Nation, state
sovereignty and the European Union - some democratic
principles
By Anthony Coughlan©St.Patrick's Day, Wednesday
17 March 2004
Trinity College Dublin
Nations and nation states make up the international
community. The trends constituting
"globalisation" and the supranationalism of the
European Union affect the environment of Europe's nation
states, but do not make them out of date.
Nation-hood, shared membership of a national community,
is the normal basis of democratic states in the modern
world. This is shown by the advent of many new nation
states to the international community since 1989, and the
likely advent of many more this century. The following
democratic principles are proposed as fruitful ways of
approaching questions of nationhood, state sovereignty
and the European Union. No claim is made for their
novelty, but it may be useful to have them together as a
summation of what is contended to be the classical
democratic approach to these issues.
INTERNATIONALISM, NOT NATIONALISM, IS THE PRIMARY
CATEGORY
We are internationalists on the basis of our solidarity
as members of the human race. As internationalists
we seek the emancipation of mankind. The human race is
divided into nations. Therefore we stand for the
self-determination of nations. The right of nations to
self-determination was the basis of the 18th century
American Revolution. It was formally proclaimed as a
democratic principle in 1789 in the French Revolution's
Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is now a basic
principle of international law, enshrined in the United
Nations Charter. As democrats and internationalists, we
assert the right of those nations that wish it to have
their independence, sovereignty and a nation state of
their own, so that they may relate to one another
internationally on the basis of equal rights with other
nations. The democratic principle of
internationalism does not mean that we are called upon to
urge people of other nations to assert their right to
self-determination; but that we respect their wishes and
show solidarity with them if they decide to do that. It
is as true of the life of nations as of individuals that
separation, mutual recognition of boundaries, and mutual
respect - i.e. political equality, neither dominance nor
submission - are the prerequisite of free and friendly
cooperation, of internationalism. In other words, good
fences make good neighbours. Political integration,
subsuming existing independent states into a larger
supranational whole, is the opposite of this.
NATIONS EXIST AS COMMUNITIES BEFORE NATONALISMS AND
NATION STATES.
To analyse nations and the national question in terms of
"nationalisms" is philosophical idealism,
looking at the mental reflection rather than the thing it
reflects. Nations evolve historically as stable,
long-lasting communities of people, sharing a common
territory and language and the common culture and history
that arise from that. On this basis the
solidarities, mutual identification and mutual interests
that distinguish a people from its neighbours,
develop. Some nations are ancient, some young, some
in the process of being formed. Like all human
groups, for example the family, clan, and tribe, they are
fuzzy at the edges. No neat definition will encompass all
cases. The empirical test is to ask people themselves. If
they have passed beyond the stage of kinship society
where the political unit is the clan or tribe, people
will invariably know what nation they belong to. That is
the political and democratic test too. If enough people
in a nation wish to establish their own independent
state, they should have it, for democracy can exist
normally only at the level of the national community and
the nation state. The reason is that it is principally
within the national community that there exists
sufficient solidarity and mutuality of identification and
interest to overcome other social divisions and induce
minorities freely to consent to majority rule, and obey a
common government. Such mutual identification and
solidarity characterise the "demos", the
collective "we," that constitutes a people
possessing the right of national self-determination. They
underlie a people's sense of shared citizenship and
allegiance to a government as 'their' government,
possessing democratic legitimacy, and their willingness
to finance that government's tax and income-transfer
system, thereby tying the richer and poorer regions and
social classes of particular nation states together. When
people speak of the "common good" that it is
the duty of the state to uphold and advance, it is the
community of the nation, "demos", people, whose
welfare is referred to. The solidarities that exist
within nations do not exist between nations, although
other solidarities may exist, such as international
solidarity, which becomes more important with time, as
modern communications, trade, capital movements and
common environmental problems link all nations together
in international interdependence in today's global
village.
HUMANITY IS STILL AT A RELATIVELY EARLY STAGE IN
THE FORMATON OF NATON STATES.
