Review: The Idea of a European Superstate

This review is a year late – the delay is thanks to the birth of our first-born, the urgency of getting my own book into a fit state to be submitted to publishers, and repeated and extended fits of procrastination. I hope to be starting to review political science books more regularly from here on in, with a particular focus on books that touch upon areas that I do academic work on (EU politics, the politics of the Internet and e-commerce, institutional theory, trust), or that are topical for one reason or another. Some of these books are likely to be of interest to the general CT reader, some not.

Glyn Morgan, _The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration_ (Princeton University Press 2005), review beneath fold. “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=glyn%20morgan%20european%20superstate. Amazon.

Glyn Morgan has written a very nice book, large chunks of which I disagree with. What I like about it – it brings out a very serious and interesting set of questions that people aren’t paying proper attention to. It also, unusually for a book by a political theorist, takes international relations theory very seriously. What I disagree with – its positive claim that a European superstate is justifiable because it would provide a proper framework for defence, and its negative claim that other possible justifications (such as social protection, environment etc) aren’t in the same league.

First, the major contribution of this book is to focus attention on the justification of European integration. Bizarrely, these questions have received relatively little attention in debates over the European Union. Nearly all of the political theoretical debate about the EU focuses on questions of legitimacy and the democratic deficit within the European Union, asking whether this deficit should be met through expanding the powers of the European Parliament, providing (as the moribund European Constitution did) a greater role for national parliaments, or giving the Council of member states a greater say. But all of these arguments take the existence of some sort of EU framework as a given. The usual question is: given the fact that the EU exists, what kinds of political arrangements might provide better kinds of legitimation? Morgan’s question goes deeper. It asks: how can we justify the project of European integration in the first place? Further, what implications do these questions of justification have for the kinds of political arrangements that would be appropriate or inappropriate for Europe?

Morgan suggests that the democratic standard of justification imposes three requirements on any political arrangement. First – any arguments for (or against) European integration should satisfy the requirement of _publicity_. This means that it should appeal to reasons that a “bare citizen” (a citizen who accepts certain basic, minimal principles) could accept. Second, arguments should satisfy the requirement of _accessibility_. That is, one shouldn’t require expert knowledge to evaluate whether or not the argument holds. Any competent citizen should be able to understand the argument. Finally, the argument should be _sufficient_: that is, it should show that the European political arrangement actually provides whatever benefits have been cited on its behalf.

Morgan then goes through various arguments for and against Europe. He notably gives skeptics of European integration a considerably more sympathetic hearing than they usually get in books on the EU, even though he makes it clear that he doesn’t agree with their arguments. He breezes through nationalist arguments, both conservative and social democratic, against integration, arguing that neither provides sufficient justification for maintaining a _Europe des patries_. He then examines arguments _for_ Europe by free market types such as Friedrich Hayek, and pro-Europe social democrats, and finds that these arguments respectively fail the test of sufficiency and publicity. In Morgan’s argument, there is no set of shared European values surrounding the welfare state. It is at best a means to an end. Many people don’t want a strong welfare state, and there are dramatic differences between the different welfare states to be found in different European countries. However, Morgan does have some opinions of his own on the merits of the stronger Continental welfare states, which he offers in passing; more on this below.

It’s in the final three chapters that Morgan puts forward his own justification for European integration. And it’s a quite specific form of integration that he’s advocating. The current EU system, dominated by technocrats, with shared and diffused competences, regular disagreements between member states etc is insufficient for his purposes. Morgan says that we need, as his title suggests, a “European Superstate.” The reason that we need this is that only such a state is competent to guarantee European security. Morgan grounds this justification in international relations theory, with its focus on power politics in which great powers set the rules of the game. Morgan doesn’t rely on realist theory; instead his arguments are strongly influenced by the “English School” or “international society” approach to international relations, which suggests that states require (and indeed are in some limited senses constituted) by a shared set of minimal rules and norms that dictate the kinds of things they can or cannot do. In Morgan’s version, states should undertake to protect the security of their citizens, which is to say that they must protect them from threats without at the same time using such draconian techniques as might undermine the basic liberties and wellbeing of their citizens.

This requires Morgan to make specific arguments against the kind of Europe that most liberals and leftists argue for, and for a European superstate that few except the most ardent European federalists dare to advocate. Many political theorists find the idea of a ‘postsovereign’ Europe, which isn’t dominated by traditional forms of state authority, normatively attractive. Morgan argues that a postsovereign Europe isn’t going to be able to address its own security needs properly. Historically, polities without centralized powers of war and decision making have been selected out of existence by strong evolutionary forces. The states that have succeeded in guaranteeing their security in a tough and violent world are those that have centralized decision-making and beefy military apparatuses. Europe needs to have these features too, if it is to protect its citizens. The alternative is to remain a weak and divided political entity, where no single nation has sufficient military power to be taken seriously on the international stage, and where the US has an effective veto power over the basic decisions that Europeans might want to take to protect their own security.

Morgan’s book has many different themes which I could take up. Indeed, there are also many arguments in it that I find convincing – but chiming in on the bits that you agree with doesn’t usually make for good debate. I want to focus on on the parts of his argument that (a) I have trouble with, and (b) that touch most closely on my own areas of interest – international relations and European political economy. Morgan bases much of his argument on claims drawn from international relations theory – the extent to which his arguments are convincing depends to a very great degree on whether his take on international relations theory is compelling. I think that one can make a reasonable case for his claims, but not one that meets the strong standards that he himself sets out. As a corollary to his claims about security, Morgan makes some arguments about political economy which I find considerably less convincing.

