The new European public law order that emerged, however, not merely presented a new vision for domestic constitutional law but also a new way of regulating interstate relations within Europe. With the collapse of the European maritime empires, European international law came to an end, yet the new ‘universal’ international law was insufficient to stabilise interstate relations within Europe. This was the view not merely of the Americans but also the elites that came to dominate Western Europe and shape its post-World War II reconstruction, namely, the Christian Democratic parties.[1] Although there were always tensions between the views of the Americans and the European Christian Democrats, the project of reconstituting Europe proceeded from an underlying consensus that Europe had to be reconstituted with new forms of interstate as well domestic constitutional relations.[2] The alternative they reached for was not the new world order of universal international law but rather what had always been the viable alternative to empire, namely, federation.[3] What the Americans as well as the Christian Democratic European elites could agree on was that European interstate relations could not be reconstituted on the old idea of the balance of power that had always relied on imperial expansion outside Europe.[4] Rather, European interstate relations had to be governed by a new federal union. Europe needed to create ‘peace by federation’, in the words of Beveridge.[5]
In the decades after World War II, ‘Europe’ became the core project that the transnational Christian Democratic elites rallied around.[6] Of crucial importance was the common European market, which provided the material conditions for rebuilding the European states, and thereby stabilising them.[7] ‘Economic security’ was seen as essential not just in providing the material foundations of military defence against a communist invasion but perhaps more significantly to win ‘the battle for reconstruction’ against communism.[8] To many people in post-war Western Europe, communism represented technological advancement and material prosperity rather than authoritarianism and dictatorship.[9] The project of European integration, both the European Economic Community (EEC) and the ECHR, was in this way a part of a centreright political project of guarding Western Europe against a revolution through the voting booth.[10] The creation of an economically prosperous European common market was to be the foundation for a new ‘anti-totalitarian’ reconstitution of Europe. The EEC was understood as a means to promote the material reconstruction and welfare that would allow the Member States to defend themselves from the ‘totalitarian threat’ of communism.[11] Within the new
- ↑ Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge University Press 2007).
- ↑ Marc Trachtenberg, Between Empire and Alliance: America and Europe during the Cold War (Rowman & Littlefield 2003). See especially the introduction by Marc Trachtenberg as well as chapter 4 by Wolfram Kaiser: ‘Trigger-happy Protestant Materialists? The European Christian Democrats and the United States’.
- ↑ Antonin Cohen, ‘Constitutionalism without Constitution: Transnational Elites between Political Mobilization and Legal Expertise in the Making of a Constitution for Europe (1940s–1960s)’ 32 (2007) Law and Social Inquiry 109; Larsen, The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union ch 2.
- ↑ Cohen, ‘Constitutionalism without Constitution’; Larsen, The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union ch 2.
- ↑ Sir William H Beveridge, Peace by Federation (Federal Union 1940).
- ↑ Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union 188–9.
- ↑ Alan S Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (Routledge 1992) famously described this in terms of the ‘European rescue of the nation-state’.
- ↑ Ibid 173–4.
- ↑ Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union 199; Judt, Postwar 88.
- ↑ For conservatives, Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford University Press 2017) 3 argues, the ‘new supranational mechanisms were indeed required to protect the “West” against communism and fascism’. Moreover, it was a means to overcoming domestic opposition to conservative policies, especially in Britain and France.
- ↑ Mark Gilbert, European Integration: A Concise History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2011) 12; Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union 199.