Only a dozen or so contemporary nation states are more
than a few centuries old. The number of member states of
the United Nations has grown from some 60 in 1946 to
nearly 200 today. The number of European states has grown
from 30 to 50 since 1989. This process is not ended, even
in Western Europe, where people have been at the business
of nation state formation for centuries. It is ongoing in
Eastern Europe. It has scarcely begun in Africa and Asia,
where the bulk of mankind lives, where most people still
form part of clan-tribal societies, and where state
boundaries were drawn by the colonial powers, with little
consideration for the wishes of indigenous peoples. There
are over 6000 separate languages in the world. At their
present rate of disappearance there should still be 600
or so left in a century's time. These will survive
because, in each case, a million or more people speak
them. There clearly are many embryonic nations. There are
also long-established nations without nation states,
which have a national identity but no independence - the
Kurds, Palestinians, Chechens for example. A nation can
keep its identity in servitude as well as freedom. Many
new nation states, probably a couple of hundred or more,
are likely to come into being during the 21st century.
They will thereby acquire those two classical pillars of
independent statehood: the sword and the currency - the
monopoly of legal force over a territory and the monopoly
of the issue of legal tender for that territory. A world
of several hundred nation
states will be a world of several hundred national
currencies.
THE RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATON OF NATIONS DOES NOT
REQUIRE THAT A NATION MUST SEEK TO ESTABLISH A SEPARATE
STATE.
Nations can co-exist amicably with other nations inside a
multinational state, as for example the English, Welsh
and Scots do within the British State. They can do this
only if their national rights are respected and the
smaller nations do not feel oppressed by the larger ones,
especially culturally and linguistically. If that
condition breaks down, political pressures are likely to
develop to break-up the multinational state in question.
The historical tendency seems to be for multinational
states to give way to national ones, mainly because of
the breakdown in solidarity between their component
nations and the development of a feeling among the
smaller ones that they are being put upon by the larger.
Shared civic nationality is the political basis of
multinational states, shared ethnic nationality the
political basis of nation states. In both cases, if the
state is a democratic one, all citizens will be equal
before the law and the rights of minority nationalities
in multinational states and of national minorities in
nation states, will be equally respected. Historically,
multinational federal states are all twentieth century
creations - the USSR, the Russian Federation,
Czechslovakia, Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria,
Malaysia etc. Several have lacked, or lack, the stability
and popular legitimacy that comes from centuries of
tradition. Some have already dissolved, others are likely
to in time, as various peoples within them assert their
right to national independence.
THE EUROPEAN UNION IS FUNDAMENTALLY UNDEMOCRATIC AND
CANNOT BE DEMOCRATISED, BECAUSE THERE IS NO EU SOLIDARITY
AND SUPRANATIONAL "COMMON GOOD" THAT IS
SUPERIOR TO THAT OF ITS MEMBER STATES.
It is the absence in the EU of anything like the
underlying national solidarity that binds Europe's nation
states together which makes the EU project, and
especially the euro-currency scheme, so problematic and
therefore unlikely to endure. The EU is a creation of
powerful political, economic and bureaucratic elites,
without popular legitimacy and authority. It is directed
from the top down rather than the bottom up and is
fundamentally undemocratic. There is no European
"demos", no European people, bound together by
solidarities like those that bind nations and nation
states. Rather the EU is made up of a plurality of
Europe's nations and peoples. There is therefore no EU
"common good" comparable to that underlying
each one of its component member states, whose
achievement could be regarded as justifying the
establishment at supranational level of state-like
governmental institutions.
Every nation state is both a monetary and fiscal union.
