ABSTRACT
Contemporary European states differ from those that founded the United States of America (USA), in diversity of language, of historical experience and of political culture. But as subjects for the creation of a federal democracy, a profound difference is that most of the European states have been independent for a long time, some for around a thousand years, so they have deep-rooted structures of society, culture and governance. An equally relevant similarity, however, is that they face essential needs which their several governments cannot satisfy separately, but which could be properly confronted by common government; and just as the centrifugal political forces in relations among the newly independent American states made intergovernmental cooperation inadequate, so such cooperation among the Europeans neither performs effectively nor respects the principles of liberal democracy. The aim of this chapter is not so much to justify that proposition, as to show how it has led member states of the European Community, now the Union, to adopt many of the features of federal democracy by a series of steps rather than to create a new state by a single act, as the Americans did through the Philadelphia Convention. This could not only contribute to understanding whether and how the Union may continue its own federal development but also help to show more generally how federal democracies could be developed in the wider world among democratic states and also, perhaps, within unitary states moving towards more structured devolution. Much of the academic literature on the Community and Union has avoided the tough question of how democratic member states can be persuaded to transfer a necessary minimum of powers to an emergent federal democracy. The neofunctionalism that has been so influential did little to explain why the first step of creating a sectoral community that would detract from national sovereignty was taken or why it should spill over into further such steps without political leadership to conceive and carry through the reforms required. Yet who would try to explain how the federal democracy of the USA was created without giving their due place to the founding fathers, or how some of their successors secured its federal development? Their influence outlasted them, not just because they were remarkable people but because they embodied ideas and developed methods that responded to fundamental needs.
