The main reason for the creation of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors was to overcome the nation-state. The founders of the ‘European Project’ believed nation-states and their rivalries and alliances, caused by nationalism, were responsible for the First World War and Second World War. They wanted to make sure that such terrible wars would never happen again. For that the nation-states had to be overcome. The first step was the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the European Economic Community in 1957. Later these organisations merged and were superseded by the EU.

Today, the EU is a confederation with some elements of a federation and a supranational organisation. Some politicians, bureaucrats and (especially) intellectuals aspire to transform the EU into a true federation, into the United States of Europe. In this blog post, I do not intend to examine whether this is a good idea or not but will focus on whether it is achievable.

Options to unite states

There are several ways to unite two or more states. The first option (and, historically, by far the most common one) is simply for state A to conquer and annex state B. As the EU wants to unite peacefully, this option cannot serve as a model.

There are two other options: one political and one economic. A state can also voluntarily choose to become part of another state. In this political option, the government, the parliament or the entire citizenship of state A vote in favour of becoming part of state B. An example of this option was the United Arab Republic, which came into existence when Syria and Egypt merged in 1958. In both countries there was a great support for the union, mainly because of widely-held Pan-Arab sentiments and the popularity of Egypt’s president Gamel Nasser. The union was confirmed in plebiscites in both countries. However, the enthusiasm for the union declined rapidly in Syria after Nasser started to replace Syrian ministers, MPs, officers and bureaucrats by Egyptians and eventually Syria seceded in 1961.

The political route seems hardly the way to go in uniting the EU. It is very hard to see how voters in any EU member state would vote their own country out of existence.[1] And a question of this magnitude could not be decided by a vote in cabinet or parliament. If this happened it would unleash a firestorm of criticism and the government of the day would certainly be toppled.

That leaves us with the third option. This option was chosen by the supporters of a united Europe when they pushed for the adoption of the single currency and the monetary union by the EU members. They knew that a monetary union without a fiscal union would lead inevitably to a massive crisis or a series of crises. They are hoping that, in order to save the Euro, national parliaments and governments will accept a fiscal union. A fiscal union means the creation of a single treasury in Brussels with an EU finance minister at its head who would make decisions on taxing and spending for the whole EU. The adoption of a fiscal union would effectively mean the creation of a single government and a political union. However, whether this option will work is highly uncertain. History shows that monetary unions between sovereign states tend to break up instead of uniting the states in question.

Multi-national states

Today, the EU has 28 member states and 24 official languages. A federal EU would thus be a multi-national and multi-lingual state. There are multi-ethnical and multi-lingual states, which are united under a central government. The Russian Federation, China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria are prime examples. However, the territory of these states were united (read: conquered) either by foreign colonisers (the British in case of Nigeria and India; the Dutch in case of Indonesia) or by the core people of an empire (the Russians and the Han Chinese respectively). Thus, these states do not serve as good role models for the EU.

There are multi-ethnical confederations, which have turned themselves into a federation: Canada, the United States and Switzerland. Canada’s transformation from a confederation into a federation from 1867 onwards was to a large extent determined by the United Kingdom. All the different territories, which became part of Canada, used to be British colonies. Most of Canada’s population in the 19th century was also British, apart from the French Canadians and the native Indians and Inuit (today referred to as First Nations), who had no political influence. Thus, Canada is not a good role model either.

On first view, the United States seems to be the best role model for the EU. It turned itself from a confederation (which won the War of Independence against the British) into a federation, without any bloodshed, by adopting its constitution in 1787. The problem is that the (white) American population in the late 18th century was far more homogenous than the populations of the EU today. The American population consisted of around 80% Englishmen, Scots and Welshmen, with a remainder of mostly Dutchmen and Germans. Almost all of them were Protestants and most of them spoke the same language. The Native Americans and African slaves also present in North America at the time were not citizens, did not have the right to vote, and were thus not part of the political decision-making process. They were basically treated like conquered people.

Switzerland used to be a (very loose) multi-national and multi-lingual confederation that turned itself into a federation. It consisted of 13 small republics, which included German-, French- and Italian-speaking areas. On paper, it looks as the closest historical counterpart of today’s EU (ignoring some major differences).

A short overview of Swiss history

The Swiss Confederation started in the early 14th century. By the 1350s, three city states (Zurich, Lucerne, and Berne) had allied themselves with a group of rural communities to form an alliance of eight polities. Over the next 150 years, four more city states and one rural community joined the alliance. This alliance became known as the Swiss Confederation and it stayed like this from the start of the 16th century until the French Revolution. The 13 polis ruled over various territories, which made up together almost all of today’s Switzerland. The Confederation was destroyed by an invasion of French troops in 1798, which brought the ideology of liberté, egalité and fraternité with them.

The French established a centralised Helvetic Republic, modelled after their motherland. However, not surprisingly, the quick change from a loose confederation to a centralised state did not work and Napoleon allowed the Swiss to revert to a confederation again. He created some new cantons and all cantons had now equal standing. All cantons granted their citizens rights and liberties in their constitutions. After 1815, conservatives came back to power in some cantons and rolled back some of the rights granted. In the next three decades, tensions between liberal and conservative cantons were increasing. These tensions culminated in a short civil war in 1847, in which the liberal cantons defeated the conservative cantons. After the war, a liberal constitution was written and adopted by a referendum in 1848. This constitution established a liberal, federal state with a central government and a single currency, the Swiss Franc.

Lessons from Swiss history

People who think that Switzerland could provide a template for the EU on how to transform a confederation into a federation should realise the following points:

• Switzerland was a confederation for almost 500 years. The EU has only been around for six decades.
• The Swiss confederation was destroyed by an invasion.
• The federal Swiss state was established after a war.
• Political unification preceded monetary union.

Switzerland was a confederation far longer time than the EU has existed. After centuries of living in a confederation, many Swiss people felt that they were (or wanted to be) part of a single nation. But it still needed a war to transform the confederation into a federation. As the supporters of a United States of Europe are not suggesting using violence to achieve their goal (one hopes so at least), it seems that their goal will remain a pipedream.

[1] The Syrian and Egyptian voters admittedly did vote their respective countries out of existence but one has to consider the very strong Pan-Arab sentiments in both countries. The attempt to create a unified Arab state from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Coast of Morocco, of which the union between Egypt and Syria was supposed to be the first step, had more in common with the creation of a unified Germany and Italy in the 19th century than a (potential) unification of the multi-national and multi-lingual EU.