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Understanding this trend and enabling it to continue is the key to world political development
Documents
Federalist and Functionalist Projects in Recent History
Federalism and Democratic Peace Theory
Union Now by Clarence K. Streit
Union Now and the Birth of ATA
- Niklaas Hoekstra, Editorial from Atlantic Perspective, 2002
- Remco van Diepen, The Netherlands Atlantic Association: The First Forty Years from Atlantic Perspective, 2002
A. Bosco What is Federalism?
Lord Lothian Pacifism is not Enough, nor Patriotism Either, Burge Memorial Lecture 1935. Edited by Richard Laming
Lord Lothian The Ending of Armageddon, 1939
Joseph Preston Baratta, The Politics of World Federation, Introduction
Frank Munk, Atlantic Dilemma: Partnership or Community? 1963
The bridge builders and The bridge crossers (...) As to goals, some proponents of the Atlantic community are perfectly satisfied with keeping it nothing more than a community of values, of philosophies, of outlook on life. These are the minimalists. Others call for the immediate establishment of an Atlantic Federal Union. They are the maximalists. In between the two, proponents of Atlantic unity range themselves along a continuum, with any number of intermediate positions such as confederation, delegation of limited powers and competencies, cooperation, consultation, more communications, etc. All of these are solutions along a vertical scale of division of power running from a central focus to component decentralized units. Some will make a distinction between ultimate and intermediate goals. They believe that an international community may have to go, in an ascending order, through many stages, from the least formal and loosest to the most highly structured and integrated. This is a debate familiar to all those who follow the discussions on European political organization, and it is usually linked to the degree and nature of supranationality. The problems it must deal with are those of quasi-executive and quasi-legislative organs able to make decisions by majority vote, the delimitation of their fields of jurisdiction, the attributes of the supranational bureaucracies or technocracies. Essentially, all of these are problems of distribution of sovereignty and delegation of powers. The most widely held view of those who wish to progress step by step is to regard a European Community – rightly or wrongly – as a necessary precondition and step towards an Atlantic Community. There are also those who have serious doubts about the piecemeal approach. They are not so sure that one step at a time will really lead to the desired goal. There might not be enough time, or there might not be enough steam to sustain a progression. Each organization generates a set of special interests, and inertia is common to all institutions. A geographical sequence, like organizing Europe first, is fraught with particular danger, because it may engender a competitive struggle. The belief held most widely is that of functional internationalism, namely that any international community has to start with a few limited functions and gradually take on others. This is not a novel idea. It was first made popular after World War I by David Mitrany and has since found expression in many ways. It forms the basis of the present United Nations system of specialized agencies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, World Meteorological Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, etc. In the words of H. G. Nicholas: “the philosophy which animates them is the belief that there are international jobs to be done, international interests to be fostered, which can be detached from politics and find their natural expression in separate, if related, associations of member states.” The European Community movement started with similar premises. The European Coal and Steel Community, the first of three, was distinctly limited to one specific sector. The European Economic Community, a few years later, already signaled a certain retreat from “sectoralism.” As Professor Hallstein has been careful to point out, the Rome Treaties marked a departure from the piecemeal approach in favor of an attack on a wider front. The Common Market would have been capable of setting up within its own framework the Coal and Steel Community or the Atomic Energy Community, and indeed any other economic agency so far proposed, such as a Green Pool for agriculture, or a White Pool for integrating production and distribution of electrical energy, or for that matter a European Central Bank or Transportation Network. The European Political Community would mark a third step away from sectoralism in the direction of a multipurpose organism. Certain advantages of the sectoral approach are coming into evidence after the reverses at both the European and the Atlantic level during the course of 1963. At a time when Britain's admission to the European Economic Community seems improbable for a long time to come, and in spite of slow progress in negotiations between the Community and the United States, a detour in the direction of Euratom has permitted and agreement between the latter and the United States, and between Euratom and the United Kingdom which was hailed as “tantamount to an Atlantic partnership” in the nuclear field. This will include a considerable cooperative effort in the field of development and research. The very multiplicity of functional organizations may at times offer a way out of political blind alleys. Two international organizations of the postwar era started out the other way: the United Nations and the Council of Europe. Different as they are they have one thing in common, namely a rather all-inclusive scope and purpose. Interestingly enough, their development went in the direction opposite to that of the Luxembourg-Brussels institutions. No sooner did they get under way than they began to spawn all sorts of specialized agencies of a functional character: the U.N. Children's Emergency Fund, the Technical Assistance Board and the Technical Assistance Committee, the U.N. Field Service, the relief agencies for Palestinian refugees and for Korea, or, in the realm of the Council of Europe, the European Commission (and the Court) on Human Rights, to name but a few.
