IMAGINING ALTERNATIVE FUTURE POLITIES FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION

Philippe C. Schmitter

Try to imagine a polity that did not have the following:

(1) a single locus of clearly defined supreme authority;

(2) an established, and relatively centralixed hierarchy of public offices;
(3) a pre-defined and distinctive "public" sphere of competence within which
it can make decisions binding on all;
(4) a fixed and (more-or-less) contiguous territory over which it exercises
authority;
(5) an unique recognition by other polities, membership in international
organizations and exclusive capacity to conclude international treaties;
(6) an overarching identity and symbolic presence for its subjects/citizens;
(7) an established and effective monopoly over the legitimate means of
coercion;
(8) a unique capacity for the direct implementation of its decisions upon
intended individuals and groups; and
(9) a predominant ability to control the movement of goods, services, capital
and persons within its borders –

but did have the capability to take decisions, resolve conflicts, produce public goods,
coordinate private behavior, regulate markets, hold elections, respond to interest pressures,
generate revenue, incorporate new members, allocate expenditures, send and receive
diplomatic representatives, conclude international agreements and even declare and wage
war! If you can do this, you will have succeeded in at least mentally superseding the limits
imposed by the nation-state upon our habitual ways of thinking about politics, although it may
still be difficult for you to imagine how such a "post-sovereign, poly-centric, incongruent,
neo-medieval" arrangement of authority could possibly be stable in the longer run. And in so
doing, you will have better prepared yourself for understanding where the European Union
(EU) may be heading.
Admittedly, Maastricht and subsequent treaties, as well as the present draft of a
“Constitutional Treaty,” do not provide a clear and specific indication of what the EU polity
will become, but if they are combined with other phenomena that have been literally written
into the integration process from the start, it may be possible to provide a sketch of what are
the alternative forms that this unprecedented (and perhaps unwanted) form of political
domination might look like in the future. Its core lies in the growing dissociation between
authoritative allocations, territorial constituencies and functional competences. In the state
model (but not invariably in the praxis of states), the exercise of public authority in different
functional domains is coincident or congruent with a specific and unique territory. When one
arrives at its physical borders, the legitimate exercise of coercion in all these domains ends.
The polity on the other side has, in principle, no right to command obedience in any domain
on one's own side -- and there presumably exists no superordinate entity exercising authority
over both sides.
But what if either the functional or the territorial domains (and even more if both)
were not congruent with the same authority? What if there were a plurality of polities at
different levels of aggregation -- national, sub-national and supra-national -- that overlapped
in a given domain? Moreover, what if these authorities did not have exclusive functions or
well-established hierarchical relations, but negotiated with each other in some continuous way
to perform common tasks and resolve common problems across several domains?
 Our language for discussing politics -- especially stable, iterative, "normal" politics --
is indelibly impregnated with assumptions about the state. Whenever we refer to the number,
location, authority, status, membership, capacity, identity, type or significance of political
units, we employ concepts that implicitly or explicitly refer to a universe featuring sovereign
states and "their" surrounding national societies. It seems self-evident to us that this
particular form of organizing political life will continue to dominate all others, spend most
publicly generated funds, authoritatively allocate most resources, enjoy a unique source of
legitimacy and furnish most people with a distinctive identity. However we may recognize
that the sovereign national state is under assault from a variety of directions -- beneath and
beyond its borders -- its "considerable resilience" has been repeatedly demonstrated.
But what if the issue were not the outright demise of its peculiar brand of "high
politics" and replacement by the "higher politics" of a new sovereign supra-national Euro-
state? What if something qualitatively different were evolving that would blur the distinction
between "high" and "low politics" and eventually produce a new form of multi-layered
governance without clear lines of demarcated jurisdiction and identity? How could we
identify these emergent properties, and what would we call them?
My hunch is that we will need a new vocabulary to pick up such developments --
initially, at the level of discrete and novel arrangements as they emerge in the on-going
practice of EU institutions and, eventually, at the level of general configurations of
authoritative decision-making and policy-implementation once they begin to form a more
