I found a book in an antiquarian bookshop which contains a proposal for
a European federal constitution. I would like to present some excerpts in
translation.
The book in question is:
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi: DIE EUROPÄISCHE NATION [The European Nation],
Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart, 1953.
Coudenhove-Kalergy
is described on the title page as “President of the Pan-European Movement and
Professor of History at the University of New York”.
A translation on the Contents page may be of interest:
I.
The European Nation
a.
Nations Rise and Fall
b.
European Culture
c.
European Race
d.
European Common Fate
II.
History of the European Nation
a.
The Greek Prelude
b.
Pax Romana
c.
The Christian Occident
d.
Modern Europe
III.
History of the Concept of Europe
a.
Dante and Dubois
b.
King George of Bohemia and Sully
c.
Penn and St. Pierre [Abbé de St. Pierre, 1658-1743]
d.
From St. Pierre to WW 1.
IV.
History of the Pan-European Movement
a.
Pan-Europe
b.
Beginnings of a Pan-European Movement
c.
Briand’s Initiative
d.
Pan-Europe vs. Hitler
V.
Birth of a European Alliance
a.
European Movement and Parliamentary Union
b.
The European Council
c.
En route to a Federal State
d.
Perspectives
Documentary
Appendix:
The Pan-European Manifesto (1924)
Draft of a Constitution for a Federal
Europe (1951)
In section III. d. -- From St
Pierre to WW1 -- it is interesting to read:
The founding fathers of the United States of
America were conscious of creating a model for a United States of Europe. With
this in mind, George Washington wrote to Lafayette: “We have sown the Seeds of
Freedom and of the Union, which shall bear fruit throughout the Earth. One day,
following the model of the United States, the United States of Europe will be
founded”.
Similarly, Benjamin Franklin, while helping
to draft the American Constitution, wrote to a friend in Paris: “…I enclose a
draft of a federal constitution for our United States… If successful, then I see
no reason why you in Europe should not realize the project of King Henry IV and
create a republic from all the various states and kingdoms by using a similar
constitution, for we ourselves had to reconcile many differences.”
Here then is this proposed constitution from the Documentary Appendix (pages 161-164):
DRAFT CONSTITUTION
FOR A FEDERAL EUROPE
1951
Arising from a
proposal by the Pan-European Movement during its European Convention in
Strasbourg in November 1950, a “Constitutional Committee for the United States
of Europe” was to be convened which should consist exclusively of members drawn
from members of this Strasbourg European Convention, to draw up a draft
Constitution for a European federal state. This draft should later serve as the
discussion basis during official negotiations.
The following ten
members of the European Convention signed as founders:
Benvenuti (Italy), Bohy (Belgium), von Brentano (Germany),
Braun (Saarland), Maccas (Greece), Mackay (Great Britain), Maxudi (Turkey),
Philip (France), Schmal (Netehterlands), Wolters (Luxemburg).
The general secretary
of the Committee, R.Coudenhove-Kalergy, sent invitations to join this constitutional
drafting committee to all members of the European Convention resulting in 76
parliamentarians joining.
After months-long
negotiations and two conferences in Basle and Strasbourg, the constitutional
committee agreed the following text on 6th May 1951:
We, the people of ……….
in recognition of our common cultural heritage,
endeavouring to promote social justice,
concerned with increasing the general wellbeing,
determined to preserve human liberty,
willing to secure peace,
have agreed to combine
our separate states as a federation named UNITED STATES OF EUROPE, whose
authorities are enshrined in the Constitution here presented.
CHAPTER
I.
Fundamental
Principles
Article 1.
All
member states of the Federation have equal rights and common duties.
The
Federation is a community of sovereign states who have resolved to create and
maintain constitutional institutions.
Member
states shall continue to carry out their sovereign rights directly, in as far
as they have not been transferred to common institutions created in accordance
with the provisions of this constitution.
Joining
the Federation is voluntary.
As soon as the
constitutionally empowered organs of at least five European states with a
combined population exceeding one hundred million have ratified this
constitution, it will be in force for these states.
Any remaining European states may
subsequently join the Federation if they honour the human rights as formulated by
the Council of Europe and have similarly ratified their accession. Their
accession will have to be approved by the European Federal Assembly.
The federation will determine a
statute law for all citizens of member states defining their Rights of
Citizenship of the United States of Europe.
CHAPTER
II.
Authorities
Article 5.
The Federation
is duty-bound to take all measures to secure public order and peace.
The Federation maintains
diplomatic and consular relations with powers which are not federation members.