Apparently the sectoral and the generalist approaches do not exclude one another. On the other hand, we have no assurance that a very limited amount of common action in a specific field will of necessity lead to ever broader and higher degrees of general fusion. What can be said with some degree of assurance is that there exists a threshold which must be reached if the cumulative processes of multinational fusion are to start operating – a “critical mass” below which fission outruns fusion. Once the threshold is reached something like a sustained reaction sets in and provides its own fuel and momentum, leading to broadening and deepening of its function. Again, the European Economic Community, specifically designed by an unusually able group of men following the inspiration of Jean Monnet to bring about such a reaction, provides the chief exhibit.
These are not the only problems of ways and means about which well-informed men differ widely. There are people who would plan years ahead, as the designers of the Rome treaties did, and those who prefer an approach that is entirely pragmatic: the bridge builders and the bridge crossers. (...)
The Right Honourable Lord Booth K.B.E., LL.D,Vice-Chairman, International Movement for Atlantic Union, The Future of the Western Alliance, 24 Sep 1964
Federalist and Functionalist Projects in Recent History
John Fiske Manifest Destiny, American Political Ideas viewed from Stanpoint of Universal History, 1870-80
Baruch Plan, 1946
The Marshall Plan Speech, Harvard, June 5, 1947 by General George C. Marshall, Secretary of State of the United States
'“European Recovery Program Basic Document No. 1”, October 31, 1947; ERP [folder 2]; Subject File, 1916-1960; Clark Clifford Papers.
Schuman Plan, Declaration of 9 May 1950
Federalism and Democratic Peace Theory
John M. Owen IV Iraq and the Democratic Peace From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005
EDWARD D. MANSFIELD and JACK SNYDER Electing to fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. . : MIT Press, 2005(....) This last part of the puzzle is even more complicated than it first appears. Enter Mansfield and Snyder, who have been contributing to the democratic peace debate for a decade. Their thesis, first published in 1995, is that although mature democracies do not fight one another, democratizing states -- those in transition from authoritarianism to democracy -- do, and are even more prone to war than authoritarian regimes. Now, in Electing to fight, the authors have refined their argument. As they outline in the book, not only are "incomplete democratizing" states -- those that develop democratic institutions in the wrong order -- unlikely ever to complete the transition to democracy; they are also especially bellicose.According to Mansfield and Snyder, in countries that have recently started to hold free elections but that lack the proper mechanisms for accountability (institutions such as an independent judiciary, civilian control of the military, and protections for opposition parties and the press), politicians have incentives to pursue policies that make it more likely that their countries will start wars. In such places, politicians know they can mobilize support by demanding territory or other spoils from foreign countries and by nurturing grievances against outsiders. As a result, they push for extraordinarily belligerent policies. Even states that develop democratic institutions in the right order -- adopting the rule of law before holding elections -- are very aggressive in the early years of their transitions, although they are less so than the first group and more likely to eventually turn into full democracies.Of course, politicians in mature democracies are also often tempted to use nationalism and xenophobic rhetoric to buttress their domestic power. In such cases, however, they are usually restrained by institutionalized mechanisms of accountability. Knowing that if they lead the country into a military defeat or quagmire they may be punished at the next election, politicians in such states are less likely to advocate a risky war. In democratizing states, by contrast, politicians know that they are insulated from the impact of bad policies: if a war goes badly, for example, they can declare a state of emergency, suspend elections, censor the press, and so on. Politicians in such states also tend to fear their militaries, which often crave foreign enemies and will overthrow civilian governments that do not share their goals. Combined, these factors can make the temptation to attack another state irresistible. Read MoreDaniel Deudney Publius Before Kant: Federal-Republican Security and Democratic Peace, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 10, No. 3, 315-356 (2004)
Reflecting American and allied ascent, Liberal IR theorists have revived earlier theorists, notably Kant and democratic peace, constructing neoclassical liberalism to challenge Realism. Republican security theory (RST) begins in antiquity and reaches a conceptual watershed in the Enlightenment, not in Kant, but in Publius = Federalist. Pessimistic, RST assumed republics were small and expansion would fatally deform, a conclusion derived from Roman history. In a pivotal advance, Publius advanced federal union, suggesting the federal-republican security hypothesis — federal union enables republican viability in competitive interstate systems. Kant does not address the logically and historically prior question of how democracies come to populate competitive state systems sufficiently to make pacific unions. The historical record of the global industrial state system suggests federal-republican security is more important than democratic peace.