coherent whole.
The first need is already being fulfilled on a daily basis by "Euro-speak", the Volapuk
integré that is constantly being invented to describe ad hoc or de jure solutions to Community
problems. Originally, these expressions had a distinctively neo-functionalist cast, e.g.
l'engrenage , le "spill-over", la méthode communautaire, l'acquis communautaire and la
supranationalité, but recently they have increased greatly in number and seem to be
emanating more and more from European jurisprudence or treaty provisions, e.g. subsidiarity,
proportionality, additivity, complementarity, transparence, compétences, direct effect,
unanimity, qualified majority voting, co-responsibility, transposition, géométrie variable,
juste retour, mutual recognition, home country control, co-decision, pooled sovereignty,
opting-out, opting-in, economic and social cohesion, sustainable convergence, euro-
compatibility, balanced support, and so forth. There are even a few terms that seek to
describe the process of integration as a whole and/or its eventual outcome, e.g.
"Comitologie", the way in which Commission drafts are subjected to an extensive exchange
of views among national administrators, interest representatives and Eurocrats until a
consensus position is reached and a policy proposal put forth; "Troika", the system of
collective executive power through which the President of the Council of Ministers during the
six-month term in office of his/her country is associated with the preceding and succeeding
presidents; "Concentric circles", the assumption that all institutional development within the
EC/EU revolves around a single administrative core, i.e. the Commission, and eventually
leads to accretions of its compétences.
I doubt if the second need, i.e. for labels to identify the general configuration of
authority that is emerging, can be fulfilled by simply aggregating inductively items from
Euro-speak as they are invented and take hold. These may provide valuable hints about
distinctive properties of the supra-national integration process, but they cannot be expected to
add up to coherent description of its possible outcome. Heretofore, the porte-manteau term
for this has been federation. Not only, as we mentioned in the introduction, does this
common label disguise a fairly wide range of institutional formats, but it also strongly implies
the existence of an orthodox sovereign state at its core -- regardless of how political authority
and identity may be shared among its sub-national territorial constituencies.
In order to provoke a discussion, I propose to resort to the creation of ideal types,
rather than attempt to piece together constructive types from pre-existing efforts at state-
building or regional integration. Moreover, I will give to the results of this deductive exercise
Neo-Latin appellations -- better to remind the reader of the novel arrangements they
represent.
[PLACE FIGURE ONE HERE]
The central assumption of Figure One is that all forms of modern politics are rooted
in representation. Where the units of authority have grown larger in area and population, and
more heterogenous in social and economic interests, rulers and ruled have relied increasingly
on regularized mechanisms of indirect participation to communicate with each other. Grosso
modo, these linkages conform to two different principles of aggregation: the territorial and
the functional. Various intermediaries -- parties, associations, movements, clienteles,
notables -- identify with the constituencies formed by these principles and re-present their
interests vis-a-vis authorities. It is this mix of territorial and functional constituencies, along
with their corresponding relations of authority and accountability, that defines the type of
polity.
And the emerging Euro-polity is no different. It began with a dual bias:
(1) toward channeling the representation of territorial interests exclusively
through the national governments of member states; and
(2) toward privileging the development of functional representation through
trans-national, European-level interest associations.
The deliberate neo-functionalist strategy of Jean Monnet et Cie. was to concede the former as
an inescapable (if eventually mutable) feature of the international system and to build
gradually and surreptitiously upon the latter. After some initial successes, this failed for a
variety of reasons and the ensuing period of "intergovernmentalism" from the mid-1960s to
the mid-1980s saw even the functional interests being transmitted largely through national
territorial channels. Since then, the mix of functional and territorial constituencies/authorities
at various levels has shifted significantly within the EU, giving rise to the present uncertainty
about the eventual outcome.
Stato/Federatio
According to Figure One, for the stato/federatio form to predominate at the
European level, both types of constituency should be coincident or co-terminous with each
other. The territorial boundaries of its authority would be fixed definitively and surround a
physically contiguous space. Membership would be irreversible -- either because central
authority would be deployed to prevent partial defections from specific norms or because
