Two weeks before the E.U. election in 2024, far-right parties were projected to do well and thus have more seats in the E.U.’s lower legislative chamber, the European Parliament. Immigration was a key issue in the rising popularity of those parties. Although immigration in both the E.U. and U.S. was in dire need of governmental fixes, the rise of the right in the E.U. came at the expense of the union itself due to an underlying category mistake evinced at least in the European Conservatives and Reformists party.
Even though it was at the time a political party in the Parliament, the European Conservatives and Reformists party denied its obvious identity as a political party in referring to itself vaguely as a group instead. No doubt according to that party, and other Euroskeptic parties on the right, a mere alliance of countries cannot have political parties, so linguistic gymnastics were resorted to, such that the parties in the European Parliament would be known as “groups,” any of which could be composed of member parties.
A legislative body, including the E.U.'s parliament, has political parties even if some call themselves or are called groups whose members are state-level parties. Such "members" are not recognized as such in the Parliament because it does not represent the states; the European Council does that. Even if a party is only in one state, it is a federal party if it exists in and is recognized by the European Parliament because one or more representatives, or Members of Parliament, claim to be of such a party, which in turn is thereby federalized.
All of such mental twisting was being done of course for ideological purposes so the nobody would dare liken the E.U. to the U.S., or any other empire-scale federal union, such as the former U.S.S.R. Such equivalencies of reason pale next to puffed up egocentricity that wants to claim that a state in one such union is equivalent to an entire union elsewhere in the world.
Both in terms of scale and the type of federalism, category mistakes have been conveniently promoted by politicians and a willing media in the E.U. and unknowingly parrotted by purblind journalists in the U.S. Because the U.S. began as a military alliance of sovereign counties under the Articles of Confederation and then invented and adopted modern federalism in 1789. those automated journalists should have known at the very least that the E.U. fits modern rather than confederal federalism.
That a union with dual-sovereignty
is distinct from a mere alliance is supposedly “unthinkable,” at least it was to Nicola
Procaccini, a co-president of the European Conservatives and Reformists party. “It
is unthinkable that anyone would argue that the European Union was born as the ECSC
and as the European Community, as a federalist state, as a United States of
Europe,” he said.[1] However,
the E.U. is distinct from the previous European Coal and Steel Cooperative
(ECSC) and the European Community. The E.U. began after those two single-issue groups,
neither of which included a government—complete with executive, legislative,
and judicial governmental bodies, or “arms”/branches. In contrast, the E.U. has
not only the European Council, which represents the state governments, but also
a parliament, which represents E.U. citizens, the European Court of Justice,
and the Commission. Furthermore, governmental sovereignty is divided in the
E.U. between the federal and state governments; qualified-majority voting alone
involves some sovereignty being at the federal level. So as it turns out, it is
not unthinkable, undenkbar, to think of the E.U. as a federal system
because it is precisely that—unlike what the ECSC and the EC were.
Procaccini’s nationalist ideology
blocked his mind from grasping the fundamental difference that renders the E.U.
as a federal system rather than as a mere alliance wherein sovereignty resides with
the states. “We want to go back to the original idea of the European Union,” he
said, “which is an alliance of nations doing a few things together, doing those
things that nation-states alone wouldn’t be able to do in the best way.”[2]
Although the latter refers to the principle of subsidiarity, which, like its
counterpart in the basic law of the U.S., is valid, it is incorrect that the
E.U. was founded in 1993 as an alliance of still-sovereign countries. Instead,
the governmental atom of sovereignty was split, just as I was in 1789 in the United
States. In other words, Procaccini was conflating the original idea of the ECSC
and the EC with that of the European Union. Going back to Althusius’ Politica (1603), the politician was confusing plena (full) with nonplena (not full) federalism.
The distortive cognitive effect
of a fervently held ideology had just a week earlier been referred to by Pope
Francis in an interview with the American television show, 60 Minutes. Referring
to the socially ideological Roman Catholic bishops, the pope said, “conservative
is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a
suicidal attitude. Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to
consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside
a dogmatic box.”[3] In
fact, the pope said that ideology itself is bad. In falsely claiming that the
E.U. was an alliance of sovereign nation-states, Procaccini was trapped in an
antiquated dogmatic box at odds with the social reality of the E.U.; his view
was thus inherently suicidal to that federal system in denying its very
existence.
To be clear, sole E.U.
competencies, or enumerated domains of political authority, or law, and the
union’s voting mechanism of qualified (by E.U. population and by numbers of states)
majority instantiate governmental sovereignty that no longer resides with the
state governments. The E.U. is thus not an alliance because in an alliance, all
governmental sovereignty is retained by the countries. The splitting up of governmental
sovereignty between a federal government and state governments is also not
confederal; instead, it evinces what scholars of federalism call modern
federalism. Both the U.S. and E.U. are cases of that kind of federalism.
Therefore, just as characterizing the U.S. as an alliance is unthinkable, so too should such a characterization of the E.U., so it is ironic that Procaccini’s dogmatic box contains the unthinkable. If allowed to be imposed on the E.U., Genovese’s distorted ideology would place that union in an impossible position—namely, of being contrary to what it is. Hence that ideology can indeed be characterized as suicidal. Now that truly makes the sordid ideology unthinkable, or at least it should be so.
2. Ibid.
3. Norah O’Donnell, “Pope Francis Tells 60 Minutes in Rare Interview: ‘The Globalization of Indifference Is a Very Ugly Disease,” CBSNews.com, May 19, 2024 (accessed May 25, 2024).