As a monetary union, it has its own currency, and with
that the capacity to control either the domestic price of
that currency, the rate of interest, or its external
price, the rate of exchange. As a fiscal union, it
has its own taxation, public spending and social service
system. By virtue of citizens paying common taxes to a
common government in order to finance common public
spending programmes throughout the territory of a state,
there are automatic transfers from the richer regions and
social classes of each country to the poorer regions and
classes. This sustains and is sustained by a shared
national solidarity, a mutual commitment to the common
good. By contrast, the euro-currency project
(EMU/Economic and Monetary Union) means a monetary union
but not a fiscal union. Never in history has there been a
lasting monetary union that was not also a political
union and fiscal union, in other words a fully-fledged
state, deriving its legitimacy from a
shared national solidarity and a common good that its
government existed to serve, which in turn underpinned a
common fiscal transfer system. The euro-currency scheme
deprives the poorer EU states and the weaker EU economies
of the ability to maintain their competitiveness or to
compensate for their lower productivity, poorer resource
endowment or differential economic shocks, by adopting an
exchange rate or interest rate that suits their special
circumstances. It fails to compensate them for that loss
by the automatic transfer of resources from the centre
that membership of a fiscal union entails. Compensatory
fiscal transfers at EU level to the extent required to
give the monetary union long-run viability are
impossible, in view of the volume of resources required
and the unwillingness of the richer EU countries to
provide them to the poorer because of the absence of
shared national solidarity that would compel that.
Currently expenditure by Brussels in any one year amounts
to less than 1.3% of EU annual gross domestic product, a
tiny relative figure, whereas expenditure on public
transfers by the EU's member states is normally between
35-50% of their annual national products.
Consequently, the solidarity that would sustain an EU
fiscal union and an EU multinational state does not and
cannot exist. Democratising the EU without a European
demos is impossible. The EU's adoption of such
traditional symbols of national statehood as an EU flag,
anthem, passport, car number plates, youth
orchestra, history books, citizenship and Constitution,
are doomed attempts to manufacture a European
"demos" artificially, and with it a bogus EU
supranational "nation" and "national"
consciousness. They leave the ordinary people of Europe
indifferent, giving allegiance to their own countries and
nation states. The more European integration is pushed
ahead and the more the national democracy of the EU
member states is undermined, the more the EU loses
legitimacy and authority in the eyes of the citizens of
its member states. There will certainly be a
great popular reaction against it. To align oneself with
such a misguided, inevitably doomed project is to side
with a supranational elite against the democracy of one's
own people, to spurn genuine internationalism for the
intoxication of building a superpower.
MINISTERS IN EUROPEAN UNION STATES TEND TO WELCOME THE
TRANSFER OF STATE FUNCTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL TO THE
SUPRANATIONAL LEVEL BECAUSE IT MEANS A CONSIDERABLE
INCREASE IN THEIR OWN PERSONAL POWER.
At national level ministers are part of the executive arm
of government. To get something done, they need the
approval of their prime minister, their national finance
minister if it involves the expenditure of money, and
above all they must have the support of a majority
of their national parliament and implicitly, of voters in
their country as a whole. Remove that power to
Brussels, shift the relevant competence to the
supranational level, and the national minister in
question becomes a European legislator, one of fifteen
- or twenty-five - others, making laws for
400 million people behind closed doors, often on the
basis of package deals, on first-name terms with the high
and mighty of the European world. There can be an
intoxicating accretion of power to the politicians
concerned, even if they wield only a handful of votes on
the EU Council of Ministers, as they are transformed from
mere government executives at national levels into
European legislators, responsible collectively to no one.
Simultaneously there is a reduction in the power and
competence of their own parliaments and peoples, who can
no longer decide or make laws on the issue in
question. A member state on its own cannot decide a
single European law. Its people, parliament and
government may be opposed to an EU law, its government
representative on the Council of Ministers may vote
against it, but they are bound to obey it nonetheless
once a qualified majority Council vote adopts it.
This devalues the vote of every individual citizen. Each
policy area transferred from the national level to the
supranational EU level devalues it further. It reduces
the political ability of citizens to decide the common
good. It deprives them of the most fundamental
right of membership of a democracy, the right to make
their own laws, to elect their representatives to make
them, and to change those representatives if they dislike
the laws they make
RESPECT FOR STATE SOVEREIGNTY IS A FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRATIC
PRINCIPLE AND THE CORNERSTONE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW.
