There is a remarkable contrast between the expectations and demands of those who pushed for European unification immediately after World War II, and those who contemplate the continuation of this project today—at the very least, a striking difference in rhetoric and ostensible aim. While the first-generation advocates of European integration did not hesitate to speak of the project they had in mind as a ‘United States of Europe’, evoking the example of the USA, current discussion has moved away from the model of a federal state, avoiding even the term ‘federation’.footnote¹ Larry Siedentop’s recent book Democracy in Europe expresses a more cautious mood: as he puts it, ‘a great constitutional debate need not involve a prior commitment to federalism as the most desirable outcome in Europe. It may reveal that Europe is in the process of inventing a new political form, something more than a confederation but less than a federation—an association of sovereign states which pool their sovereignty only in very restricted areas to varying degrees, an association which does not seek to have the coercive power to act directly on individuals in the fashion of nation states.’footnote² Does this shift in climate reflect a sound realism, born of a learning-process of over four decades, or is it rather the sign of a mood of hesitancy, if not outright defeatism?

Siedentop misses the mark when he complains of the lack of any profound or inspired constitutional debate on the fate of Europe, capable of seizing the imagination of its peoples. For our situation today is not comparable to that of either the Federalists or the delegates to the Assemblée Nationale. At the end of the eighteenth century, in Philadelphia and Paris, the Founding Fathers and the French Revolutionaries were engaged in an extraordinary undertaking, without historical precedent. More than two hundred years later, we are not merely heirs to a long-established practice of constitution-making; in a sense, the constitutional question does not provide the key to the main problem we have to solve. For the challenge before us is not to invent anything but to conserve the great democratic achievements of the European nation-state, beyond its own limits. These achievements include not only formal guarantees of civil rights, but levels of social welfare, education and leisure that are the precondition of both an effective private autonomy and of democratic citizenship. The contemporary ‘substantification’ of law means that constitutional debates over the future of Europe are now increasingly the province of highly specialized discourses among economists, sociologists and political scientists, rather than the domain of constitutional lawyers and political philosophers. On the other hand, we should not underestimate the symbolic weight of the sheer fact that a constitutional debate is now publicly under way. As a political collectivity, Europe cannot take hold in the consciousness of its citizens simply in the shape of a common currency. The intergovernmental arrangement at Maastricht lacks that power of symbolic crystallization which only a political act of foundation can give.

Let us then start from the question: why should we pursue the project of an ‘ever-closer Union’ any further at all? Recent calls from Rau, Schroeder and Fischer—the German President, Chancellor and Foreign Minister—to move ahead with a European Constitution have met sceptical reactions in Great Britain, France and most of the other member-states. But even if we were to accept this as an urgent and desirable project, a second and more troubling question arises. Would the European Union in its present state meet the most fundamental preconditions for acquiring the constitutional shape of any kind of federation—that is, a community of nation-states that itself assumes some qualities of a state?

Why should we pursue the project of a constitution for Europe? Let me address this question from two angles: (i) immediate political goals, and (ii) dilemmas stemming from virtually irreversible decisions of the past. If we consider the first, it is clear that while the original political aims of European integration have lost much of their relevance, they have since been replaced by an even more ambitious political agenda. The first generation of dedicated Euro-federalists set the process in train after World War II with two immediate purposes in mind: to put an end to the bloody history of warfare between European nations, and to contain the potentially threatening power of a recovering post-fascist Germany. Though everybody believes that the first goal has already been achieved, the relevance of peace-keeping issues survives in a different context. In the course of the Kosovo war, its participants became aware of subtle yet important differences in the way that the US and UK, on the one hand, and the continental nations of Europe on the other, justified this humanitarian intervention—the former resorting to maxims of traditional power politics, the latter appealing to more principled reasons for transforming classical international law into some sort of cosmopolitan order. This is a difference that exemplifies the rationale for developing a European Union capable of speaking with one voice in matters of foreign and security policy, and bringing a stronger influence of its own to bear on NATO operations and UN decisions. Recent attempts by Persson, Solana and Patten to mediate between North and South Korea offer the first sign of a more serious intention by the EU to engage in global affairs.

The second goal, the containment of a potentially dangerous Germany, may have lost its salience with the growing stability of democratic institutions and spread of liberal outlooks in the Federal Republic, even if the unification of the country has revived fears of some return to the self-assertive traditions of the German Reich. I need not pursue this question here, since neither of the two original motives for integration could be regarded as a sufficient justification for pushing the European project any further. The ‘Carolingian’ background of the founding fathers—Schuman, De Gasperi, Adenauer—with its explicit appeal to the Christian West, has vanished.

Of course, there was always a third strand in European integration—the straightforward economic argument that a unified Europe was the surest path to growth and welfare. Since the Coal and Steel Community of 1951, and the subsequent formation of Euratom and the European Economic Community of 1958, more and more countries have become gradually integrated through the free exchange of people, goods, services and capital between them—a process now completed by the single market and single currency. The European Union frames an ever denser network of trade-relations, ‘foreign’ direct investment, financial transactions and so forth. Alongside the US and Japan, Europe has gained a rather strong position within the so-called Triad. Thus the rational expectation of mutual benefits within Europe and of differential competitive advantages on world markets could, to date, provide a legitimation ‘through outcomes’ for an ever-closer Union. But even making allowances for the consciousness-raising impact of the Euro, which will soon become a unifying symbol in everyday life across the continent, it seems clear that henceforward economic achievements can at best stabilize the status quo. Economic expectations alone can hardly mobilize political support for the much riskier and more far-reaching project of a political union—one that deserved the name.

This further goal requires the legitimation of shared values.footnote³ There is always a trade-off between the efficiency and legitimacy of an administration. But great political innovations, such as an unprecedented design for a state of nation-states, demand political mobilization for normative goals. Constitution-making has hitherto been a response to situations of crisis. Where is such a challenge, we might ask, in today’s rather wealthy and peaceful societies of Western Europe? In Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, transitional societies striving for inclusion and recognition within the Union do face a peculiar crisis of rapid modernization—but their response to it has been a pronounced return to the nation-state, without much enthusiasm for a transfer of parts of their recently regained national sovereignty to Brussels. The current lack of motivation for political union, in either zone, makes the insufficiency of bare economic calculations all the more obvious. Economic justifications must at the very least be combined with ideas of a different kind—let us say, an interest in and affective attachment to a particular ethos: in other words, the attraction of a specific way of life. During the third quarter of the past century, Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘Golden Age’, the citizens of Western Europe were fortunate enough to develop a distinctive form of life based on, but not exhausted by, a glistening material infrastructure. Today, against perceived threats from globalization, they are prepared to defend the core of a welfare state that is the backbone of a society still oriented towards social, political and cultural inclusion. This is the orientation that is capable of embedding economic arguments for an ever-closer union into a much broader vision. Of course, rapid economic growth was the basis for a welfare state that provided the framework for the regeneration of postwar European societies. But the most important outcome of this regeneration has been the production of ways of life that have allowed the wealth and national diversity of a multi-secular culture to become attractively renewed.