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Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
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that the regions have now become a kind of third force, and they play off their relationships with both host countries and the EU to advance their goals. And, they often bypass both governing institutions and create networks among themselves as well as with transnational global institutions to meet their objectives. They have added a new level of engagement to the European political potpourri. Now, the governance networks are increasingly made up of local, regional, national, transnational, and global players, in a myriad of shifting alliances, each attempting to influence the direction of the political game.
The net result of the protracted struggle between the confederalists and federalists over pushing political authority further down into the states, or pushing it beyond national territorial boundaries to the Union itself, has been that neither the member states nor the Union has been strengthened. Rather, there has been a balkanization of authority, with the entrance of new players and a multiplication of competing agendas.
The EU has ended up becoming the rule-maker and gatekeeper. It establishes the directives that govern the play, brings together the players, and helps facilitate the political process among the parties. The EU is the first purely regulatory state whose function is to serve as an arbiter among contending forces.
It’s often said that the United States is unique among nations because it owes its existence to an idea—the belief in the inalienable rights of persons to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The EU is an even more ethereal political experiment. The U.S. government’s legitimacy is, at least, still grounded in the conventional notion of control over territory, the ability to tax, and the right to exercise force, if necessary, to assure obedience to its laws. The EU enjoys none of the conventional requisites of states. Its legitimacy is based exclusively on the continued trust and goodwill of the members who make it up and the treaties and directives—and soon a new constitution—they have pledged to uphold.
We are so used to thinking of citizenship as something that goes hand in hand with a territory and a nation that it is difficult to fathom the idea of also being a citizen of a transterritorial governing body bound not in traditional property relations but rather in universally accepted codes of human conduct. The late British sociologist Ernest Gellner captures the inherent difficulty of belonging to a shared ideal that transcends geography. He writes,
The idea of a man without a nation seems to impose a strain on the modern imagination. . . . A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears. . . . All this seems obvious, though, alas, it is not true. But that it should have come to seem so very obviously true is indeed an aspect, or perhaps the very core, of the problem of nationalism. Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such. 12
Some post-modern political theorists suggest that in the new world of dense, overlapping, and ever changing relationships, governance is really more about association and connectivity than about controlling a specific physical space. 13 Scholars refer to the political reconfiguration of Europe as “the new medievalism,” a term coined by the late Hedley Bull of Oxford University in an essay he wrote back in 1977. Even then, Bull sensed the emergence of a new political landscape in Europe. He thought it “conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government, but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organization that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.” 14 Bull pointed out that “in that system no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with
The net result of the protracted struggle between the confederalists and federalists over pushing political authority further down into the states, or pushing it beyond national territorial boundaries to the Union itself, has been that neither the member states nor the Union has been strengthened. Rather, there has been a balkanization of authority, with the entrance of new players and a multiplication of competing agendas.
The EU has ended up becoming the rule-maker and gatekeeper. It establishes the directives that govern the play, brings together the players, and helps facilitate the political process among the parties. The EU is the first purely regulatory state whose function is to serve as an arbiter among contending forces.
It’s often said that the United States is unique among nations because it owes its existence to an idea—the belief in the inalienable rights of persons to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The EU is an even more ethereal political experiment. The U.S. government’s legitimacy is, at least, still grounded in the conventional notion of control over territory, the ability to tax, and the right to exercise force, if necessary, to assure obedience to its laws. The EU enjoys none of the conventional requisites of states. Its legitimacy is based exclusively on the continued trust and goodwill of the members who make it up and the treaties and directives—and soon a new constitution—they have pledged to uphold.
We are so used to thinking of citizenship as something that goes hand in hand with a territory and a nation that it is difficult to fathom the idea of also being a citizen of a transterritorial governing body bound not in traditional property relations but rather in universally accepted codes of human conduct. The late British sociologist Ernest Gellner captures the inherent difficulty of belonging to a shared ideal that transcends geography. He writes,
The idea of a man without a nation seems to impose a strain on the modern imagination. . . . A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears. . . . All this seems obvious, though, alas, it is not true. But that it should have come to seem so very obviously true is indeed an aspect, or perhaps the very core, of the problem of nationalism. Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such. 12
Some post-modern political theorists suggest that in the new world of dense, overlapping, and ever changing relationships, governance is really more about association and connectivity than about controlling a specific physical space. 13 Scholars refer to the political reconfiguration of Europe as “the new medievalism,” a term coined by the late Hedley Bull of Oxford University in an essay he wrote back in 1977. Even then, Bull sensed the emergence of a new political landscape in Europe. He thought it “conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government, but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organization that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.” 14 Bull pointed out that “in that system no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with
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