Insistence on the sovereignty of one's own state is a
natural right as well as a social duty. It is in no way
an expression of misguided national egotism. Sovereignty
has nothing to do with autarchy or economic
self-sufficiency. The national sovereignty of a
democratic state is analogous to the freedom and autonomy
of the individual. It means that one's domestic laws and
foreign relations are exclusively decided by one's own
parliament and government, which are elected by and
responsible to one's own people. State sovereignty is a
result of advancing political culture and is an
achievement of modern democracy. It is not an end in
itself but is an instrument of juridical independence,
determining the possibility of a people that inhabits a
particular territory deciding its own destiny and way of
life in accordance with its own needs, interests, genius
and traditions. It is the opposite of every kind of
subordination to foreign rule. Without sovereignty a
nations's politics become provincial, concerned with
marginal and unimportant issues. Maintaining state
sovereignty alone guarantees the political independence
of a nation and creates conditions for its members to
maintain their right to self-determination. The
sovereignty of a democratic state means at the same time
the sovereignty of its people. The end of the sovereignty
of a state is at the same time the end of the sovereignty
of its people. The sovereignty of a state and of its
people is democratically inalienable. No government, no
parliamentary or referendum majority, has the right to
alienate it, for they have no right to deprive future
generations of the possibility of choosing their own way
of life and deciding the common good of that
society. The only mode of international cooperation
acceptable to democrats is therefore one that will not
demand of a state the sacrifice of its sovereignty.
That makes possible the free cooperation of free peoples
united in sovereign states on the basis of juridical
equality, which is fundamental to a stable international
order.
CONCEPTS OF "SHARED SOVEREIGNTY", "POOLED
SOVEREIGNTY" AND "JOINT NATIONAL
SOVEREIGNTIES" ARE COVERS FOR HAVING ONE'S
LAWS AND POLICIES DECIDED BY EUROPEAN UNION BODIES ONE
DOES NOT ELECT, WHICH ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE TO ONE'S OWN
PEOPLE AND WHICH CAN HAVE SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT
INTERESTS FROM THEM
In the EU countries can no longer decide their own laws
over a wide range of government. In practice countries
and peoples that surrender their sovereignty to the EU
become ever more subject to laws and policies that serve
the interests of others, and in particular the bigger EU
states. The claim that if a nation or state surrenders
its sovereignty to the EU, it merely exchanges the
sovereignty of a small state for participation in
decision-making in a larger supranational EU, is simply
untrue. The EU continually reduces the influence of
smaller states in decision-making by abolishing or
limiting national veto powers. Even if bigger states
divest themselves similarly of formal veto power, their
political and economic weight ensures that they can
always get their way in matters decisive to them. Equally
false is the statement that membership of new states in
the European Union and their surrender of sovereignty to
the EU would increase their sovereignty in practice. The
nation that gives up its sovereignty or is deprived of
it, ceases to be an independent subject of international
politics. It becomes more like a province than a nation.
It is no longer able to decide even its own domestic
affairs. It literally puts its existence at the mercy of
those who are not its citizens, who have taken its
sovereignty into their hands and who decide the policies
of the larger body. In the European Union the big states,
in particular the French-German axis, decide fundamental
policy. Juridically, EU integration is an attempt to undo
the democratic heritage of the French Revolution, the
right of nations and peoples to self-determination. Its
profoundly undemocratic character makes the EU a project
that must inevitably disintegrate.
DEMOCRACY MEANS RIGHTS OF EQUALITY, WHICH PEOPLE AGREE TO
ACCORD ONE ANOTHER AND WHICH THE STATE RECOGNISES.
Democrats acknowledge the possession of equal rights by
all citizens of a state, as well as equality of rights
between people of different sex, race, religion, age and
nationality. Ethnic minorities too are entitled to have
their rights protected within a democratic state.