Anthony Pagden, Imperialism, liberalism & the quest for perpetual peace, Daedalus, Vol. 134, Issue 2, Spring 2005
… The long-term political objectives of the United States, which have varied little from administration to administration, have been to sustain and, where necessary, to create a world of democracies bound inexorably together by international trade. And the political forms best suited to international commerce are federations (such as the European Union) and trading partnerships (the OECD or NAFTA), not empires.
… With due allowance for the huge differences between the late eighteenth century and the early twenty-first, and between what Kant understood by representative republics and what is meant today by liberal democracies, the United States' vision for the world is roughly similar: a union of democracies, certainly not equal in size or power, but all committed to the common goal of greater prosperity and peace through free trade. The members of this union have the right to defend themselves against aggressors and, in the pursuit of defense, they are also entitled to do their best to cajole so-called rogue states into mending their ways sufficiently to be admitted into the union. This is what Kant called the "cosmopolitan right."· We may assume that Truman had such an arrangement in mind when he said that the American system could only survive by becoming a world system….
Scott A. Silverstone, Federal Democratic Peace: Domestic Institutions, International Conflict, and American Foreign Policy, 1807-1860
Recent studies note that a shortcoming in democratic peace literature is the dearth of research on how institutional variation among different types of democracies will affect conflict decision making and the likelihood of constraints on the use of force. This article addresses this shortcoming by examining how America?s distinctive federal institutional structure produces a particular set of constraints on the use of force that are significantly different than what we find in other democracies. Federalism is the key organizing principle behind the electoral systems for legislative offices as well as the presidency, the internal composition of Congress, and the political party system. Federalism introduces a territorial component to domestic politics that produces constraints on the use of force in several ways. It magnifies the executive?s electoral vulnerability to regional sources of opposition, increases competition within Congress over military policy, weakens the ability of political parties to centralize decision making, and decreases the executive?s ability to control the policy agenda. The logic of a theory of ?federal democratic peace? is then tested against a series of international crises involving the United States between 1807 and 1860. In eleven of the fourteen cases examined, the United States was constrained in its use of force. In all eleven cases, the dynamics of American federalism provide a superior explanation to realist and liberal alternatives.
Roussel, Stéphane, "L’instant Kantien : La contribution canadienne à la création de la ’communauté nord-atlantique’ (1947-1949)", dans Greg Donaghy (dir.), Le Canada et la guerre froide, 1943-1957, Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Commerce international, Ottawa, 1999, pp. 119-156.
"Les diplomates canadiens ont joué un rôle considérable dans les discussions visant à établir les bases de l'Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord (OTAN). Leur apport le plus visible et le mieux connu est l'article II du Traité de Washington (avril 1949), lequel invite les membres de l'Alliance atlantique à renforcer la coopération dans les domaines non militaires. Mais dans l'esprit de dirigeants et de diplomates tels que Louis Saint-Laurent (ministre des Affaires extérieures, puis premier ministre), Lester Pearson (sous-secrétaire d'état, puis secrétaire d'état aux Affaires extérieures) et Escott Reid (sous-secrétaire d'état adjoint aux Affaires extérieures), l'article II devait être beaucoup plus que ce que les commentateurs en retiennent aujourd'hui. à leurs yeux, il n'était en effet que la première étape d'un projet, original et audacieux, visant la formation d'une « Communauté nordatlantique ». L'Alliance devait ainsi servir de fondement à une fédération d'états, et donc à une autorité supranationale.Dès 1950, l'Alliance atlantique a évolué dans un sens différent de celui que souhaitaient Pearson, Saint-Laurent et Reid, et leur projet de Communauté transatlantique, rangé depuis parmi les curiosités de l'Histoire, n'attire à peu près plus l'attention des chercheurs. Cet épisode présente néanmoins un grand intérêt, car il permet de vérifier certaines hypothèses qui font l'objet de débats entre les théoriciens des relations internationales, notamment les « réalistes » et les « constructivistes ». (...)