It can make international agreements.
Member states may exchange
diplomatic representatives amongst themselves as well with foreign powers.
The Federation is empowered to
take all measures for the standardization of the European economy.
The Federation respects the
democratic constitutions of member states.
In any conflicts between laws of
a member state and federal laws, only the federal law is valid.
CHAPTER
III.
The
Federal Authorities
1. The Federal Parliament
Article 9.
The Federal Parliament,
consisting of a House of Representatives and of a Senate, has the legislative
power of the federation.
The Parliament shall meet at
least once every year.
The people belonging to a member
state, are represented in the House of Representatives in proportion to their
numbers, with one representative for every one million or fraction of a million
citizens.
Representatives are elected by
direct election for a term of four years, in general franchise, and in
accordance with the national laws of each member state.
Then Senate consist of delegates
from national parliaments.
Every member state is entitled to
twelve delegates. States with fewer than one million citizens are entitled to only six delegates.
Following each parliamentary
election in member states, the respective delegates to the Federal Parliament
shall be newly appointed.
Both chambers of the Federal
Parliament shall convene separately.
Their separate authorities, however, remain identical and the approval
of both houses is required for any parliamentary resolution.
The federal budget is in the sole
prerogative of the Federal Parliament.
Both chambers of Federal Parliament
unite into the Federal Assembly for the following events:
a. election
of the federal council
b. election
of judges for the federal court
c. accession
of new member states
d. changes
to the constitution
2. The Federal Council
Article 12.
The executive authority is a
Federal Council, whose nine members are elected by the Federal Assembly for a
tenure of four years.
The
Federal Council remains in session until a new Council is constituted.
Article 13.
The Federal Council is
accountable to the Federal Parliament for all its actions.
Authorities within the Federal
Council are distributed among its members in accordance with allocations of
administrative departments.
All decisions are made in the
name of the Federal Council.
Article 14.
In case the external or internal
peace or the security of the Federation is disturbed or under threat, the
Council must take all necessary measures which it must immediately report to
the Federal Parliament.
Article 15.
The Federal Council elects
annually for a term of one year by simple majority one of its members as
President and a further member as Vice President. The President, or in case of
his inability, the Vice President, is chairman of the Federal Council.
The President of the Federal
Council is at the same time the President of the United States of Europe.
3. The Federal Court of Justice
Article 16.
The Federal Court of Justice consists
of fifteen members.
The judges are elected form a
list of 45 nominees, prepared by the Federal Council, by two-thirds majority of
the Federal Convention for a life-time appointment. The judges elect a President of the Court
from amongst themselves.
Article 17.
The Federal Court of Justice is
responsible for:
a. the
interpretation of the Constitution
b. for
the settlement of disputes amongst member states.
The Federal Parliament can enlarge the responsibility of
the Federal Court of Justice by federal law to include other spheres of
responsibility.
CHAPTER
IV.
Constitutional
amendments
Article 18.
Constitutional amendments
require a three-quarters majority of all members of the Federal Assembly.
ooooo00000ooooo
This 1951 draft constitution –
while no doubt needing far more work – is at least a solid framework for a
democratic federation, from which the current European Union (EU) is about as
distant as any other democratically unaccountable fiefdom elsewhere.
Let me start with at what one
might mean by ‘Europe’, best explained by various map views.
PAX ROMANA ~ 120 CE
The view of the strictly geographical definition:
The EU view:
The Council of Europe:
…and its map of current members:
There is, of course also the
Europe of thought, perhaps best remembered by thinking of its Greek roots, the
age of enlightenment and age of reason, and the unbeatable summary in the words
liberté, égalité, fraternité of the French
revolution, but also not forgetting the various intervening dark ages during
the last three millenia or so. We are still far from having sustainably
globalized these three guiding stars of liberté, égalité, fraternité requiring constant vigilance against marauders
and also need ‘spring cleaning’* through renaissances – an ongoing Sisyphean
task.
As it happened, I stumbled across this ‘ancient’ (1956) pocket book while looking through my random-order library searching for something else recently:
Robert B Downs: BOOKS that changed the World, a Mentor Book
by THE NEW AMERICAN
LIBRARY, New York, 1956
“After the World War I the British were so ‘tired’ that they did not listen to
Mackinder as they had before. In the 1920s he tried to make the British realize
that the airplane altogether eliminated the world’s shorelines as the limit of
travel”.
