by In the face of the geopolitical and climate crisis, the question of sovereignty is on everyone’s lips. Each country is seeking to regain control of its destiny, its supplies and its production chains. People are even talking about European sovereignty, sovereignist federalism or federal sovereignism. A contradiction in terms? Not necessarily, but on condition that we agree on the content. To avoid the pitfalls of nationalism and empty shells, it is essential to rethink the question of federalism, which must become a tool in the service of the best social, fiscal and environmental objectives on offer, and no longer a means of reducing the power of the states and promoting a logic of dumping and generalised competition between territories. Let us look back. In its early days, European
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In the face of the geopolitical and climate crisis, the question of sovereignty is on everyone’s lips. Each country is seeking to regain control of its destiny, its supplies and its production chains. People are even talking about European sovereignty, sovereignist federalism or federal sovereignism. A contradiction in terms? Not necessarily, but on condition that we agree on the content. To avoid the pitfalls of nationalism and empty shells, it is essential to rethink the question of federalism, which must become a tool in the service of the best social, fiscal and environmental objectives on offer, and no longer a means of reducing the power of the states and promoting a logic of dumping and generalised competition between territories.
Let us look back. In its early days, European integration drew some of its inspiration from the federal-conservative and ordo-liberal ideas of Hayek and the Freiburg school, with a form of rigid constitutionalisation of the principles of free trade and competition. After the unlimited state power and devastating excesses of Fascism, Bolshevism and Nazism, it was a matter of framing national sovereignty and promoting the reconstruction of Europe on the basis of economic exchange, without a new political majority suddenly putting an end to it. The memory of the 1930s, when electoral democracy had shown its limits, and when the breakdown of trade between countries had aggravated the crisis and plunged the world into an abyss, was still bitter.
We should not force the issue: European integration has always combined multiple inspirations, within unstable compromises, incomplete changes in direction and a multiplicity of possible trajectories. The same will be true in the future: the European Union is not a finished product, far from it. Between 1950 and 1980, Europe also relied on pragmatic forms of industrial planning, directed credit and control of capital flows. It was in this context that France, Germany and their neighbours were able to build powerful welfare states, with considerable collective investment in education, health, housing, infrastructure and social protection, thus demonstrating to the world that it is not only possible but essential to combine economic prosperity with the socialisation of wealth, respect for individual rights and a strong state capacity, under the control of voters and citizens.
Then the movement towards free trade and free movement of capital accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty. The French socialists played a key role, exchanging with the German Christian Democrats the deregulation of capital flows for the single currency. The gamble was that it was worth it, in the sense that the pooling of monetary policy, with a European Central Bank taking its decisions by majority vote and thus able to ignore a German veto, would in the long term allow new areas of shared sovereignty. The gamble has been partly fulfilled: without the action of the ECB after the crises of 2008 and 2020, it is possible that the European countries would have been torn apart in sterile games of competitive devaluation and in collective impotence in the face of global markets. The problem is that not everything can be solved with money (as current inflation shows) and that at the same time we have gone too far in the sacralisation of financial markets and competition, including in transport and energy, with the harmful consequences that we see today. All this in a context where Chinese and global competition has changed scale, so that unbridled free trade has greatly increased industrial relocation and the feeling of abandonment.
What could a federalism of the best social deal look like? The Manifesto for the Democratisation of Europe offers some answers. Those countries that wish to do so could set up a European Assembly drawn from their national parliaments and competent to adopt a budget for investment in the future (environment, training, social cohesion) financed by common taxes on profits and on the highest incomes, assets and carbon emissions. This would take nothing away from the sovereignty of each country, which, pending the adoption of these social-federal measures, could impose conditions on its partners to protect itself against unfair competition and social, fiscal and environmental dumping.
The challenge is to develop a core group within the EU based on such principles, without destabilising the whole. The task is surmountable, building on the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly created in 2019 and giving it real powers, while opening it up to other countries. Such a core group would form the embryo of a future European Parliamentary Union (EPU), which could eventually bring together all 27 EU countries, or perhaps one day even the 43 countries meeting this week to launch the European Political Community (EPC).
The fact remains that what is urgently needed now is a hard core, not a new empty shell. In the face of the coming crises, in particular the new recovery plan that will have to be adopted at European level and the painful fiscal measures that will have to be taken to deal with the debt and rising interest rates, it would be illusory to imagine that the EU will be able to cope with the situation with the unanimity rule. Only a few countries will be able to take the lead. All the more reason to start now.