outright secession would become too costly for the welfare of citizens. National and sub-
national units might not disappear -- especially in the federalist versions of this outcome -- but
each would have an assured and identical status within an overarching hierarchy of authority.
On the functional side, there would be a fixed allocation of competences among a variety of
separate agencies operating within a cumulative division of labor -- normally coordinated
through a common budgeting process. Given the characteristics of existing national states,
the most likely sub-species of the stato to emerge in Europe would be something akin to the
Politikverflechtung and "cooperative federalism" practiced by the Swiss or the Germans,
hence, the label stato/federatio.
Confederatio
A confederatio would be a more loosely coupled arrangement in which the identity
and role of territorial units is allowed to vary, while the distribution of functional
constituencies and competences is rigorously fixed and separated in order to protect members
from encroachment by central authorities. In it, there need be no presumption of territorial
contiguity and no established hierarchy of internal authority. Members would retain their
autonomy and be relatively free to enter and exit. Each could negotiate its own differentiated
relation to the unit as a whole, but once a member be strictly bound to contribute to the few,
cumulative and coincident, functions devolved upon central institutions, e.g. common
currency, liberalization of trade flows, environmental protection, traffic control, weather
prediction, and/or collective security. Historically, such polities have been short-lived, viz the
United States from 1781 to 1789, Switzerland from 1815 to 1848 or Yugoslavia from the
death of Tito in 1980 to 1991. They proved either incapable of defending their variable and
dispersed territories from encroachment by others, or of redistributing resources among
themselves to prevent the defection of their members. With the recent changes in international
security and material welfare, such a solution might be more viable than in the past.
Consortio
The consortio is a form of collective action practiced more by consenting firms than
consenting polities. In it, national authorities of fixed number and identity agree to cooperate
in the performance of functional tasks that are variable, dispersed and overlapping. They
retain their respective territorially-based identities, form a relatively contiguous spatial bloc
and accept positions within a common hierarchy of authority, but pool their capacities to act
autonomously in domains that they can no longer control at their own level of aggregation.
There seem to have been relatively few salient historic examples of this type given its
implications for national sovereignty, but one suspects that a detailed investigation of the
bilateral relations between any two contiguous states would reveal a large number of
"regional" commissions and task forces designed to cope with specific problems without
endangering the international status of their participants. Once these proliferate enough to
interact and stimulate each other, then, it may be accurate to speak of a consortio having
replaced strictly state-like relations, say, between the United States and Canada or Norway
and Sweden.
Condominio
Finally, the condominio would be the most unprecedented, even unimaginable,
outcome of all for the Euro-Polity since it would be based on variation in both territorial and
functional constituencies. Precisely what the state system had taken so long to fix into a
coincident interrelation would be sundered and allowed to vary in unpredictable ways.
Instead of one Europe with recognized and contiguous boundaries, there would be many
Europes. Instead of a Eurocracy accumulating organizationally distinct but politically
coordinated tasks around a single center, there would be multiple regional institutions acting
autonomously to solve common problems and produce different public goods. Moreover,
their dispersed and overlapping domains -- not to mention their incongruent memberships --
could result in competitive, even conflictual, situations and would certainly seem inefficient
when compared with the clear demarcations of competence and hierarchy of authority that
(supposedly) characterize existing national states. While it seems unlikely that anyone would
set out deliberately to create a condominio -- and no long-lasting historical precedents come
to mind -- one can imagine a scenario of divergent interests, distracted actors, improvised
measures and compromised solutions in which it just emerges faute de mieux and rapidly
institutionalizes itself as the least threatening outcome. According to my admittedly biased
and speculative reading of the Maastricht Accord, this may even be the most probable
trajectory for the EU -- unless emergent trends and subsequent events deflect its course in the
near future.
****
None of the prevailing theories of integration can predict which (if any) of the above
four ideal types will be closest to the Euro-polity that is emerging. All focus on process not
outcome. All presume that integration will eventually lead to some kind of stable
institutionalized equilibrium, but fail to specify how and when this can be expected to occur.