Majority rights and minority rights are different from
one another, but are not in principle incompatible. The
struggle against racism, sexism, ageism and national
oppression are all democratic questions. By contrast, the
traditional issues that divide political right and left,
proponents of capitalism and socialism, in modern
industrial societies, are concerned with inequality in
ownership and control of society's productive forces, in
power, possessions, income and social function. The mass
democracy that historically was first achieved under
capitalism serves to legitimate and
make more tolerable the inequalities of power, wealth and
income that exist in that form of society. Traditional
left-wing thought holds that capitalism in turn creates
the material conditions for the application of the
principle of democracy to the economic sphere, as
socialism, social democracy or a social market.
INTERNATIONALISM, NOT "GLOBALIZATION", IS THE
WAY TO A HUMANE FUTURE.
The notion that globalization makes the nation state out
of date is an ideological one. Globalization is at once a
description of fact and an ideology, a mixture of
"is" and "ought". It refers to
significant trends in the contemporary world: ease of
travel, free trade, free movement of capital. The effect
of these on the sovereignty of states is often
exaggerated. States have always been interdependent to
some extent. There was relatively more globalization, in
the sense of freer movement of labour, capital and trade,
in the late nineteenth century, although the volumes
involved were much smaller than today. At that time,
moreover, most states were on the gold standard, a form
of international money. Modern states do more for their
citizens, are expected by them to do more, and impinge
more intimately on peoples' lives, than at any time in
history, most obviously in providing public services and
redistributing the national income. Globalization imposes
new constraints on states, but constraints there always
have been. States adapt to such changes, but they do not
cause nation states to disappear or become less
important. Globalization as an ideology refers to
the interests of transnational capital, which wishes to
be free of state control on capital movement and seeks
minimal social constraints on the private owners that
possess it. The relation of transnational capital to
sovereign states is ambiguous. On the one hand it may
seek to erode the sovereignty of states in order to
weaken their ability to impose constraints on private
profitability. On the other hand it looks to its
own state, where the bulk of its ownership is usually
concentrated, to defend its political and economic
interests internationally.
PEOPLE ON THE POLITICAL LEFT AND RIGHT HAVE AN OBJECTIVE
COMMON INTEREST IN ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING STATE
SOVEREIGNTY AND UPHOLDING NATIONAL DEMOCRACY
People on the political right wish the state to legislate
right-wing measures, those on the political left seek
left-wing ones. Neither can obtain their wishes unless
they are citizens of an independent state in the first
place, with the relevant legislative power and competence
to decide. This is why people on the political left and
right of politics have an objective common interest in
establishing and maintaining an independent nation state
and a government that represents and is responsible to
the nation. Likewise, within each state, different social
interests align themselves for and against the
maintenance of state sovereignty, seeking either to
uphold or to undermine national democracy. This is
the central theme of the politics of our time. It is why
democrats in every country today, whether on the
political left, right or centre, are potentially part of
an international movement in defence of the nation state
and national democracy, against the political and
economic forces that seek to undermine these.
THERE IS NO INTERNATIONAL, POSITIVE OR NATURAL LAW RIGHT
THAT ENTITLES PEOPLE TO MIGRATE TO LIVE AND WORK IN OTHER
PEOPLE'S COUNTRIES - APART FROM POLITICAL ASYLUM SEEKERS,
WHO ARE RECOGNISED AS POSSESSING SUCH RIGHTS IN
INTERNATIONAL AND NATURAL LAW.
All independent states have the right to decide who shall
settle in their territories and how newcomers may acquire
rights of citizenship. Once people of different
national or ethnic origins are resident in a country,
they have the right to be treated the same as everyone
else. It is evidence of how the European Union affects
the sovereignty of its members that such classical
components of citizenship as rights to residence, work
and social maintenance must now be extended by the
government of each EU country to the citizens of all the
other member states as a requirement of European law. The
states themselves no longer decide such matters. Two
distinct democratic principles are involved in assessing
international migration policy: the right of national
communities to protect their social and cultural
cohesiveness and integrity in face of uncontrolled or
excessive immigration, and the right to equal treatment
of all people within a country. It is the confusion of
these two principles that makes rational consideration of
migration issues often difficult.
.......................................................................................
Anthony Coughlan is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Social
Policy at Trinity
College Dublin and is secretary of the National Platform
Research and
Information Group
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