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Articles on the European Constitution
The Federal Future of Europe: From the European Community to the European Union.
Dusan SidjanskiISBN: 0-472-11075-6
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Pub. Date: September 2000The Federal Approach to the European Union or The Quest for an Unprecedented European Federalism
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Introductory note by Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission
It is with great pleasure that I pay tribute to Professor Dusan Sidjanski's English edition of The Federal Future of Europe. As Professor Harold Jacobson rightly says in his forward, this work fills a gap in the literature, since Anglo-Saxon studies tend to underplay the federal approach to European integration. Furthermore, this English edition is the most up to date publication of a book, which during the past decade has become a classic in European analysis.
Federal thinking has been implicit throughout the history of European integration. Overtly present at the outset, sometimes muted or even running underground at times, the logic of federalism has in fact been present at all the main stages of European integration. One can trace it all the way from the Spinelli Report, which re-launched the integration process in the early 1980s, to a great many of the political programmes put forward during the last elections to the European Parliament in 1999.
This federal thinking has a singular relationship with the neo-functionalist approaches, which are more familiar to the Anglo-Saxon reader. It is a kind of historical and dialectical process during which the failures of each of them contributed successively to the successes of the other, a process which is probably far from over. Thus the original failure to achieve political integration outright in the early 1950s, led to the Monnet-Schumann functional approach epitomised in the Treaty of Rome. Similarly, the relative failure of this approach - integration "spillovers" occurred at an economic level, but went nowhere on a political level - led, ultimately, to the political developments of the Single Act and the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam.
Today the European Union must grapple with the conceptual problems of enlargement, a challenge that surpasses all previous experience. Our only certainty is that Europe, in its perpetual evolution cannot rely on a pre-existing road map or on some historical model to guide us in this new adventure. We are breaking new ground. Moreover, Dusan Sidjanski's particularly opportune analysis in the framework of European federalism casts a clear light on one of the deepest and most permanent mainsprings of European action.
This work is all the more welcome in that it does not just retrace the history of European integration in the light of the theory of federalism, but it provides a critical assessment of what the author calls "European federalism". I would not go so far as to say that every episode, every twist and turn in the story of Europe, could be explained by reference exclusively to this theory. However, if this analysis is not a unique source of my reflection, it is certainly quite clear that it is one of the most illuminating and enriching analysis for the future of Europe which will doubtless be both difficult and exciting.
I wish English-speaking readers of this new edition, which is now at last at their disposal, the pleasure of discovering the major work in European integration.