Aux yeux des dirigeants canadiens, le Pacte atlantique devait être plus qu'une alliance au sens classique du terme, c'est-à-dire un engagement d'assistance mutuelle. Non seulement le Pacte devait-il englober les questions de défense, mais il devait aussi s'étendre aux relations économiques et culturelles. Pour les Canadiens, une alliance strictement militaire était insuffisante et devait être complétée par des engagements destinés à accroître la solidarité des alliés. Bien entendu, ces engagements devaient d'abord permettre à l'Ouest de faire face à la menace militaire proprement dite en créant un réservoir de ressources suffisant pour faire contrepoids à l'Armée rouge. Mais plus encore, ils constituaient un moyen de faire face à la menace politique, c'est-à-dire à l'influence acquise par les partis communistes d'Europe occidentale à la faveur de la guerre, influence qui risquait de s'enraciner encore plus profondément si les gouvernements de l'Ouest se révélaient incapables de satisfaire les besoins économiques et sociaux de leurs citoyens. En ce sens, le projet de communauté apparaît comme le prolongement des efforts entrepris dans le cadre du plan Marshall. Les engagements pris par les alliés visaient en outre à éviter que ceux-ci ne s'affaiblissent en s'entre-déchirant pour des motifs de compétition économique. Dès mars 1948,Reid résume l'idée en ces termes :
Mere force is not enough. There has to be the determination to use the force if necessary and a determination accompanied by a fervent belief in the society which one is trying not only to defend but to make the basis of an eventually united world.The new treaty must therefore be a living document and create a new living international institution.
C'est donc à la lumière de cette logique qu'il convient de se pencher sur les efforts en vue de faire inscrire au Traité de Washington les dispositions sur la coopération non militaire.Le Pacte devait aussi donner lieu à la création d'un certain nombre d'institutions qui constitueraient le cadre formel dans lequel prend corps la notion de communauté:
The Atlantic Treaty must be more than a mere military alliance [... ] it must create new imaginative types of international institutions which will be outward and visible signs of a new inward and spiritual unity and purpose in the Western World [... ] They should be given titles symbolic of the ultimate goal of the world order which we have in mind and of which we are building an essential foundation.For this reason we suggest the use of such terms as [... ] "Atlantic Community"for the international organization established by the treaty.
La réflexion sur le type d'institution qui devait être mis en place évoluera tout le long de l'année 1948 au gré des négociations avec les autres partenaires.Les alliés s'entendent rapidement sur le principe de la création d'un Conseil de l'Atlantique Nord réunissant les représentants des états membres et agissant comme organe exécutif. Toutefois, certaines des propositions formulées par Pearson et Reid se distinguent par leur audace. Ainsi, au cours de l'automne, ils évoquent une formule inspirée de l'Union de l'Europe occidentale : un conseil des ministres des Affaires étrangères, un conseil des ministres de la Défense, un comité des chefs d'état-major, un comité des approvisionnements et un secrétariat. Mais Reid voit encore plus grand:
[... ] we should go farther than the Brussels Treaty in setting up revolutionary new political instruments of the alliance. That is why I feel that we should have not only a Board for Collective Self-defence, but a parliament, a president, [... ] a chancellor [... ] and a chief of staff. [... ] This would give the impression that we mean business when we talk about forming a new society of the free nations.
Reid cherche également à mettre en place un mécanisme décisionnel fondé sur le principe de la majorité simple afin d'éviter les initiatives unilatérales ou les recours au veto, sans pour autant sombrer dans les complications d'un processus qui exigerait l'unanimité:
We also suggest that an effort be made to make a clean break with the old issues of "veto"and "unanimity" by setting up a system of weighted voting. We have in mind a system under which the largest state, the United States,would have, say, forty votes,the smallest state, Luxembourg, one vote and others in rough proportion. Under such a system of weighted voting it might be possible for all the signatory states to agree to accept decisions made by a two-thirds majority. The United States would in fact have a veto since it would cast more than one third of the total possible vote, but it would be a logical and defensible veto.(...)
David C. Hendrikson, "In Our Own Image: The Sources of American Conduct in World Affairs," The National Interest, No. 50 (Winter 1997)
In the long span of American history, two moments stand out for their creative refashioning of the political order. The first comprises the framing, ratification, and amendment of the Federal Constitution from 1787 to 1790; the second, the creation of the system linking the United States with the advanced industrial democracies after the Second World War.