Not so, it seems as these two
illustrations may show without many words:
While the last picture shows the
world’s coastlines simply by lines connecting the terminal ports of shipping
routes, it also becomes obvious that all of that sea traffic happens only
because the people inhabiting these vast hinterland areas can’t do without that
growing interchange of raw materials and manufactured products – while transport
of people has shifted to air travel save for ferries and cruise liners. When
first visiting the US starting from Munich in 1952/3 the only way to get there still
had to be by liner, in my case from Genoa to New York (courtesy American Field Service).
But back to the Books that Changed the World, where Mackinder
figures as Chapter 9 under the heading HEARTLAND AND WORLD ISLAND – Sir Halford
J Mackinder: “The Geographical Pivot of History”.
Robert B. Downs there
writes:
“Within little more than a decade after Admiral Mahan had demonstrated,
so convincingly and conclusively, the historical invincibility of sea power,
the applicability of his doctrine to the future was seriously undermined, if
not invalidated, by two new factors. One, in the material realm, was the Wright
brothers’ first successful experiments, in 1903, with a powered airplane. The second,
in the realm of ideas, was a scientific paper, written in 1904, by an English
geographer, Halford Mackinder, later celebrated as ‘the father of geopolitics’.
In neither case did the world recognize immediately the monumental
significance of these two events; nevertheless, the face of the globe was to be
irretrievably changed by them.
No more improbable setting could be conceived for the dissemination of revolutionary
theories than the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London, January
25, 1904, at which Mackinder read his famous paper, ‘The Geographical Pivot of
History.’ Filling only twenty-four printed pages, the work was no more than an
ordinary pamphlet in length, but its remarkable analysis of the interrelations
of geography and politics, past and present, throughout the world introduced
concepts that subsequently swayed the thinking of political and military
leaders, economists, geographers, and historians everywhere.
At the end of the World War I, Mackinder developed his argument in considerably
expanded detain in Democratic Ideals and
Reality, though without essential modification of his original thesis….”
In the course of discussing the
Mackinder’s thoughts further right into the forties and fifties of the last century – just like the Coudenhove-Kalergi
book referred to earlier. However, in the current context of
musing about the possibilities that Brexit, I don’t want to dwell on
history, but on ideas worth remembering – and there would be this quote related
by Downs from Mackinder’s original paper:
“Is
not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which
is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads,
and is today about to be covered with a network of railways? There have been
and are here the conditions of a mobility of military and economic power of a
far-reaching and yet limiting character.”
And from the concluding paragraph of Downs’ review of
Mackinder’s Geographical Pivot of History :
"Criticism has exposed the weakness
of some details of Mackinder’s views, but it has not invalidated his basic
premises. As ‘the first to provide us
with a global concept of the world and its affairs,’ in John C. Winant’s
phrase, he will be long remembered.
“There is,” declared Mackinder, “no complete geographical region
either less than or greater than the whole of the earth’s surface.”
That brings me back to 1963 when
I heard Buckminster Fuller in London on his way (back or from?) the UIA
(International Union of Architects) conference in Paris where he presented his definition of the overriding
onus on all designers – in the sense of 'design is the designation of means to
an end’:
“... to render the total chemical* and energy resources of the
world, which are now exclusively preoccupied in serving only 44% of humanity,
adequate to the service of 100% of humanity, at higher standards of living and
total enjoyment than any man has yet experienced.”
*I would add intellectual
to this list of resources
Fuller’s magnum opus in following
his own design brief is his CRITICAL PATH [© 1981, my copy Hutchinson and Co,
London, 1983]. The foreword of this book alone is essential reading, and I have
explained this opinion in one of my blogs at
Another special mention in this
blog is the reference to what I called my TYGER reads. Since I only know what I
read, and reading time being mostly during the night, William Blake’s poem
fitted my night-time astonishments when reading things that really dumbfounded and at the same time inspired me to keep up ‘the pleasure of finding things out’,
to paraphrase Richard Feynman.
The first TYGER posting is at http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/tyger-httpwww.html
where I also mention Vaclav Smil who
inspired me beyond dreams with his encyclopaedic knowledge of things ‘energy’
in all its forms – and insisting on measuring ins and outs – similar to the statement
of Kamerling Onnes [Physics Nobel Laureate 1913] “Tor meten tot weten”, from measuerement to knowledge. His work
briefly….
Work
When different substances are cooled to very
low temperatures, their properties change. In 1908 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes used
an ingenious apparatus to cool helium to liquid form. Fluid helium was
carefully studied and also became an important aid for the cooling of different
substances and charting their properties at low temperatures. In 1911 Heike
Kamerlingh Onnes discovered that the electrical resistance of mercury
completely disappeared at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero. The
phenomenon became known as superconductivity.
