of stability to the greatest instability. And yet our stable democracies are only a hundred to a hundred and fifty years old – a mere moment in the long history of mankind.

The title-deeds upon which the claims to greatness of contemporary liberal democracies are based are many and genuine; they are advanced industrial economies, which promise, if mankind so desires, opportunities for productivity which will give a completely new meaning to the ideas of ‘scarcity’, of the distribution of economic wealth and services and to the idea of work itself; allegiance to lofty, humanist values founded on the affirmation of the primacy of the individual as a citizen; pride of place given to individual rights as contrasted with the corporatist rights of anciens régimes, which oppressed the individual and paralysed social and economic growth; toleration of non-conformist ideas and movements; flexibility in dealing with conflicts between individuals and groups.

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN A FORMIDABLE GROWTH OF literature on the political and other implications of business corporations. Much of the writing on the corporations has been of an alarmist nature. We are usually referred to the growth of an impressive economic (and, by implication, political) power of the corporations, the lack of effective democratic control on their activities, and the consequent need to establish a more effective set of constraints. It is suggested that internally the corporations are tending to by-pass the legislatures and other representative institutions, while externally the multinationals are integrating sectors of economies across states, and employing a management which may owe primary loyalty to the corporation and not the state in which managers are based. The emergence of the multinationals therefore not only seriously challenges many of our cherished political institutions and procedures, it also confronts our patterns of thinking about the sovereign state which have been inherited from the 16th century. In that they escape from the constraints of national boundaries and representative institutions it is alleged that the corporations are rendering obsolescent our traditional concepts of both state and sovereignty. Much of this argument is neatly encapsulated in the evocative titles of such scholarly works as Beyond the Nation State and Sovereignty at Bay.

‘EXTERNAL SOVEREIGNTY’ IS THE CONCERN OF THIS PAPER, AND THE extent to which it has been eroded, in substance if not in form, by the pressures of the modern world. The formal distinction between external sovereignty and internal sovereignty needs to be emphasized at the outset. Externally, sovereignty connotes equality of status between the states – the distinct and separate entities – which make up our international society. Internally, it connotes the exercise of supreme authority by those states within their individual territorial boundaries. From Bodin who, in De La République (1577), saw souveraineté as the exclusive right ‘to give lawes unto all and everie one of its . . . subjects and to receive none from them’ to the Permanent Court of International Justice which, in the Wimbledon Case (1922), held that the sovereign state ‘is subject to no other state and has full and exclusive powers within its jurisdiction without prejudice to the limits set by applicable law’, the concept of the sovereign state has implied both supremacy within and equality of status without.

THE FACT THAT A PARALLEL CAN BE DRAWN BETWEEN THE PROCESS of European integration and an emerging sovereignty illustrates the political nature of European integration. No matter what definitions of sovereignty are used – and we will come back to that – it is clear that the European Community has one fundamental characteristic: it is a framework within which an attempt is being made to translate into action, through an institutional process, a complex of economic, social, and human aspirations. If politics consist in making possible what is desirable, then the Community does indeed deal with politics. What is important is the degree of originality and autonomy in the community, rather than references to such notions as ‘subject to international law’ or ‘political recognition’. Much has been written on the concept of sovereignty and on various aspects of its changing nature.

IF POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION BEYOND THE NATION-state is to prevail in the future, as it well might, what is to be the nature of relations between and among supranational units or regional blocs? Will such relations buttress or endanger world peace? To such broad questions there are no answers. But to a derivative set of more specific questions, which probe the same kinds of concerns, we can attempt answers. We can ask, and hope to discover, for example, how newly integrated units behave in their external relations, and we can also ask why they behave as they do. From this we can postulate a world of super-units successively entering the international system, and then perhaps say something about the impacts that such entrances are likely to make. While an exercise of this nature could be carried out simply for the sake of expanding theoretical knowledge, it could also be put to very practical and immediate use in lending perspective on the external relations of the European Communities and the impacts of the EEC on world affairs. This last, and most practical concern, is the object of this paper.

LET US ASK FIRST OF ALL A SIMPLE QUESTION – ‘WHY DOES ANYBODY want integration?’ There are usually two reasons. The first is: in order not to be killed by somebody with whom we fail to integrate. This argument for integration has been stressed by popular writers, such as Emery Reeves and others. It is a variation of the old German proverb which goes, loosely translated, ‘If thou wilt not my brother be, I'll smash thy skull most certainly.’ This notion that groups that do not integrate must destroy each other is a widespread but false belief. Luckily it is not true. The Scandinavians did not form any United States of the North, and yet they have not killed each other for a long time even though their ancestors were formidable warriors.