Down with Westphalia

From an article in this week’s The Economist:

”Sceptics and enthusiasts for the European Union are united in one thing: they do not like muddle. The Europhobes want to boil the union down to a free-trade zone. The Europhiles want it to turn into a federal state. But Jan Zielonka, an Oxford-based political scientist, thinks this is a false choice. His new book suggests that Europe should adopt a ’neo-medieval’ way of looking at itself. It should have soft borders rather than hard ones, multiple overlapping structures rather than neat tidy ones.

[…]

His shorthand for such thinking is ’Westphalian’. The treaty signed in that German province in 1648 broke the Holy Roman Empire—which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, but the kind of fuzzy political entity that Mr Zielonka likes. In its place, the treaty created a Europe of nation-states, which survived for the next three centuries. Mr Zielonka thinks that the Westphalian model is out of date and impractical.”

I believe in a federal Europe, but only if its constitution limits the power of the supranational institutions. To me one of the main arguments in favour of a European federation is similar to the so-called Europhobes’ favourite argument against it: I want to see a European Union that focus entirely on open borders, free trade, and defending common interests. But unlike most Europhobes, I see no intrinsic value in preserving the nation-states. In that sense, I agree with Mr Zielonka. In any case, we need a real debate on the future of Europe. Regardless of our attitudes towards the EU, we need to find workable solutions to the many problems our continent is facing, and when doing so we should learn from our past. Neither empires nor nation-states have worked well for us.