First, the security aspects of his argument proper. In Morgan’s argument, the EU is weak and divided, which means that it can’t provide for its own security. Its ability to project power is subject to an effective US veto, because NATO is the only framework that can provide the necessary logistical support etc for effective military operations. But the reliance of the EU on the US also means that it may be dragged along willy-nilly by the Americans when they want to do something crazy. Morgan argues that an international system in which there were two major liberal powers rather than one would be a healthier one; the Europeans could more easily resist being dragged into unnecessary wars and so on. But this would require that Europe build a superstate that could undertake military action independently.

This is all reasonable enough, but it isn’t at all clear to me that Morgan’s argument meets his own criterion of sufficiency. That is, there may be other, less far reaching political arrangements that could provide the EU with greater ability to respond to crises; and the security justification for a federal superstate may only be a weak justification. As noted, Morgan argues that divided polities are militarily inferior to unified polities, and that evolutionary forces have tended to weed out the former in favor of the latter (as decentralized states were either either eaten up by centralized ones or forced to change their ways). But this, it seems to me, obscures more than it reveals. These evolutionary forces aren’t really at work any more in the advanced industrialized world – there is no direct risk that Western Europe will be invaded in the foreseeable future (that two EU member states have nuclear weapons, and a third could develop them relatively quickly is likely to deter most invaders). The real issue of concern for Morgan’s argument is Europe’s ability to project force rather than defend itself. As Morgan says, the EU’s record in doing this, e.g. in the former Yugoslavia, is pitiful. But it’s not clear to me that this necessarily spells doom for any future effort by a non-federal EU to engage in joint military action. While Morgan is surely right in arguing that this is likely to be more difficult for a divided EU than for a federal superstate, the case that it’s effectively unworkable is a very tough case to make. We have examples in the past of decentralized entities that have gone to war, and won (a classic case for international relations theory being the success of the Greek city states in beating back the Persian invasion). We may have some further data on this soon; the EU mission in Lebanon is going to be an important test case for whether EU member states can indeed work together towards common military objectives.

Furthermore, there’s a downside to the kind of centralized war making power that Morgan favors, which is amply demonstrated by recent US history. The effective centralization of decision making over military affairs means that it’s easier for leaders to involve the country in war for dubious or downright bogus reasons. This can – as the evolving disaster in Iraq demonstrates – have very substantial and negative implications for both the security of the US itself and for the broader stability of international society that Morgan is interested in. That a decentralized political entity finds it more difficult to reach decisions on matters of war isn’t always a bad ; war is far from necessarily security enhancing, and a strong requirement that it be debated between different actors with clashing interests may make it more likely that wars are fought only when they’re necessary.

With regard to security, I think that Morgan makes claims which are plausible, but which don’t meet his own very high standards of justification (more precisely, in Morgan’s terms, I don’t see that he has made the case for more than a weak justification). His claim that a European superstate would need to be run on free market principles if it were properly to protect Europe’s security seems rather less plausible to my eyes. Quoting Morgan (p.87)

Indeed, if Europe is to become an effective global counterweight to the United States, as Habermas and others hope, then Europe needs an economy at least as vibrant and productive as that of the United States. The Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism – which is less regulated, more innovative, and (somewhat paradoxically) more congenial to women and immigrants – provides far better guidance here than the ossified, dirigiste models of Continental Europe.

Now this is an aside, more or less, but it’s a very strongly worded aside. And I don’t see how Morgan can really support it. It’s notoriously difficult to make accurate judgements about the overall success or lack of same of advanced industrialized economies over the longer term. The graveyard of economic forecasting is crammed full of the corpses of confident predictions about the superiority of this or that country’s economic system. It’s even harder to draw the empirical links between economic systems and military prowess, except in the very broadest of terms (for sure, a state needs a reasonably well functioning economy, and sufficient capacity to extract revenues through taxation and other means). Now there’s surely a lot that’s wrong with _some_ Western European economies. There is also a lot that’s wrong with the Anglo-Saxon model – and it seems to me that one would have much more evidence than Morgan provides here before one could even begin to make the case that the latter economic model is better suited to providing clout on the world stage than the former.

These are my major disagreements with Morgan’s book (although if this essay wasn’t getting too long already, I might talk about his take on nationalism too). But there are some important truths to his argument, even if I don’t agree that they provide a general justification for European federalism. Take for example, EU “energy policy”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/07/11/bear-hugs/. The EU is increasingly dependent on Russian energy supplies. Russia is quite astutely using this dependency to win political concessions, and to play EU states off against each other. EU member states are far less willing than they should be to criticize Russia’s internal tendencies towards autocracy, and external penchant for treating neighboring states as part of its empire. If the EU had a proper common energy policy, its bargaining clout vis-a-vis Russia would likely be very substantially increased – it would be far better able to deal with Russia on its own terms. I don’t think that this is anywhere near being justification for forming a federal European superstate; but it does surely suggest that Morgan is onto something.

Next up: Tyler Cowen’s _Good and Plenty_.