…no wonder I came across his name
when reading about thermodynamics – but his level is way beyond my layman’s
approach to things scientific.
But there are specialists who
also interpret professorial levels of sciences for the likes of me, among them
Vaclav Smil, part of my first TYGER reads. I was dumbfounded after reading some
of his books, that his name is rarely mentioned in general discussions of
things ‘energy’. I was right away
convinced that his books are ‘must reads’. To quote a description from his home page
[2016] at http://www.vaclavsmil.com/ :
“Vaclav Smil does interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy,
environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical
innovation, risk assessment, and public policy. He has published 37 books and
nearly 500 papers on these topics. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at
the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science
Academy). In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 global
thinkers and in 2013 he was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada. He
has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and international institutions, has
been an invited speaker in more than 400 conferences and workshops in the USA,
Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, and has lectured at many universities in North
America, Europe and East Asia. His wife Eva is a physician and his son David is
an organic chemist.”
I later found that This
is the man Bill Gates thinks you absolutely should be reading,
writes
Clive Thompson in WIRED magazine:
“There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil,”
Bill Gates wrote this summer. That’s quite an endorsement—and it gave a jolt of
fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the
University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an
ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three
dozen books have analyzed the world’s biggest challenges—the future of energy,
food production, and manufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the
most data-heavy books you’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic
facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere
produces this year.)
His conclusions are often
bleak. He argues, for instance, that the demise of US manufacturing dooms the
country not just intellectually but creatively, because innovation is tied to
the process of making things. (And, unfortunately, he has the figures to back
that up.) WIRED got Smil’s take on the problems facing America and the world.”
One of Vaclav Smil’s books –
Global Catastrophes and Trends – The Next Fifty Years [MIT Press, Cambridge
Mass. 2008] has this to say in my current context:
From the back cover description:
"Fundamental change occurs most
often in one of two ways: as a 'fatal discontinuity.' a sudden
catastrophic event that is potentially world changing, or as a persistent,
gradual trend. Global catastrophes include volcanic eruptions, viral
pandemics, wars, and large-scale terrorist attacks; trends are demographic,
environmental, economic, and political shifts that unfold over time. In
this provocative book, scientist Vaclav Smil takes a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary
look at the catastrophes and trends the next fifty years may bring. This is not
a book of forecasts or scenarios but one that reminds us to pay attention to,
and plan for, the consequences of apparently unpredictable events and the
ultimate direction of long-term trends...."
A small paragraph from Chapter 3 Unfolding Trends sums
up the essence of trends affecting practically all of human endeavours:
"Perhaps the most helpful way to think about
globalization would be to get rid of the term, and not just because that noun has become so emotionally
charged. The term interdependence describes much
more accurately the realities of modern economies.
Once they left behind the limited autarkies of the preindustrial era, states have come to rely on more distant and more diverse
sources of energy, raw materials,
food, and manufactured products and on increasingly universal systems of communication and information processing. No
country can now escape this imperative,
and as this process advances, it will become impossible for any nation—no matter how technically adept or how militarily
strong—to claim a commanding place on top."
After all, local or
global wealth creation is not a zero-sum game where one party must lose what
another may gain best summarized perhaps by Fuller and Alvin and Heidi Toffler:
In the Brexit
context, two further comments by Smil should be kept in mind:
“Russia, too, is part of my Europe.
Arguments about Russia’s place in (or outside of) Europe have been going on for
centuries… I have never understood the Western reluctance or the Russian
hesitancy to place the country unequivocally in Europe… its history, music,
literature, engineering, and science make it quintessentially European.” p.93
“Russia has another strength in its
intellectual capacity. The country has always had many highly creative
scientists and engineers, whose fundamental contributions are generally unknown
to the Western public. How many people watching a scanner toting up their
groceries know that Russian physicists, together with their US colleagues,
pioneered masers and lasers. (Nobel prices in physics were awarded to Nikolai
Gennadievich Basov and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov in 1964 and to Zhores
Ivanovich Alferov in 2000.) How many people seeing the images of the US Air
Force stealth planes know that this class of aircraft began with Piotr
Iakovlevich Ufimtse’s (1962) equations for predicting the reflections of
electromagnetic waves from surfaces?”
All considered – could Brexit be the first step to a new Federal United
Europe – connected to both world oceans by land and sea, when the engendered
sea traffic should also keep the Arctic maritime route free, plus a road across the
Bering Strait to cap it all?
`