The first incarnation of the American system lasted from 1789 until 1861, when its tensions exploded in a great war that brought it to an end. The second incarnation still endures; indeed, we are now commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the institutions and programs - Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - most closely identified with it.It may seem odd to consider these two political associations together, for there are crucial differences between them - in the character of their institutions, in the political loyalties held by the men and women within them, and in the equality (or inequality) of their members. But there are also remarkable affinities. Both creations aimed to establish something called "ordered liberty", substituting the rule of law for the "empire of force." Designed to find a via media between the anarchy of states and a consolidated empire (the two great poles along the spectrum of possibilities), both creations nevertheless sought to safeguard the two values with which each of these otherwise negative examples were closely identified: the liberty of states and the preservation of peace and order over an extended territory. This entailed the creation of a union or federative system of large extent that could preserve peace within its zone and ensure protection from aggression without. The golden grail of this search was an association that could combine the external force and order of a great empire with the internal freedoms of a small republic.
Ronald Asmus, Philip P. Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, Across the Atlantic and the Political Aisle: The Double Divide in U.S. - European Relations, August 2004
The German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Campagnia di San Paolo, Transatlantic Trends: Key Findings 2005
Constitution of the Unites States of America
Aristide Briand
The Ventotene Manifesto (1941- 44)
Towards a free and united Europe - a draft manifesto
The Ventotene Manifesto, whose full title is "For a Free and United Europe. A draft manifesto", was drawn up by Altiero Spinelli and by Emesto Rossi (who wrote the first part of the third chapter) in 1941 when they were both interned on the island of Ventotene. After being distributed in mimeographed form, a clandestine edition of the Manifesto appeared in Rome in January 1944. The present text was edited by the Società Anonima Poligrafica Italiana and presented by the Edizioni del Movimento Italiano per la Federazione Europea (i.e. Publications of the Italian Movement for the European Federation). This edition is based on the 1944 edition which Spinelli stated was "the authentic and precise text". Translated from the original Italian by Anthony Baldry. [Read More]
Altiero Spinelli
Adam Garfinkle Toward a Democratic Union, The National Interest, April 2, 2003
Ivo H. Daadler, James M. Lindsay An Alliance of Democracies: Our Way or the Highway, Financial Times, November 06, 2004
Carl Hodge Atlanticism for a New Century: The Rise, Triumph, and decline of NATO, June 2004 Pearson
Reviving the West: For an Atlantic Union
By Charles A. Kupchan, Foreign Affairs, May/June 1996
... The West is unraveling in part because it lacks the defining images and projects that galvanize domestic polities. Constructing an Atlantic Union of democracies will not call up the same sense of collective commitment and sacrifice as the struggle against communism. Yet it need not. ...
Summary: The West has triumphed over its adversaries, but all is not well in the realm. Its voters are unhappy, its politics adrift. Now is not the time to pursue ambitious plans that would simultaneously deepen and broaden existing institutions. The West must lock in and eventually extend the greatest achievement of the past century: the creation of a community of democratic states among which war is unthinkable. The mechanism would be a transatlantic union committed to a single market and collective security.
read 500-word preview
Liberal Internationalism: Peace, War and Democracy by Michael W. Doyle
Periodical publications:
Universities and Educational programs, organizations:
Encyclopedia of the European Union
EU Center, Washington DC - American Consortium on European Studies
American University - Europe Council
- Graduate Research Center on Europe
George Mason University - School of Public Policy
George Washington University
European Union Research Center
Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian StudiesGeorgetown University - BMW Center for German and European Studies
Johns Hopkins University - Center for Transatlantic Relations/ACES
European Institute of Public Administration
Institute for the Analysis of Global Security
Transatlantic Studies Association(University of Dundee, UK)
Transatlantic Studies Association(University of Nottingham)
University Association for Contemporary European Studies
Inter-governmental organizations and other cooperation structures:
Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
Transatlantic Business Dialogue
Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue
Think-Tanks, NGOs and other organizations:
Atlantic Council of the United States
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Center for Defence Information
Center for European Policy Studies
Center for Strategic and Interantional Studies
European Community Studies Associations
European Union Studies Association
Federation of American Scientists
Foreign Policy Research Institute
German Marshall Fund of the United States
International Atlantic Economic Society
International Institute for Sustainable Development
L'Observatoire Social Européen
National Endowment for Democracy
NATO Parliamentary Assembly(formally North Atlantic Assembly)
Network of European Union Centers
Royal Institute of International Affairs
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Transatlantic Information Exchange Service
TransEuropean Policy Studies Association
United States Institute of Peace
Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Streit Council joins the Atlantic Council of the U.S. and NATO's ACT in sponsoring the Achilles Seminar on Transformation and the Transatlantic Relationship Global Threats,
Henry Luce Jr. |
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Richard T. Arndt First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century |
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