AUTHOR'S NOTE: Having pubilshed my book chapter section on "The Transnational Islamic State" on 23 September 2014 as an international coalition began military operations in Syria, and my book chapter section on "The Submerged State." on 24 September 2014 in the wake of the United Nations climate change conference in New York, I might as well publish other section of the chapter, "Transnationalizing Earth," which speculates on trends that are influencing changes in the Westphalian nation-state system, or outright challenging it. The book manuscript is far from being in shape for publication, but I would like to circulate some of my ideas and hopefully stimulate discussion in the academic and policy communities. --TG
The unparalleled
destructiveness of the 20th century’s wars led some to question the
nation-state’s ability to deliver on a state’s most basic raison d’être:
security for its people. European leaders in particular have been crafting a
system of political integration that is transcending the nation-state. The
evolution of the European Union has been a unique process. Never before has
there been a zone of open borders, free trade, and a common monetary system
encompassing so many nation-states.
After the Second
World War, steps towards integration were seen by many as a means of turning
the continent away from the extreme forms of nationalism that had devastated
Europe. In 1951, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Luxembourg ratified the Treaty of Paris to form the European
Coal and Steel Community, one of the objectives being to eliminate the
possibility of further wars between its member states by pooling the national
heavy industries essential to war production. The same “inner six” states
created the European Economic Community with the Treaty of Rome in 1957,
creating a customs union that eliminated tariffs across their mutual borders.
The inner six also created the European Atomic Energy Community simultaneously.
The 1967 Merger Treaty combined the three communities into a single set of
institutions called the European Community (EC). Denmark, Ireland, and the
United Kingdom joined the EC in 1973. The first election of the European
Parliament was held in 1979. As the 1985 Schengen Treaty was being implemented
to create open borders without passport controls between most of the member
states, the EC had expanded to 12 members (Wikipedia 2012). The collapse of the
Iron Curtain at the end of the Cold War presented the European integration
project with the opportunity to spread eastward to include former socialist
states, and the EC drew up the Copenhagen criteria for candidate members to
join the community, which “require that a state has the institutions to
preserve democratic governance and human rights, has a functioning market
economy, and accepts the obligations and intent of the EU (Wikipedia 2012a).”
The 1993
Maastricht Treaty established the European Union (EU) under its current name,
and committed 11 of the member states to the creation of a single monetary
system to replace national currencies by 1999. The euro existed only as an
accounting currency until 1 January 2002, when euro notes and coins were issued
and national currencies began to phase out in the Eurozone, which by then
comprised 12 states. The Eurozone now includes 17 states, extending from
Portugal to Cyprus and from Finland to Malta. The euro, managed by the European
Central Bank, has become the second reserve currency in the world behind the US
dollar, with a quarter of foreign exchanges reserves being in euro; however,
since 2009 the European sovereign-debt crisis has plagued the monetary union.
In all, the EU
now consists of 28 member states. Together with the European Parliament and the
European Central Bank, its institutions include the European Commission, the
Council of the European Union, the European Council, the European Court of
Auditors, and the Court of Justice of the European Union. Thus, the EU
exercises many of the powers and functions of a sovereign state, which it has
obtained by the consent of its constituent states. It is a project of economic,
political, and judicial integration, although not of military integration. The
member states maintain their national defense establishments; however, most
member states are also members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and their
military forces are coordinated through the NATO command structure. The
collective security apparatus of NATO and the multidimensional integration of
the EU ensure that Europe, which has been the scene of only one international
conflict (the 1999 Kosovo War between NATO and Yugoslavia) since 1945, will
continue to be a zone of peace (Wikipedia 2012). It took two world wars of
unprecedented devastation to convince Europeans that they had little to lose by
trying, but Emanuel Kant’s vision of a “liberal pacific union” appears to be
coming true (Kant 1796).
In 1998, at a
Symposium on the Continuing Political Relevance of the Peace of Westphalia,
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana stated:
…[H]umanity and
democracy are two principles essentially irrelevant to the original Westphalian
order…. [T]he Westphalian system had its limits. For one, the principle of
sovereignty it relied on also produced the basis for rivalry, not community of
states; exclusion, not integration (Solana 1998).
In 2000,
Germany’s Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer referred to the Peace of Westphalia
in his Humboldt Speech, pronouncing the system of European politics set up by
Westphalia as obsolete.
The core of the concept of Europe after 1945
was and still is a rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the
hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace
of Westphalia in 1648, a rejection which took the form of closer meshing of
vital interests and the transfer of nation-state sovereign rights to
supranational European institutions (Fischer 2000).
Some have
suggested that the end state of the European experiment in integration will be
a single, sovereign but federal, state, akin to the United States of America.
If for no other reason, the present organization of the United Nations makes
this exceeding unlikely. The European states would scarcely wish to give up their nearly 30
seats in the General Assembly, or for that matter in any other international
organization, for a single one. Isaac Hikaka has deployed a similar argument
against the idea of a federal Pacific Union as a single state. “In
any assembly of nations each is equal, so microstates such as Palau and Tuvalu
have the same voting power as superpowers such as the United States of America (Hikaka 2005, 38).” On the other hand, it
should be noted that the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic
of Germany in 1990 with the knowledge that it would lose its UN seat,
and thus the international voting power of the German people was cut in half;
in this case, domestic political, economic, and social issues outweighed the
reduction in international representation. It should be remembered, however,
that the UN’s organizing principle of “one state, one vote” was compromised
from the very inception of the organization. When the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics broke up into 15 independent states in 1991, only 12 of them needed
to apply for membership in the UN; The Russian Federation assumed the seat of
the USSR and all of its international obligations, and Ukraine and Belarus were
founding members of the UN. Thus, a single sovereign state had three UN seats:
its own, and those of two of its constituent republics. Since the “one state,
one vote” rule was bent once for the Soviet Union, it is at least conceivable
that the rule could be bent again for the European Union, a project of peace
and prosperity.
Jorg Friedrichs, Weber
Fellow at the European University Institute, offers a novel perspective on the complex and fluid state of
affairs. He notes that neither
conventional international relations theory nor the discourse about
globalization seem able to account for the apparent contradictions between
globalization, fragmentation, and sovereign statehood. As a conceptual
alternative, he introduces the idea of “new medievalism,” in the sense that
today’s system is characterized by overlapping authority and multiple loyalty,
held together by a duality of competing universalistic claims, much as:
...the Middle Ages were characterized
by a highly fragmented and decentralized network of sociopolitical
relationships, held together by the competing universalistic claims of the
Empire and the Church. In an analogous way, the post-international world is
characterized by a complicated web of societal identities, held together by the
antagonistic organizational claims of the nation-state system and the
transnational market economy. New medievalism provides a conceptual synthesis
which hopefully transcends some of the current deadlocks of [international
relations] theory and, at the same time, goes beyond the fundamental
limitations of the globalization discourse (Friedrichs 2001).
The European integration
project, where sovereignty is shared between the EU and its member states, is an
exemplar of Friedrichs’ post-international world, where the transnational
market economy competes with the organizational claims of the nation-state
system of sovereignty.
1: "The Submerged State"
2: "The Liberal Pacific Union"
3: "The Celestial Constellation"
4: "The Transnational Islamic State"
5: "The Empire Strikes Back"
6: "The Global Federal State"
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